The poet grabbed the top plate and motioned generously to the crowd. The “Om” died out completely as the meditators regained their connection with reality and came for their plates. Sam dipped into the bucket with the tin can and slopped out a steaming gray mess with dark chunks floating in it.

Clancy held out a trembling pair of chopsticks. Her glasses were fogged with her awe for Figarty, who took the sticks politely, then asked, “Have you got such a thing as a fork?”

Clancy went inside to fetch him one.

Hands reached for plates and sticks. Sam proudly splayed the food onto plates. Every now and then someone bravely said, “Oh, Mr. Figarty, your poems have meant so much,” before they drifted away, shyly, with their smoking food.

Music chimed from down the street.

Figarty put his plate down. “Ice cream!” I noticed he’d pushed the mess to one side to make an empty space, but he hadn’t eaten. He stood up and raised his arms. “Wouldn’t anybody like some ice cream? My treat?”

Nobody answered.

The truck stopped down the street and then continued. We watched Figarty approach the truck, which played its little tune, two bars over and over again. Figarty ordered from the old woman leaning out of the hatch; he held an ice cream bar in each hand and started eating them both.

Sam sat down on the doorsill and looked at me. “I sure would like an ice cream.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

A frizzy-haired girl in the circle sniffed and clicked her chopsticks into the rice can. “He’s not a Buddhist! What a hypocrite!”

The ice cream truck drove off and took with it the sound of children shouting. The woman across the road stepped out onto her porch again, her hands wrapped in her apron. She looked up the street to where the ice cream truck had gone. She smiled. Then she glanced at Sam’s lawn and went back inside.

The scarred old toad

Some of us despise our own youth with a vague and bitter nostalgia and fixate on our worst phrases and acts with miserable clarity. It’s a relief for me, in a way, to remember these scenes, to re-create them, to breathe through them again with the cynicism I’ve gained since. I am glad they can never happen for me again.