thoughts of an ice connoisseur

I’m going to let you in on a secret... okay, that’s laughable since I’m posting this on a blog… nevertheless…. I am an ice connoisseur. Specifically, ice cubes or forms of ice that is small enough for your drink. Most, mind you, are not your traditional cube shape. I have been chastised for chewing ice by individuals who warn me that I could crack my teeth on I (which hasn’t happened yet), and then, of course, the ever present danger of choking on ice, but since that already happened when I was in the seventh grade and my mom successfully did the Heimlich maneuver on me, saving my then unsaved life, I figure that’s old hat too. Well not old hat. It just doesn’t worry me that much. It worries me enough to be mindful of ice cube size and mindful enough not to go spitting ice into the yard, or in the case of my yardless apartment living existence, onto someone’s windshield in the parking lot… If I’ve lost you already, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll spare you the dramatic details in their entirety of how my mom saved the day after the neighbors ran away and my book-engrossed sister failed to notice that my life was in danger... But I really enjoy crunching on ice. I’ve always loved water, and it’s probably one of my favorite beverages; however, I definitely prefer ice water. In fact, I prefer ice in most my drinks. (How I survived in Europe a whole summer is beyond me.) In part because ice makes the drink very cold and room temperature water or sweet tea just doesn’t do the trick for me. (This is the only area in which I am sensitive to caloric; with food, I often won’t bother to reheat leftovers. I actually enjoy cold mac n cheese and pizza.) The other part is just because I like to crunch on the ice. I am well aware that crunching on ice would be considered impolite and ill-mannered. Though I enjoy it, I will forego the consumption of ice if I’m in unfamiliar company. But generally most of my ice crunching goes on behind the walls of my apartment while I’m sitting at home, reading, writing or listening to music or something by myself. The point being, I enjoy ice. Think about it this way: some people like to chew gum. In fact, chewing gum gives people something to do. Not an action like exercise or productivity, but it’s something to keep you engaged. (This is perhaps akin to prior thoughts on licking Tootsie Roll Pops.) Or consider smokers, who upon quitting, turn to chewing gum. Something about the action, keeping you slightly distracted from your craving, filling the void… lets call it the void of stillness. I hasten to give it a positive term – that is, the stillness, rather than referring to it as inactivity, which gives a negative sense – and thereby make it clear that often the chewing of gum or crunching of ice is merely a way of fidgeting, of being unable to be still and quiet, which for me seems to be greatly detrimental. All the same, void is a negative word, thereby demonstrating that our perception of stillness is that of a lack that needs to be done away with. I will postulate that until we can see the stillness as full and replete, we will fail to learn the beauty of silence and solitude and hearing the still small voice of wisdom in our soul’s ear. In the meantime, we all turn to something. This is also why, in my opinion, so many people are obese in our society. The craving for food or junk food in particular, or even something seemingly innocuous like soda consumption, we instinctively turn to, and then naturally we rack up the calories and sugars and next thing you know you’ve gained 20 pounds and have to start taking meds for high blood pressure and are just Twinkies away from diabetes. (Twinkies, btw, are not a thing of nature. They also will not burn; they singe and melt like plastic. There is a reason for this…) We fill our day with subtle distractions that are mindless or thoughtless in form and I believe there is a serious reason for this. And as I started this discourse about ice, you see that I fully am aware of my own fault in seeking to fill the void of stillness with something as mindless as chewing on ice.... however I will return briefly to the subject of ice consumption, to put forth my precise connoisseurship relating to ice (that is, my connoisseuric ideas). That I thoroughly enjoy ice has been established. I have noticed that the type of ice you will be served at a restaurant or that will pop out of your freezer molds can vary greatly in size, shape, and density. This ranges from cubes, sticks, elongated half ovals or semi-spheres, pellets, rectangular cubes or a hodge podge of crushings. Some can’t really fit in your mouth in their original size; others are the size of pills and could be easily swallowed without causing an obstruction. The density of some ice is so great that you will be hard at work to get a crack in it. This is when I would advise not to try to get the crack, but let it melt a while in your drink. I am not going to encourage crunching on ice when there is a substantially increased possibility of cracking a tooth. My personal favorite is the pellet ice. Pellet ice can be found at one of my favorite restaurants, Costa’s Famous BBQ in Birmingham, AL. I usually take note where this type of ice can be found, as it is by far my favorite. (Don’t expect to find it consistently in food chains; I’ve been to some Chick-Fil-A’s that have the pellet ice only to be disappointed on visiting another one somewhere else that did not.) First of all, there is absolutely no danger to choking. The ice is small enough to swallow easily. Second, the ice is usually bumpy which makes crunching easier on your jaws. It somehow breaks apart easier, probably also due to its size and smaller surface area. Thirdly, it will easily melt in your mouth, which also accelerates the consumption, and decreases the amount of noise the crunching produces. This is usually a pitfall of crunching on ice, in that anyone you may be sitting near or talking with will most certainly hear you crunching on the ice, and thereby either get annoyed or think you rude… which as a general rule, I try to avoid creating such negative feelings or leaving such negative impressions about myself on other people. Thus, the pellet ice gets an A+ in my book. However, I have discovered another type of ice that gets very, very close in the rankings. As I now produce my own ice using old-fashioned ice trays (no ice maker in my apartment’s freezer), I have to keep on filling up my 1 or 2 ice trays, which I also, incase you didn’t surmise, empty fairly quickly, say about 3 times each night. What happens, however, is that usually I go back to my freezer to get more ice for my drink or my empty glass and the ice has not had enough time to freeze all the way through. This results in a variety of ice densities. First, you have the ice that only has a thin frosty crust that with a slight poke of your finger reveals the watery expanse below it. No where near being ready. The next stage is that the outer sides of the cube have frozen, but what inevitably happens is that there are some gaps and holes and the freezing process is not quite far enough along to give the ice a firm enough cube shape. Thus, the top comes off leaving a semi-frozen bottom and semi-frozen sides stuck to the tray. This also is pretty useless. The penultimate stage, before the ice has become a frozen mass of a cube through and through, I claim as my favorite type of ice, perhaps only runner-up to the pellet ice. This is when the freezing process is slightly further along than the second stage; thus, the top, sides, and bottom of the cube are solid and connected to one another and the cube can be picked up out of the tray in one piece. Sometimes, there will still be small fissures. This is doubly interesting because this third stage results in a small amount of water being encapsulated by the frozen sides, albeit the interior of the cube itself has not reached this same solidity. This also usually signifies that you can easily crunch into the sides of the cube and release the water from its inner captivity, if it has not already leaked out through the side fissures. This density is great. I still have the gratification of crunching on the ice, but also it’s combined with a wateriness that sort of blurs the line between ice and water. It’s like water slush. And I was always a fan of slushies. Growing up, we had slushie makers. Well, it was more like a mug that you put your juice or sweet tea in and come back twenty minutes later to a juice slushie or tea slushie. I’d usually eat this with a spoon, and I was addicted to this sort of thing growing up. So it’s no wonder I’ve found a great way to recapture that slushie feel with a homemade ice version. Before I lead any readers unsuspectingly down the dead end road of my ridiculous idiosyncrasies, I’ll try to put all of this in perspective. I am a person who is intrigued by a simple element like H2O, in its degrees of solid and liquid and in between. This represents a small but real joy for me, akin to things like the smell of a grilled steak or knowing the names of constellations or seeing a sparkle in someone’s eye. I feel more in tune to the workings of the world, and connected to a rhythm in creation I cannot and dare not confine in mere words. The fact that I judge the quality of ice cubes or undergo varied reactions to another’s body language or laughter indicates that I not only have rationality but personality. I don’t expect everyone to understand my idiosyncrasies about ice cubes, but I bet someone out there does understand. Likewise, that someone who does understand probably won’t understand why I enjoy sleeping on a floor when I could sleep on a bed, because I have no twin, and no one has a twin: that is, no one has a soul twin. Moreover, the most obvious realization I have whenever I see any other human being (so obvious it’s subconscious) is that something in us is screaming UNIQUE. To take this one step further, the fact that I recognize that I can enjoy the crunching of ice and yet think that this wonderful thing may in fact be a distraction from something greater and more wonderful and beautiful, does not demand that I give up crunching of ice totally. Rather, it calls me to reflect and cogitate, whereby I am moving to a new level of cognizance and contemplation, a new stretching of my brain and even my soul, by thinking outside of myself to grasp at a truth or an idea that wants to fill the void with the abundant experience in stillness, and in turn, may lead me to meaningful, directional action that could never be categorized as action alongside of chewing gum or crunching ice, so different in nature is the action that may result. And not simply stillness for the sake of stillness, not meditation by emptying my mind of every jot and tittle, but rather by filling it with something true, beautiful, and good to be still in, which must be otherworldly in nature, beyond the walls of buildings and confines of space, beyond philosophy, gleaning the substance for which philosophy grapples in its very nature.

Be still my soul, I say, and I hear, “and know that I am God”….