General Store--1942

There is a future. say the magazines, where ice cream cones coast down wet slides, and color rules, where sadness is postponed another day. All the obscene profits are for kings who plot such things. You read in all the magazines of wildness waiting in the wings where common sense should rule. It is a thing that teachers sometimes said, but never in a school, God damn them... they would teach on corners of a busy street had they been truly called. It's four o'clock, and ice cream time again-- lost upon old men, but for the careful eye of that sweet boy of ten, who stands there watching by the freezer as the shuffling shopman bends to dip the luscious stuff one time, and two, and three for a nickle in the flavor of the week. The weary one goes home to pet the dog and read about the war, the thirty-seventh time before fried ham and yesterday's potato salad hit the serving bowls... he would not ask for wine... and anyway, a cup of kindness cannot quite assuage the appetite. ~