the scoop.

It is one of those really great tragedies of life: The dangling of that which your heart most desires, right in front of you, just out of reach.

I am speaking of ice cream, of course.

The scooping of, rather. That’s the risk you take when you decide to put that responsibility in someone else’s hands.

I have to hold one hand down with the other when standing on the other side of the counter at an ice cream shop. I don’t blame the scoop. It knows its place.

If the scoop were to have a say, I truly believe it would be on my side. I have the tendency to converse with inanimate objects, and I think they respect me for this. Just this morning, I was speaking to my belt as I looped it around my waist. Inanimate objects. They get it, or as my friend Michael would say, “they know how to keep it real”.

Any scoop in charge of my ice cream would know how to keep it real. The scoop would say to me (maybe) something like, “I am sorry Meredith. Really, I am. I heard you say cookies and cream. You obviously want cookies with your cream. If I had a way to do the scooping myself, I would certainly get all the cookies within reach. Really, I would. But the situation is out of my hands, like, literally. I am actually in someone else’s. And they just don’t get it.”

I would thank the scoop for understanding. And then I would step back, force myself to avert my eyes away from the scooping process, and instead, scowl at the scooper. Why? Because it’s the cookies I really want. If it wasn’t, I would just order vanilla. Duh.

Instead, I am teased. I can see an abundance of deliciously sweet chocolaty and crunchy cookies. They are right in front of me, just out of my reach. I walk away with a waffle cone of mostly vanilla ice cream.