In the 25 years we’ve lived here, in this house and neighborhood there has never been an ice cream truck come through. The houses are spaced far apart. The driveways are long. Ask your feet at Halloween, when you’ve put in 10,000 steps for your next Mars Bar and your little ones are begging to go home. Plus the neighborhood is old and not teeming with children. We have a Santa come through every December on a hook and ladder, sirens blaring to basically a mailbox salute, but no ice cream truck. Until today.

Ellie doesn’t recognize the sound at first. Cultural gap. She’s at the dining room table pounding out a philosophy paper. I think it must be an app, or an alarm on one of their phones. Where is that sound coming from? Is that an ice cream truck?? If you can recall that bubbly, annoying tune you will be thinking, Who in their right mind would load that on their phone? and you would be right. But it’s growing louder, clearly outside our house. Just up the street. I open the front door and the garish, saturated music is unmistakeable.  It’s the real thing all right, as real and incongruous as everything else this season — masks in the grocery store, hand sanitizer in every room, social calendar about as busy as the underground life of a Cicada (See ya in 17 years!). And here we are, postcard-perfect May day in suburban Virginia where the lawns are tended twice a day, and we have an ice cream truck making its way down our street. “New,” “novel,” no-match-for-this Corona virus … meet normal.

I stand for a single moment at the door, incredulity and delight mixed, and then move into steps imprinted long ago: Find wallet. Find wallet empty. Race through house searching for cash. Accost household members in the midst of their otherwise normal moments: Got any cash? The new twist here? Grab mask and gloves. Race from house. Chase truck. Grown adult, gray-haired, spectacular spring day, horrible music, chasing a moving vehicle down the street. Waving. The combination is one my college kid hasn’t seen before, I am sure of it. I don’t try to explain as I dash about like a nut job, and she doesn’t try to stop me. We needed a little excitement around here anyway, mid-dead-afternoon on day 54 of quarantine. For me, the prize is worth it. I’m going to score us all a little taste of normal. Got crisis? It’s a job for provider-Mom. I can at least bring them a sampling of the way things used to be. I remember running for the ice cream truck a billion years ago. Goes well with bare feet, pig tails, summer heat, second-grade smiles missing teeth. What that clap-happy tune promises the little window delivers: colored pictures all laid out, each one too tempting to choose. That is how life should be. Delightfulness on a stick.

Truck does a little turn in our cul-de-sac, giggling and puttering along and heads back my way. I wonder as I pull on my latex gloves if the driver will be wearing his. I wonder, like most things I plunge into, Is this a good idea? Is it safe? Can you get Covid-19 from a push-pop? Once I stop running the second doubts catch up, like a wake smacking me from behind. Then Ellie does for real. I am waiting on the corner when college girl arrives, breathless at my back, shaking her head and smiling. She also has jogged the half mile.  She is sock-footed. I like that she got the memo: RUN! One needs know how to behave in all life’s pantheon events, especially the unexpected ones. She, too, has thought to grab gloves and a mask. Good protocol, Ellie. Safety before shoes. “Mom!” she gasps, “I thought you were going to get kidnapped.” Whaaaat? Now it’s my turn to be confused, until I realise the generation gap going on here: what is the essence of innocence to me shows up in her world as a threat. Ambiguous icon, for one who’s watched way too many crime shows and scary movies on Netflix. Send in the clowns.

My little truck is a harbinger of more than summer. More than a symbol of normal American life. It brings with it a bomb pop of hope. Yesterday we get the news that George Mason is working out in-person classes for the fall. In person! Can it be true? The news comes with the droplets not dry on our masks, sanitizer in every room, the very first indicator that life could be, if not normal, then liveable by the fall. I read the signs. I put my rocket science degree on hold to have a family; but happily you don’t need one of those to see that things are loosening, softening, easing back into “normal” life. On Friday we get the sweetest of all unexpected deliveries: a letter from Hanover County Public Schools outlining three graduation ceremonies with dates and a few details. Not one plan. Not one date. But three. Finally. A response to a crisis as large as the crisis and as delicious as hope. There you go, daughter. We will get you through this. It will not be what you expected. It will not be what you wanted. It will not be what any of us wanted. But it will. Not. Be. Nothing.

The word “plan” has been a four-letter word since early March, when one by one, they fell. I remember almost crying as I finally opened my calendar to begin erasing the wonderful events our spring would have ushered in: band concerts and trips–even bowling field trips had me bawling. With not one, but two graduates in the house, the “last one” aspect of so many of these cancelled milestones is hard to swallow. Nobody likes a “last chance” that is never extended. An overdue notice that comes after the bill and just before the “no-due” notice. You know what? Never mind. We’re not holding that anymore. Most of these events came with the life-structuring THE in them–the eighth grade band trip to Kings Dominion, the spring concert featuring music Will has been relegated to play alone in his upstairs bedroom these past nine weeks, THE senior prom. Definitive article. Definitively gone. Events for which, there was only ever one of them, significant enough to gird life. Without them, our core is shaken. Yes, I realise this is ridiculous self-pity in light of the true destruction, illness and war-zone conditions people have lived through. I knew it then, too, but it didn’t do anything to dull the pain of having to erase page after page of our “But, wait! But–maybe! But no!” lives. The taste of desperation still in my mouth.

Sophie is out on a run when he comes beeping and boogying through our neighborhood. I’m surprised she didn’t pass him. Crawling at a pace slow enough for a trike to catch and playing that ridiculous music to the air. No children around anywhere. Will and his dad have just left for yard work at church. Afternoon routine. Boy will be sad to have missed this unexpected diversion. It’s one of the few things lately I would have enjoyed showing him for the first time, instead of the stuff I do: “pandemic” and “quarantine,” “social distancing” and other firsts you wish the world would not indoctrinate your child to. Ellie and I, we stand at the little counter, six feet away. I will just have to educate her. Okay honors girl, shoeless one, listen up. No college degree is complete without…. She is still smiling in disbelief and–admit it, Ellie–childish delight. This is fun. This is fun. While she ponders her choices, I remark to the man inside the truck that in all the time we’ve lived in this neighborhood his novelty-mobile is a novelty indeed. “Really?” he looks at me like folks do, increasingly like a dinosaur with two heads. I can’t tell if he’s struck by what I’m telling him, or the fact that I’ve noticed. Kept track. “Really? Well, you know what? I’ll be back next Thursday. And every Thursday after that. Watch for me.”

The man takes our order, happy to sell five ice creams to two customers and make off with what has to be a ridiculous mark up. Three nutty buddies, an ice cream sandwich, and one of those red-white-and blue rocket jobbies for Bill. Bill likes those. $12.50. What?! Side road robbery. I tip him anyway, sign of gratitude and almost childlike exuberance. Give it away. Live large. My girls have something to look forward to, a slimmest, thinnest grin of beginning before the world smiles summer large. Maybe tastes so much better than no, not ever. “Do you want the junior size,” asks the man when I order my confections, “or the extra large?” Hmmm, let me think. Graduation? Video celebrations and diplomas and dates?? The possibility of a prom? I get to celebrate life’s milestones and carry them with me, altered or not, after all? Life is back on the calendar. What do you think?

Later, when we are regaling Bill and Will about the events of the day, Will doesn’t seem sad he missed the grand event. “Geeze, mom, I’ve seen an ice cream truck before.” He is just glad we thought of him in our hyper-ecstatic moment and explosion from the house earlier. He’s probably relieved he did not have to witness his mother thundering down his bus route in Crocs, yelling and waving. Happy to have an ice cream cone while he shelters in place with the people he still likes best. In not quite a week he will ask me, “What day is it?” Tuesday, son. He’ll look at his online Schoology calendar, modern kid. Stepping over the assignments I’m sure are posted on there to announce, “Remember Mom, Thursday. The ice cream man comes on Thursday.”

Got any cash?