The Ice Man Cometh

Somewhere in the mid-eighties (known to veterans as the Decade-Of-All-Trends-Wrong), popular house decor colors where deemed to be mauve, powder blue, and beige. Although no longer the right colors now (newsflash half of America!) -- back then I purchased a budget friendly cheap plastic beige bowl representative of the period.

However impressive the vaguely southwestern-slash-dawn-of-MTV decorating savvy I possessed then was---
little could I have imagined that same bowl would yet be with me today.

Worse still, could I have possibly imagined it would become Hubby's All-Time, Number One, Hands-Down, --- Favorite Forever Bowl.
Well, favorite ice bowl, that is.

What is an ice bowl you ask?

Funny you would inquire because it's true, ---no such dining or kitchen apparatus as an 'ice bowl' exists in the books. But because of my first hand experience, I am able to take a stab at explaining to you just exactly what an ice bowl is. ------


An 'ice bowl' is a bowl that keeps ice cubes out where guests can look at them.


'Oh!' you exclaim. 'You mean an ice bucket?' you ask. 'Like what Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, or Bing Crosby use to use!'


Well, no. No, an ice bowl is different.


An 'ice bowl', is an unsightly, unnecessary, unused contraption, the same beige color of dried desert camel dung.
( . . . and has unsightly brown spots from the heating element of a dishwasher, as well as is accompanied by a just as unsightly slotted plastic oversized spoon.)


An ice bowl can appear at anytime, and at any function (--solely held at Bliss and Hubby's home).

You may find it at barbecues, family gatherings, Superbowl parties, rehearsal dinners, neighborhood socials, family home evenings, Columbus Day soirees, funerals, political events, barn-raising feasts, in-law entertaining, graduation festivities, and retirement bashes.


No occasion is too big or too small for an ice bowl.
If ice exists, it should be melting and center stage in a dumb bowl.



Okay. I sound like a brat. I know.
It's just, I have never had people ask, "excuse me, where do you keep your ice?"

I mean, we could have the fanciest of affairs, and there appears out of nowhere--between the Baked Alaska and crystal stemware -- a sloppy dollar store cracked shallow beige bowl of off-tasting ice cubes.



Anyhow, the problem is not only in the bowl.

Never has a man been more in love with his ice, than hubby is.


The very refrigerator we have exists not because the housewife of the home picked it out after bellowing the merits of its spaciousness and fresh-crisp drawers, or reading 4-star'isms in Consumer Reports, ---
but because Hubby found it deserted outside a welfare home, hosed it off, and gleefully declared (while haulin' it through the front door on a two-wheeled dolly) ---

"They don't make ice makers like this anymore!"



The Man Is All About His Ice.


I know if the house were on fire, he'd tell me to save the ice.
When we had our first child, I brought an overnight bag to the hospital -- Hubby brought his ice chest.
Unless Hubby has his mug of crushed ice and Kool-Aid to go with a meal, our dinners are as wrong as Maroon 5. (catch that? perfect maroon 5 reference!) (they're awful! enough with Maroon 5!)

To this day, no sound pierces my heart deeper than the dreaded words,

"Hon - where's our ice-bowl?"



Oh Well.
Maybe time will prove me wrong. Someday we may see pictures of the President in the Oval Office with a plastic bowl of ice next to him -- just-in-case . . . . --- we'll see . . . though time as of yet, has not been a friend to most of my hair-brained theories.