HOLY CANNOLI

If you have a grandkid 16 years old or younger, you should never visit an ice cream parlor without them. Trust me. Your chances of having an “adventure” skyrocket with them along.

We took our youngest granddaughter, Cristiana, to lunch recently, one of the last days of her school break. After lunch, we headed to an ice cream place a couple of blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. It was a chilly day, so I suggested that Cristiana go inside and not wait for her aging grandparents to waddle in. When Irene and I entered the store, Cristiana had taken up a position near the ices counter. She’s big on ices and like her mother, Deena, seems to delight in making complicated orders with several (make that 17) flavors.

While the older man who I think owns the store was dipping away to fill Cristiana’s order, she asked, “Is this a family-owned business?” “Yes,” the man said.

Irene at this point had given her ice cream order (maple walnut) to a young boy who was digging with all his might in a bucket of ice cream under the glass counter. He kept piling scoop after scoop into what the shop calls a medium cup. When he was done, he put it on the counter and said, “Here’s your holy cannoli.” Irene replied, “I didn’t order that. I asked for maple walnut.” The two flavors were side-by-side in the ice cream case.

The boy didn’t know how to handle this and the older man — I’m guessing his grandfather — took charge. He put a lid on the cup of holy cannoli and left it under the refrigerated counter. After ten seconds or so, I said, “I’ll take that. It’s already, so I’ll take it.” The man said in a friendly tone, “No you won’t. You’ll get what you want.” He then started using a dipper to strong-arm some maple walnut into a cup for Irene. As he was doing this, I asked, “Is this a family-owned business?” He chuckled but kept scooping.

The boy asked me what I wanted and I walked to another part of the display case and pointed at what I think was a flavor, created by the Devil, called dark fudge chocolate.

Way before any of this had happened, Cristiana, who turns 16 late this summer, had asked for a cup of vanilla bean ice cream to take home to her sister Daniella. Not thinking the man had heard her, the words “vanilla bean” came out of her mouth a second time three or four minutes later.

When it was time to pay, the man took the cup of holy cannoli and put it in our bag and said it was free. He also, the best I can make out, didn’t charge us for the second cup of vanilla bean. To recap: the three of us left the place with five cups of ice cream or ice and only paid for three.

We sat in the car eating away while looking at clever signs in the store window. They included: “Dinosaurs didn’t eat ice cream. Look at what happened to them.”

The medium portions were so big both Irene and I only ate half of our ice cream in the car, taking the remainder hope for enjoying after dinner. An afternoon later I got a text from Cristiana: “Holy cannoli is scrumptious.” Irene and I agreed our ice cream was delicious.
We can’t wait for Cristiana’s next school break and hope she’ll want to make a return visit with us.