by Chris Jay
stuffedandbusted@gmail.com
I imagine that most cities have their own local ecosystem of frozen treat vendors, but still: In Shreveport, you can learn a great deal about someone simply by asking where they go for a snow cone.
Take me, for example.
I spent a decade—my 20s—as a Tim’s Southern Snow person. When you’re a Tim’s Southern Snow person, you have to accept that life is about trade-offs. You surrender the right to park a vehicle diagonally, while gaining the ability to enjoy cream (a heavy drizzle of pet milk) in all three places (bottom, middle, top). And, if we’re being honest with ourselves, who doesn’t want cream in all three places? Some people, Baptists mostly, have never had cream in even one place.
When you’re a Tim’s Southern Snow person, you will never know the joy of a rainbow snow cone. That’s because Tim will not combine multiple flavors, as is made clear in several of the 75 or so handwritten notes that are taped to the window. But, in exchange for never having tasted the rainbow, Tim’s customers get to shop for used VHS movies, factory-sealed watch batteries and broken calculators while their delicious, single-flavor snow cones are meticulously prepared.
There is ritual in what Tim does. This is the high, holy stuff that the rest of Louisiana likes to think that Shreveport doesn’t have; it is funk and character.
At some point in my life—around the time that I became a homeowner—I found myself seeing less and less of Tim. These days, I’m a Kalona Kones person. I love the owner of Kalona Kones, Sharon; she is incredibly kind to first responders, children and pets. The Kalona Kones menu lists countless flavors, many of which are nonsensically named in wonderful ways (i.e. “Transformers,” “Circus Madness”). There are no proscriptions against combining flavors. Park your car however the hell you’d like, Sharon doesn’t care. Life’s about living.
The last time that my wife, Sara, and I visited Kalona Kones, Sharon gave our dog a free treat and sat with us beneath one of the beach parasols that color her corner of the parking lot. We got to talking, and somehow, she wound up sharing an incredible story.
Her grandmother had owned a brown woolly monkey named Toby. Back then, you could order young monkeys out of the back pages of magazines. When Toby felt badly treated by Sharon’s grandparents, he would leap onto her grandfather’s head and urinate down the back of his neck. Sara and I roared with laughter as a vanful of boys, clad in grass-stained baseball uniforms, queued up at the window, wide-eyed.
“That monkey’s still buried in that backyard,” she’d said to herself, pensively, as she rose to make snow cones.
I finished my last slurp of Spider-Man (it’s blueberry and sour cherry), and the three of us walked home.
The thing is, I do miss Tim’s Southern Snow. The snow cones there are probably the tastiest in town. But I’m 39 years old now; I am a grown-ass man with sore feet and several overdue projects at work. I didn’t come this far without getting hooked on opioids just to let someone tell me how to park my car in front of the goddamned snow cone stand. I bought this car on the internet, and I will park it diagonally if I’d like to.
The days when I had enough life ahead of me to commit to a single flavor, when I enjoyed order and craved instruction, are behind me.
These days, I am near enough the darkness to see that it isn’t darkness at all. It’s all of the colors at once.
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