From the Earth to the Cross / My Stare Decisis You Paid

On her deathbed my grandmother requested her last remains be mixed together at Cold Stone, the ascetic urn poured on vanilla and tapioca ice cream, mashed and turned together by the employee’s lovingly scoop.

We took seriously the wish that her terrestrial ashes live on dispersed in a single serving to-go container stored in a freezer set to the official Cold Stone temperature. Robert Ludlow, her attorney, long time confidante and the executor of her estate, redrafted her Last Will & Living Testament after assigning his legal aid, Edith Montrose, a pale asthmatic with perpetually chapped lips, the reason the office humidifier was bought, who devoured Heidegger during lunch breaks and train commutes, to research restaurant sanitation laws. Edith unearthed neither clause nor case law restricting the legality of Grandmother’s request and sent Robert Ludlow acknowledgement that the non-existence of prohibitory law equaled tacit consent, something she told the Cold Stone manager to quell his “I don’t want the health department up my ass” reservations.

Twice weekly, sometimes three dependent on the weather, my grandmother patroned Cold Stone Creamery. She remained fedilitious to a single store despite three area franchise locations. Besides enjoying their product, she considered Cold Stone an accurate analogy for life and the human condition, how we, like the myriad toppings sitting behind the sneeze glass, attempt to separate, compartmentalize and distinguish. “Just look at this taxonomical system,” she mused while waiting for her single-dip waffle cone, “to think that the candy toppings match our attempts to organize nature, people, behavior.” She’d watch as the toppings were violently merged from their compartments into the typhoonic spatchel path. “From chaos to order—and always again returning to chaos,” she’d mutter ambivalently while the candies coalesced. “Nature laughs always at us. Has no time for tragedy and all that rigmarole. Tragedy is plain bunk to nature.”

Her sinewy hands holstered the waffle cone, disregarding the provided napkins, nonetheless bringing the extra napkins home, storing them in a kitchen draw to distribute during late afternoon hors d'eavours. I’d see her iconic chilled chardonnay and shrimp cocktail, the glass stem nestled atop a Cold Stone napkin and blotting carefully, so as to preserve her makeup, red cocktail sauce from her mouth with another napkin. She never needed to wipe her face. Precautionary decorum dictated patting one’s face while breaking bread or fish.

Not one to speak ill, she referred often to custard as “tasteless slop.” Frozen yogurt—even the mention of supra—illicted shierks and a baritone gurgle from her midsection. When driving past TCBY she refused to acknowledge the store with even a peripheral glance, requesting earnestly, “Please tell me when it’s safe to look,” while tilting her chin upward with vestal bride dignity.