Lists & Words

I loved this essay about Mark Dow's experience as a teacher in a special school.

We write things down, and hold on to them, for many different reasons. To stop time and keep the “edge of marveling” honed, or at least handy. To create pockets of order. To prove to ourselves that we exist. To be able to immerse ourselves in whatever matters to us but is gone.

I also love making lists and one of those fools who likes bottle up the past as much as possible, just to see it fall through my hands like sand.
Another part I liked.

Sometimes on my way home from the special school, I’d stop by Celebrity Pizza, where the big seller was ice cream. At first I went there just to pass the time, but I became interested in how interested the manager was in ice cream, and I started writing down things he said, such as, Soft vanilla outsells all hard ice cream except hard vanilla and hard chocolate. It outsells hard strawberry. …

And: “You hear all this talk about salt now. Well, it’s the hidden salt that gets you. Häagen-Dazs, Hood, those are the top-of-the-line, and they’ve got about one-and-a-half to two teaspoons of salt per gallon. Down at the bottom, you’ve got five teaspoons per gallon. That might not sound like a lot, but it is. It’s like taking a steak and putting the whole salt shaker on it. You know how to tell how much salt an ice cream has? If you drink some water after, and then that’s it, O.K. But if want to drink more later, then that one’s got more salt. And if it makes you burp right after it, and then you burp later and you can taste it still, if it repeats on you, that’s because of the salt.”

He talked about ice cream to just about everyone who ordered some.

He asked one customer, “Does ice cream give you a headache?”

The customer said he didn’t think so.

“Yes it does,” the manager said. “It does everybody sometimes. You know why? Because it’s so cold. It hits the roof of your mouth and just shocks you through your head. You know how to prevent it? Just drink some water first. Water has a film on it. Most people don’t know that, but it does. It coats up here …” — he touched the roof of his mouth with his index finger and made a blurry two-part noise — “The roof of your mouth. It puts a film there. Then it’s not such a shock.”

The anecdote about the ice cream was especially lovely. And yes, we do say "jimmies" instead of sprinkles. But I never get those anyway.

via Ken's twitter