(Poetry Month – Week Five)
The Ice Cream Man
Kinda short
kinda stocky
thick, dark hair with natural wave rather than curl.
My dad always said Jesus was probably built more like him
than those pictures you see hanging at Sunday school.
He was Greek.
He knew some Greek.
He even knew people in Greece-relatives.
Once, when he was older,
he went to Greece.
He had a smile that could bring on a season.
One Christmas Eve, it was warm and there was no snow
and it just didn’t seem like Christmas…until
he walked through the door after church.
He was wearing a Santa hat
and with arms spread wide
and a smile as big as Christmas itself,
and those sweet soft blue eyes
he blurted “Merry Christmas”
and gave me a hug.
Only then did I begin to grasp the true meaning of the season.
He had a wife and three children.
He had some bad times.
He had way more good times.
He had several cats over the years.
He had Parkinson’s disease.
He had a will like no other.
He had more grace in one quivering finger
than most people have in a lifetime.
He pretended to milk a cow in the swimming pool
thus squirting me with water every time.
He went camping
He had an amazing sense of humor
and a soft lovable almost huggable laugh.
He was a man of God.
He was a grandpa.
He was my friend.
I knew him as the ice cream man.
I think this poem pretty much sums up Charlie as I knew him. When I wrote it, it came out in the past tense. When I shared the poem with Charlie’s wife, I was a blithering idiot and she was completely composed. Her response was simply, “You’ll read that at his funeral.”
As we approached the church for Charlie’s funeral, we pulled around to the back of the church looking for a parking place. The car in front of us stopped and my dear friend Iris who, like Charlie, had Parkinson’s disease, got out and headed toward the elevator. I decided I would get out and join her. I grabbed my purse and hopped out of the car.
When I left the house, the poem was in my purse. When I got inside the church, the poem was not inside my purse. Assumably it fell out in the car. I was not meant to read the poem at Charlie’s funeral, I couldn’t keep my composure just sitting in the pew.
My Patio 