The Deserter, Dessert

As a boy, I can't think of any time when we failed to keep desserts in the house. Growing up in Arizona as I did, ice cream fell in line with staples like bread, mill and toilet paper. We always had one half-gallon if not more, sometimes having the big huge container or the sack of little individual cups. It was all good, so long as there was something there. You just had to have something, even if it was just the bare minimum of popsicles.

I never even have popsicles anymore. Desert is non-essential now, which is a fact that was unfathomable once. Even when I was attending school in Chicago, cold desserts such as Klondike bars were a mandatory, positively essential item on every week's grocery list (which was straight out of Louis the 16th's kitchen by comparison with what I deign to eat today). I don't know why I didn't think more of hot desserts.

Well, there are today no hot ones or cold ones. There are some lollypops around which are so vile that I have let them sit around now for over a year if not more. I certainly could buy dessert, but I just don't for some reason. Maybe I have through some period of necessity become permanently austere. It's a tragic thing to contemplate someday having endless money to through around but no longer possessing the imagination to invent things that might be done with it.

Maybe here and there I can get some desert. It's not really so expensive, after all. Then again, I have yet to render every real meal of the day truly complete with everything recommended in the food pyramid (or whatever it is now). Maybe I should make sure that each dinner has meat and vegetables before I fret about some lack of sweets my my diet. I think that was at the tip of the pyramid somewhere, and probably hasn't changed much since they did away with it.