Empty Ice cream cartons on a picnic table

We had just purchased two double-scoop, chocolate-chip ice cream cones from the stand on Vanderbilt Beach Rd. We were standing in the 84-degree heat, enjoying the glorious sunshine of a fine Florida morning. As any veteran ice cream gobbler knows, you have to start licking with abandon in the heat, or the melting ice cream will dribble all over you.

There is an art form to gobbling ice cream in the heat. You have to start first, with licking the bottom edges of the large scoop of chocolate chip perfection, where the ice cream meets the cone. Then, you lick in smaller circles until you have molded the frozen delight into a manageable pyramid that won’t dissolve in your hands. We were now sitting at one of those ubiquitous three-plank picnic tables, that sit outside of the stand, within sight of the beach.                   

At first, busy with devouring my own ice cream cone, I hadn’t noticed the twin cardboard containers, with their plastic spoons standing in them as erect as sentinels. The name on the cartons read “Kilwin’s.” It is both a brand and a purveyor of fine foods, chocolates and ice cream.The melted remains of a former iced something or other, pastel in color, was evident in the bottoms of the cartons. Had someone hurriedly tried to ingest the contents and then been called away by an urgent phone call?  Or, maybe the iced confection was the denouement of a particularly heavy lunch and the ice cream had proved more attractive to the eye than the stomach’s ability to take on any more calories?

 The two containers looked like a posed array in an art show. They touched each other at an oblique angle that would form the five to eleven o’clock axis on a clock face. Curiously, both of the two plastic spoons, used to eat the ice cream, were positioned at a two o’clock angle. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe not. I had just finished reading a spy novel about the cold war period of the 1950’s, pitting U.S.S.R versus the west. My mind was still in active overdrive with plots involving spies and miscreants. Maybe a secret signal was indicated here? Perhaps a meeting was set for five minutes to two someplace? Or maybe a delivery, of some secret message on November second was indicated, to the knowledgeable on-looker? The permutations of possibilities were endless to the imaginative.

 But then, maybe it was just that two people, too lazy to clean up their trash, had left the cartons there, after enjoying some frozen yogurt on a warm SW Florida morning. I always wondered about those people who refused to clean up after themselves at fast food restaurants. Were they born to the cloth and expected servants to clean up after them? Or were these minor acts of rebellion deliberately meant to annoy an authority figure and make them do more work? We would never know. Or, maybe they were just what they seemed to be. Two empty, frozen yogurt cups that had gotten left on a picnic table, outside of an ice cream stand at the beach?

By now, our own ice cream cones were nibbled down to almost the level of that crunchy, tasty sugar waffle cone. All speculation, about the twin empty cartons, was subsumed into the dramatic and tasty finale of eating an ice cream cone on a warm Florida morning. When we had finally finished enjoying our ice cream cones, I swept up the two cups and dumped them into the trash. The mystery no longer mattered and the case was closed.

                                    -30-

                                 (612 words)

                             Joseph Xavier Martin