Learning the Limits of Perfection: Ice Cream Sodas, Melons, Life

The Ashanti weavers of Ghana are said to always leave one thread undone on their magnificent Kente cloths as an admonition: Perfection is only for the gods, not mortals.
 
In Brooklyn of almost 60 years ago, I lived for a time in Park Slope, then a neighborhood of genteel brownstones adjacent to Prospect Park — a district not yet the yuppified, chichi, and costly neighborhood it later became.
 
While wandering its byways one day I came across a street I had never before traversed, and upon one corner sat an old-fashioned ice cream shop, the type heretofore seen by me only in the movies set in a small town in the Midwest where well-behaved kids came after school to sit, sip, and swoon.
 
Cohen’s Candy Store that I frequented daily in high school had a soda fountain with stools to sit on. The store dispensed nickel and dime Cokes, egg creams, and ice cream sodas. There were penny candies in a glass case, a magazine rack in the back, a newspaper rack outside, and Charlotte Russes sitting next to an open window facing the street ready to be sold to passersby.

This newly discovered place in Park Slope was immaculate, well-lit, no stools just tables with old-fashioned chairs, large windows, and no reading matter in sight. To the young me this was surely a place from a world I did not know.
 
I entered, I sat, I ordered. I was the only one in the place. The waiter, surely one not sprung from the same loins from whence came the burly brothers who owned and ran
Cohen’s, took my order: a black and white ice cream soda.
 
It arrived, and the disappointment was overwhelming. Rather than the traditional tall fluted glass in which I had previously received every ice cream soda of my young life, here was a munchkin, a mini container, a diminutive demonstration of Anglo-Saxon reticence rather than my traditional Jewish excess. The glass, in short, was the smallest dispenser of delight I’d ever seen. Its contents appeared to be correct in substance and proportion but hugely lacking in volume.
 
Rather than stalk out or loudly complain as any good Brooklyn boy was taught to do, I remained as well-mannered as my surroundings dictated and dug in, as if this could have been possible with such a dainty dish. I was never one, and remain so to this day, to savor, to eat small bites, to sip slowly, so the ice cream soda went down pretty fast.

I was almost done before I realized something extraordinary was happening. It was good. No, I mean it was really good. No, I mean it was FANTASTIC! Before I could even acknowledge the gift I had just been given, the damn thing was gone.
 
Do I have another, both together barely approximating my usual quota of this exquisite blend of ice cream, milk, chocolate syrup and soda water? Or do I say one is enough, the very thought of which seemed like folly, completely in opposition to my belief system? Less is not more. Damn, I say, to Mies van der Rohe and the minimalist movement. MORE IS GOOD! It is as American as beer bellies and Ozempic.

I was bewildered and made anxious by this conundrum of whether to order another.  
To my amazement, perhaps still reeling from the exquisite gustatory experience, I demurred. Reeling, I left dazed and confused. If less was more, then what was more?

Weeks later I walked the streets of Park Slope trying to find my place again, but tragically could not. It was my first lesson to not mess with perfection. In my mix of stubbornness, avarice, and stupidity I’ve had to relearn that lesson many times and it still hasn’t stuck. As my dear mother always said, “your eyes are bigger than your stomach.” And so they are.

Many a bellyache has come my way, but I still seem not sated by something that satisfies all my needs, even for a moment in time. If it can happen once, it can happen again. More remains more.
 
This past summer, soon before we left our Santa Fe house to return to Seattle, my wife Joan went to the local farmers’ market. She knows that I have a soft spot for a good cantaloupe. All season long, in fact for the past several years, I had not found even one that pleased my palate.
 
That is until Joan arrived home that day, a gnarly looking round ball in her hand. A funky looking fruit, heavily veined like I had never before set eyes upon. Even worse, it wasn’t robust but on the scrawny side.  She had the first piece; I warily looked on.

“It’s really good,” she said. I dismissed this, knowing that nothing that looked like my scrotum could have anything attractive about it. “You never know” is our motto, so putting skepticism aside I tried a small slice. Like that ice cream soda of many years before, something extraordinary was happening. It was good. No, I mean it was really good. No, I mean it was FANTASTIC!
 
Fortunately, unlike the soda, there was more melon. Each time I cut into it I expected
disappointment but was slapped in the face by success. And then it was gone.
 
The next week I accompanied Joan to the farmers’ market. At my insistence we searched out the melon lady. She had several, each as ugly as before. I picked what I thought to be the best one, bigger than the first. I waited two days for it ripen, my salivary glands working overtime. I cut the ceremonial first slice and…
 
To seek perfection lost is to be a fool. Yet somewhere in this world, lightning will strike twice. Against all evidence to the contrary, I still believe that if there was one perfect melon there has to be another, and if there’s another, why not “more”?