Homemade

He couldn’t call it “Homemade”;

they wouldn’t let him,

for it wasn’t made in a home,

not his home, a domicile,

but in a back room next to the pharmacy,

entered by a door on the back wall

by the magazines, and so it wasn’t “Homemade,”

but “Hallett’s Made,” political correctness before

it became popular, but strange in those days

of Hallett’s Drug Store, where I worked,

on the corner of Front Street and Center,

a local favorite in my hometown.

I spent my time after school and into the evening

dishing ice cream for others, a soda jerk

making ice cream concoctions with “Hallett’s Made”

ice cream, despite the sign, hanging

as it always had, proclaiming it “Homemade.”

It bore a good price, affordable though, for a single

scoop in a cup or a sugar cone, no extra charge,

or perhaps, dangerous living, a hot fudge sundae,

or butterscotch, by chance even a banana split;

I could make them all, hot fudge

and whipped cream, a cherry placed on top,

carefully, a final touch. And for the more refined,

an ice cream soda or a milkshake, made to order,

vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, rich and thick

with an extra scoop of ice cream, the way

I liked ‘em, long before I worried

about calories and cholesterol, a growing waistline.

But I soon left for college and the world, an adult career,

leaving Hallett’s and soda fountains behind

and moving away. I heard later that Mr. True retired, finally,

a fair man, and true, training me well,

well enough even to make the ice cream myself,

mixing the ingredients, the secret flavoring, sworn to secrecy.

So Mr. True retired and Hallett’s closed – and the ice cream?

Retired, too, rocking on my memory’s front porch,

drawn out now in poems of then, of growing up,

discovering work and jobs and the way life conducts itself,

the past going away into the recesses of remembrance,

set aside to surface on a day like today,

when a dish of “Homemade” Hallett’s ice cream

is what I crave, an extra scoop with hot fudge,

whipped cream, and the cherry carefully placed on top;

for this singular recollection reminds me

that I, too, am “homemade,” made in a small town

where Hallett’s Drug Store gave me my start,

dishing up a little nostalgia for each of us to carry

out into the world to help us remember home,

where we lived and where we grew up,

and what we left behind in leaving.