Saturday, August 05, 2006

The Ice Man
Chancy, at Driftwood Inspiration. was talking about how the ice man used to visit when she was a child. How he would chip ice off for the children and use great, huge black tongs to lift the ice block to his shoulder and carry it in and place it in the top of the ice box. And about people putting a sign in the window to let the ice man know that ice was needed. One of the comments was about what happened if you forgot to empty the ice tray (a flood, is what happened).

And all of this reminded me of a family story. Background. When my mother was pregnant with me, my parents had an ice man who was a redhead. Since my mother was a brunette and my father was a strawberry blonde, when people would ask my father if he wanted a boy or a girl, he would say, "I don't care, as long as it isn't a redhead." Well, it was obvious the minute I was born that I was a redhead, and he must not have objected because my Aunt Julie was there and she said he kissed me before I had been washed off. (Just in case you are wondering, both of my grandfathers and my Aunt Julie were redheads.}

When I was six, my father died. My mother remarried when I was nine and when I was ten, we moved to Puerto Rico for a year. In those days of prop planes, a trip from California to Puerto Rico took three days. We (Mama, Daddy, Forrest, and I) flew from San Francisco to New Orleans the first day, to Miami the second day, and on to San Juan on the third day.


Elegant travel. Everyone, including my pregnant mother, dressed up to fly in those days. There were only four seats to a row, the meals were very nice and served on china with good flatware and steak knives for the steaks and tall glasses with ice clinking in them for the water. Everything very, very nice.

And, we stayed at elegant hotels along the way. In New Orleans it was the Monteleone, very uptown, very lovely. We ate in the hotel dining room that evening. As the hostess, who was a redhead, seated us she looked at my brunette mother and brunette step-father and brown haired brother and asked me, "Where did you get that lovely red hair?"

To which I replied, "Well, Daddy always did say we had a redheaded ice man."

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is cute... My brother used to tease me, because my hair was straight black and thick, He'd say the milk man was Asian.

J said...

So all of that genealogy research I did was for NOTHING? ;)

goldenlucyd said...

Well, Jocelyn, I really need to get out of here. I wanted to see what you'd written about the iceman and got caught up reading 2 months of posts. I wish I had your gift. Everything I write (on the odd occasion I really say anything) is such an effort. I feel like you're just sitting here chatting with me. I also enjoyed perusing Py Korry's and Julie's blogs. That avocado-chicken chili sounds wonderful.
If I ever finish my own post I'll be back to finish your archives.

Chancy said...

That is just too cute... Out of the mouths of babes...:)

kenju said...

What did your mom and step-dad think of that? LOL

A very cute story! I remember when people dressed up for travel. I was always told that people who were dressd in their best acted better than when they were dressed casually. Maybe we should all go back to dressing up for plane travel, huh?!

Ms. Mamma said...

Very cute story. Class and sass!

Maya's Granny said...

Kenju,
I think my parents were amused, since whenever they told the story (which was often) it had that touch of "my kid is funnier than your kid" about it.

Tabor said...

This is such a good post for me. I was standing in line in the Bed Bath and Beyond store (one of our local places where you can drop twenty bucks easily) and two little men 9one about 5 and one about 39 had the most BEAUTIFUL red hair. It was that very rare color that was so stunning it looked artificial.