Why I Called It Ice Cream Headache

As spring arrives, I find myself thinking about that day again.

It comes back the way these things often do this time of year—not as a full memory, but in fragments. The softness in the air. The way the light lingers a little longer in the afternoon. The sense, even as a kid, that something was beginning again.

 

It was the spring of 1967. After school. I was nine.

 

I was sitting in the Supreme Dairy Bar, in the small midwestern town of Oglesby, Illinois, having a milkshake.

 

He was a regular there. One of those men who seemed to belong to the place as much as the counter or the stools. I didn’t know his name. I don’t think I ever did. But he was always there, or at least it felt that way.

 

And he said to me, “Kid, don’t drink that milkshake too fast. You’ll get an ice cream headache.”

 

That was all.

 

At the time, it didn’t seem like anything more than a small kindness. The kind of thing people said to each other without thinking. No lesson attached. No reason to remember it.

 

But I did.

 

Or maybe it stayed with me in a way I didn’t notice at first.

 

Years later, I tried to write about that moment. It came out first as a poem—just a fragment, really. A way of holding onto the feeling of that place. The Dairy Bar. The quiet rhythm of people coming and going. And him.

 

Somewhere along the way, he became Jimmy Smith.

 

The poem became a short story. The short story kept opening outward, pulling in other lives—Ray, Johnny, Nancy, Earl—until it became something larger than I had intended. A single moment widening into a day. A handful of lives intersecting in ways that felt inevitable once they were there.

 

By then, the year had shifted.

 

1968

 

I was ten, but it felt like something had changed.

 

You heard things you hadn’t heard before, or maybe you just heard them differently. Names that seemed to carry a kind of weight even if you didn’t understand why. Martin Luther King. Bobby Kennedy. The television stayed on longer. Adults spoke in quieter tones. There were images—crowds, sirens, people moving in ways that didn’t feel like everyday life.

 

Words like Tet. Khe Sanh. Body count. 

 

Black and white images of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. 

 

The whole world is watching.

 

I didn’t understand them.

 

But I felt them.

 

And somehow, all of that found its way into the story.

 

Because even in a small town, in a place like the Supreme Dairy Bar, the world was already shifting. You could feel it, even if you couldn’t name it. The sense that something was changing, just beneath the surface of ordinary days.

 

And still, in the middle of all that, there was that moment.

 

“Don’t drink that milkshake too fast.”

 

It sounds like advice about nothing.

 

But I’ve come to think it was about something after all.

 

About slowing down. About paying attention. About the way even the sweetest moments can turn on you if you rush through them. About how quickly things change, even when everything around you seems the same.

 

Writing Ice Cream Headache felt like that at times. I would think I understood a character, and then something would shift. Not dramatically. Just enough. And I’d have to stop and sit with it.

 

That’s when I knew the title.

 

Not because I chose it, but because it had been there all along.

This novella has always stayed near and dear to me, maybe more than anything else I’ve written. 

 

Not because of what it is, but because of where it came from.

 

A time in my life when things were still mostly simple, but already beginning to change. An age of innocence that didn’t disappear all at once, but was tested, quietly and steadily, by a world that was becoming harder to understand.

 

When I think about it now, I don’t just remember the story.

 

I remember that spring.

 

A Dairy Bar. A milkshake.

 

A man who said something simple.

 

And a boy who didn’t know yet that he would carry it with him for the rest of his life.