Will Wright's Ice Cream Parlor

It's Valentine's week and I've been thinking about dates: while the first real, "I'll pick you up and we'll drive to..." date was to the Pixie Kitchen at the Oregon coast, there was a sort-of date before that. It was the nervous, never kissed a girl, is it okay if we hold hands?, kind of date.

I was 15 and living in LA. Just about a mile away in Westwood Village was Will Wright's Ice Cream Parlor. It was a classic from that era-- actually, the tail end of that era--  where a couple, or a family, actually chose to stop off for an ice cream as a destination in itself. At any rate, I was totally taken with a girl named Marla Miller and somehow thought Will Wright's would be an appropriately suave destination for a couple of 9th graders on foot. How I swung the financing on that deal I can't be sure. I wasn't working and any money I found burning a hole in my pocket usually went into a cigarette machine at the UCLA bowling alley, a bag of really crappy pot, or pizza and french fries in the Coop. She must have mattered, though, as we walked the 10 minutes down to Will Wright's and had ice cream as scripted. Not to be repeated, it wasn't too long after that my family moved away.

I saw Marla at a 20 year reunion in LA way back in '95. She remembered me enough to say hi but there was certainly nothing fondly nostalgic or sentimental in that. Nonetheless, like so many other things, I am  fortunate and grateful to have grown up in a place and time when a young kid's first time out with a girl could still be on foot, to an ice cream parlor, and leave a happy memory-- even if only with a ghost from the past.