Late in March, the ice-cream truck that decides my neighborhood’s soundtrack started playing Christmas music. It was close to Easter, so you can imagine my feeling of creeping insanity, sitting on the porch while the redbuds bloomed, thinking I heard “Jingle Bells.” Then “Adeste, Fideles.” Then a break for “Home on the Range.” Then “Rudolph.” This was all in a couple of minutes: ice-cream trucks change songs pretty quickly. It was only when he drove past me playing “Silent Night” that I knew I wasn’t hearing things.
He’s good, this driver. It’s not the beauty of the songs that gets you as much as the sheer violence of the transitions. I’ve heard Dua Lipa right after “Annie Laurie.” I’ve heard Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake mixed with that song about Easter bonnets. I’ve heard Jennifer Lopez’ “(Tonight we gon’ be it) on the floor” somehow turn into “Darling Clementine.”
It’s hard to account for the delight this produces. I’d heard “La Cucaracha,” and I’d heard “O Tannenbaum.” But what drove some mad, prolific genius to transpose them (along with a staggering repertoire of other hits from folk and ballet, hymns and hip-hop) into the tinny, instantly recognizable sonic idiom of ice-cream-truck music? And now a twenty-five-watt megaphone spliced to a mechanical music cylinder designed in the ’30s blares them in strange sequences, rolling down my street. The familiar is new again.
I heard him play “Greensleeves” once, which I’ve learned is the ice-cream-truck song of choice in the UK and Australia. Imagine standing by an ice-cream van (they’re called vans in England) with a Good Humour bar in your hand and those bittersweet, melancholy notes in your ear. Alas, my love, ye do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously. As a business strategy, it makes sense. If you want to drive up ice-cream consumption, get people thinking about the one who got away.
It’s also nice to know that the “Glasgow Ice-cream Wars” of the ’80s, which involved gang-managed Glaswegian ice-cream trucks selling drugs and untaxed cigarettes and clashing violently with each other along profitable routes, were fought to the accompaniment of “Greensleeves.” Alas, my love! Ye do me wrong.
In the us, the most common ice-cream truck song might be Scott Joplin’s “Entertainer,” but his wrenchingly lovely “Solace” is a better fit for ice cream, which you eat to be consoled, not entertained.
For a long time I couldn’t remember where else I had encountered the magic combination of surprise and recognition that you get from a well-dj’d ice-cream truck. Then it struck me that all of my favorite professors have had a knack for producing it—the ones with bottomless memories and a certain appetite for tangents. On the first page of my freshman Iliad notes, I find “The point of existentialism is that nobody can take a bath for you,” right next to “Legend: the Greek alphabet was invented in the spring of 750 bc to write down Homer.” No idea how these tied together. I have since gotten much better at taking notes. If I can help it, when my students get to college, they won’t leave gaps in the record like that.
In my own classes, I want to be like the ice-cream truck—to teach by surprise, to churn up the widest selection of delights, and to be, like Rudolph’s promotion to head reindeer in Lent, a bit out of step with my time. And not just because I teach Latin. We get hung up on antiquities in English too.
Take the etymology of “sycophant,” which denotes an ill-intentioned flatterer nowadays but derives from the Greek sycophantos (a man who stirs up frivolous lawsuits), which literally means “someone who shows figs.” That’s because when Megara backed Sparta during the Peloponnesian war, Megarian figs (the Cuban cigars of the fig market) were banned in Athens, but everyone smuggled them in anyway. A sycophant was the type of guy who would point out the box of Megarian figs in your fridge just to cause trouble.
Once I threatened to punish a fractious Latin class by reading them the most boring article in the Oxford Classical Dictionary if they didn’t pipe down, and they didn’t, so I read them the article on honey. Did you know that the infant Plato was fed honey by bees, and it made him eloquent? This should be common knowledge. Did you know that the honey from the shores of the Black Sea is bitter and induces madness? It’s a shame that the American Pediatric Association won’t even look at research with publication dates ending in bc. Imagine if medieval surgeons had been that narrow-minded.
Medieval surgeons aside, you can’t beat my students for surprises. At homecoming a couple of years ago, a raft of Latinists came up to me, got on the ground like sea lions, and began barking and chanting Horace’s letter to Lollius. I still haven’t figured out why, but I view them with a new respect. And when they run for public office I may ask for a payment in exchange for my wife’s video of this event.
Two juniors stopped me in the hall one day to ask if I had any sealing wax. I told them that, not being a hereditary nobleman, I usually just lick the envelope. Was this some sort of covid precaution? No, one of them was working on his “prom ask.” I like that they were working on it as a team. My classmates, too, were helpful wingmen in my courtship of a young siren from Hockaday whom I took to prom and afterwards to the Cistercian chapel to hear Fr. Philip say “You may kiss the bride.” Actually, he forgot to say it, and we’re not sure where we stand canonically. We mostly hold hands, anyway.
I think I like my local ice-cream truck so much because it’s like Cistercian: rooted in tradition (“O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “Greensleeves”), staunchly Texan (“Home on the Range”), culturally inclusive (“Stille Nacht,” “La Cucaracha”), and deeply thought-provoking (“Jingle Bells”). I know it’s a bit late, but Merry Easter, y’all. He is risen.