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For nearly forty years, the pinnacle of ice cream experiences has been the Jersey Mud.

A tulip sundae glass. Chocolate ice cream. Marshmallow sauce. Vanilla ice cream. Chocolate sauce. Malted milk powder. Whipped cream. A cherry.

When served, the first step is to stir the malt powder into the rest of the ingredients. Otherwise the spoon is coated  the whole time you eat the sundae.

My experiences with the Jersey Mud were limited to a drugstore in Cedarville, Michigan, a small town in the upper peninsula. For several years, from 11 to 16, I spent part of my summer at a camp about 9 miles north of Cedarville. Sometimes there was a break. Sometimes we got to run to town. Sometimes we got to have a Jersey Mud. (Sometimes we also had the best pizza in the world, but that’s a different post and is debatable).

I haven’t been back to Cedarville since I was 16.

My job has taken us close to a drive-in in Grabill, Indiana. This summer, while waiting for an order, I looked at the list of sundaes. I noticed that one of them was the Jersey Mud. Hope was very concerned about me when she watched my euphoria. But I didn’t get one.

Today I was at the drive-in. I was the only one in the place. I asked the owner about the Jersey Mud. He described it. I said I knew. I asked where it came from. He said he had picked it up from the upper peninsula, from a drugstore in Cedarville. I said I knew all about it. He had vacationed there as a kid. He decided to bring the recipe to Grabill.

I ate my corn dog. And then I decided to get a Jersey Mud. He fixed it. He said it would taste like I remembered.

He was wrong.

It wasn’t so much that it was softserve rather than hard ice cream. It wasn’t the bowl rather than the sundae glass or the piling the ingredients together rather than the clear layers.

It was that I was eating it alone.

The pinnacle of my ice cream memories and I was eating it alone. I wasn’t sharing it with our kids. I wasn’t in the context of an adventure after a long day, in the middle of the summer when the air conditioning of the drugstore would have been a luxury and the group lining up for a sundae would have been community and the taste would have been something to talk about for, well, until the next year.

At times all we want is to consume something alone. It seems to us that the aloneness and the consumption are the point. But mostly, I think, the point is shared experiences. To have eaten the sundae with four spoons, to watch our kids turn up their noses at the malt powder, to have everyone say, “You waited thirty-five years for that?”–that shared experience would have been wonderful.

As I ate ice cream, alone, I realized that I had forgotten what I have often learned. Remembered ice cream is alway better than the sundae in front of you. Recreate those joys with family, so there are people who love you with you when you find they don’t taste the same. Because often, the taste was so good…because of the people around you.

By the way, the other half of the sundae is in the freezer at work. If you want to share it, I mean.

by Jon Swanson

Photo graciously provided by jon.swanson, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved