For Scoops Like These, We All Scream

The sign outside said, “We’ll trade ice cream for money.”

Sunday afternoon, that seemed like a good deal to the mixed bag of characters coming through the door at the Baskin-Robbins on North Monroe.

At about 2:45, a dad, mom and boy who looked about 11 came in and ordered like regulars. Then they slumped down at one of the place’s four tables and barely said a word, unless you count the sound of a waffle cone being chewed.

Maybe they were wiped out from the heat. Maybe they weren’t looking forward to getting back in their pickup.

Not far away, three guys in their 20s ate ice cream and engaged in a conversation that occasionally sounded more like a movie than casual weekend gabbing. “You mean, you want someone to share your pain?” one of the guys asked another.

A woman who looked about 60 stared at the numerous choices in the display cases as if she were studying X-rays while a specialist explained to her about the spot he had hoped not to find.

A teenage girl asked for a scoop of Oregon blackberry, though it sounded like “organ blackberry.”

Then Dustin and Cody arrived. The adults with them seemed cranky. But the two little boys were psyched.

The smaller of the two smushed his face against a clear plastic display case and slowly walked along the lineup of choices, never lifting his face (mouth and all) from the see-through surface. “Mommy, I want a cone,” he yelled with sincere urgency.

A young sandals-wearing man with a beard, a toe-ring and a T-shirt displaying words such as “Diversity,” Harmony,” and “Unity” instructed a young woman in the art of ordering.

“Get double scoops,” he said, as if failing to do so would brand her a complete ice-cream rube.

He himself eventually chose a scoop of New York Cheesecake and a scoop of Rainbow Sherbet.

One taste of the latter convinced him he had made a mistake. And so a ballcap-wearing friend of his with a nasal voice tried to get the woman behind the counter to give the sherbet-hater a free scoop of something else.

“C’mon, be a sweetheart,” said the nasal guy.

The store employee, a pleasant, efficient woman, explained that things didn’t work that way.

Someone in the sherbet-hater’s group asked about a dog in a car outside. “He’s probably dead,” deadpanned one of the young men.

But another guy took a little dish of water out to it.

One of the women turned her attention to the charmer who had made the dead-dog crack. “So,” she asked. “Do you have a leather interior?”