For Father’s Day, we made root beer floats. (Among other things. I wanted to find a wonderful way to celebrate my Patient Husband’s Patient Fatherhood, but I couldn’t do that sufficiently, so instead we bought root beer and ice cream.)
(We ended up with that because we didn’t order dessert at the restaurant.)
(Actually, to add insult to injury, I sent him out to buy it himself.)
(This is a lot of parentheticals.)
Anyhow, we had “seconds” or RBFs on Monday night, and that finished up the root beer, so my Patient Husband made them small, in regular mugs. I pointed out that none of us actually requires a gallon of ice cream anyhow.
The Kiddos then asked about having a triple scoop, and I said, “Let me tell you about my grandfather.”
Once upon a time, the world’s best ice cream was made at a place called Jahn’s.
Jahn’s had a dessert called The Kitchen Sink, which I believe contained 22 scoops of ice cream and 11 toppings. You’d have to be a lunatic to eat it all, right?
Better yet, if you could finish the whole thing, they’d make you another one. Free.
My grandfather and great-uncle, who together once ate an eighty-pound watermelon, ordered one (much to the horror of my great-aunt and my grandmother) and proceeded to devour it all: all twenty-two scoops of ice cream, all eleven toppings. All of it.
My grandfather, who also had a pinch so tight he could make a penny scream for mercy, then asked for the second one. But my grandmother and great-aunt were so embarrassed that they made them leave.
—
Oh, the watermelon? At the end of one summer, they bought two eighty pound watermelons and brought them home in a baby carriage. They broke the baby carriage doing this.
They then covered the watermelons in shellack and set them out in the shed where they’d stay cool. One of the melons got a hole in it and wasn’t edible, but sometime in November they got out the other melon and cut it open, and between the two of them, they ate the whole thing.
(This eating the whole thing was something of a family tradition, I’m given to understand. I am Italian.)
The next morning, my grandfather lay in bed, unable to move. “I’m dying,” he moaned.
My grandmother, always calm and level-headed, started screaming and ran out the door looking for the doctor. At the office, she grabbed him by the arm and made him leave a patient on the exam table in order to come save my grandfather’s life.
On learning that my grandfather had indeed eaten something unusual (since yes, 40 pounds of watermelon is unusual) he told off my grandmother and grandfather. Apparently my grandfather’s system was having a problem dealing with forty pounds of water-weight: I guess he was drowning on dry land.
Your takeaways:
1) Don’t eat 40 pounds of watermelon all at once
2) If you do eat 22 scoops of ice cream and feel a hankering for another 22 because they’re free, don’t do it where my grandmother knows about it.
3) If you do, then tell me and I’ll write a weblog entry about it. Enjoy!
