Remember when dad sold ice cream

My father only sold ice cream in the summer. Those were hot days, with the Lao wind, making our throats dry, and everyone craved ice cream. From the village, at dawn, my father would cycle down to town to get ice cream to sell. Sometimes, when his ice cream cart arrived home, my siblings and I would wake up with our eyes half-closed. My father would have a bowl of cold rice or some boiled potatoes and then cycle around selling ice cream all day.

Dad’s tools were simple, consisting of an ice cream container tied tightly with rubber bands on the rack of his Thong Nhat bicycle, along with a whistle. The ice cream container had two layers, an outer layer of mixed wood as a protective frame and an inner layer of foam, with a lid to keep the heat in. The whistle attracted customers, and each time they squeezed it, it made a sound that sounded like a call: “ice cream… squishy…”.

The ice cream sticks my dad sold at that time cost only a few hundred dong each. Every time the neighborhood kids heard their dad’s ice cream whistle, they would run out of the house to the alley to look around, call out to buy, and then just hold the ice cream stick in their hands and suck on it, not daring to bite it, for fear that it would run out quickly! And in my immature thoughts at that time, I was vague: I didn’t know if the name “ice cream” was given because of the sound of the whistle, or because we kids only dared to hold the ice cream stick and suck it back and forth, enjoying it slowly. In any case, the cool, sweet taste of each ice cream stick on a hot, sunny day always had an appeal to kids.

I love my father on hot summer days, always roaming the streets on his bicycle with an ice cream box on the back. After selling enough in one village, he would cycle to another village, another commune. During the mid-summer harvest season, he would take his ice cream cart down to the village fields to sell. Even though he had to stand in the middle of the field in the blazing sun, he still felt happy because the hot sun usually meant he could sell more. On late afternoons or late afternoons, when he came home from selling ice cream, he would often sit on a bamboo bed in the corner of the house, take out a handful of coins, count them, smooth them out, and keep them carefully. At those times, my brothers and I would gather around him and ask: “Did you sell a lot today, Dad?” And then, the happiest thing was to be “rewarded” by my father for the remaining unsold ice cream bars!

Ice cream is now more readily available, more varied and more delicious. Yet sometimes, the simple, cheap ice creams of the past still become a longing, a longing that comes back intact in my mind. Those ice creams of those days carry with them the coolness and sweetness of my childhood and the hardships and difficulties that my father had to go through!

Hello love, season 4, theme "Father" officially launched from December 27, 2024 on four types of press and digital infrastructure of Radio - Television and Binh Phuoc Newspaper (BPTV), promising to bring to the public the wonderful values ​​of sacred and noble fatherly love.
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Source: https://baobinhphuoc.com.vn/news/19/171847/nho-thoi-bo-ban-kem