Of Ice Cream and Things Dead and Cold

On an arid and sunny Sunday, I arrived at Manila, nostalgic and sweaty from a thirty-minute train ride packed with families and children. For many months, this compulsion to revisit Gary’s, a small white-laden restaurant along the harried Taft Avenue lane just for its chocolate ice cream, has been stirring inside me. Not remotely artisan nor unique, it is nothing but commercial ice cream straight out of the pint.

But it was ice cream that me, my sister and my stepdad shared one hot afternoon 20 years ago as my mother rested on a bed, fresh from Cesarean surgery at the Philippine General Hospital across the street. 





“Ang mahal ng ice cream,” he whined in his distinct Chinese accent. Five decades of living in Manila and he hasn’t shaken off that peculiar slang or pronounced tanigue right.

He ordered two scoops of chocolate ice cream nonetheless, and we kids watched in slow motion as a waiter laid it down the white table, smoking icy and glistening. Each dab of the spoon revered like it was churned for kings, even if it was one we could easily bait three times cheaper in a grocery. Diabetic, he tasted but a spoon and happily looked on as we fool ourselves about how mind-blowing dessert was. He had a knack for children who ate heartily food he brought to the table. 

We did not return to Gary’s since. But it was a memory that stayed with me and had me tossing and turning in bed among thousands of others almost everyday since he left.

I carry my footsteps back to the restaurant – now occupied by a bustling drugstore, its old self abandoned, arrhythmic, and grey like hearts left by the departed. No longer were there cakes of dust on walls, or the four-seater chairs where we huddled two decades back. The past has officially been closed for memory reliving. 

I end up here in the morning, all the way from Bulacan, in search of ice cream.

So instead, I trace paths back to places we used to frequent, places close to my stepfather’s once beating heart: Maxim’s at del Pilar, Emerald Garden along Roxas Boulevard, the CCP grounds, Don Inggo’s fronting the Manila Bay marina. Memories, at first smarting, then comforting.

In the end, I found my feet at my mother’s doorstep, a half gallon of light mocha and chocolate ice cream in hand. Colors of dark and light. Their cheeky sunniness condensed in huge balls, a homage to the merriment of childhood in the dark reality of the ephemera. 

My sister and I shared ice cream as we used to with my stepdad, only now the children keep a bigger share of the scoops. Just like how it was in Gary’s.

During my father’s wake, we were handed popsicles as workers laid his coffin to the ground, our skin braised under the February sun. Ice cream. A fitting emblem of things now dead and cold, I thought.

My niece made this. She does have an eye for food styling.

But today I take the time to thank my stepfather for that expensive ice cream he so generously spent on only to see us happy, and a thousand other scoops before and after that.

For ice cream, in all its sweet, icy splendor is never a gastronomic symbol of the dead and cold. Today, it is cheery, warming food for the soul. A scoop of hope, of revisiting childhood joys, a window to pockets of moments that will forever stay alive and warm.