by Patrick Caneday

Created on: March 17, 2009

It's Sunday, we're home from church, and the neighbor kid my girls usually play with is out of town. The wife needs to study for the state nursing exams. The kids are so wound up their heads are about to pop off like those helicopter toys when you pull the cord. And I am stuck on 43 Across of the Sunday crossword puzzle.

It is the perfect storm of domestic disturbance calls.

Something had to be done. I thought long and hard about what was most important: a nursing license or my crossword puzzle. My marriage hung in the balance.

"Come on, kids," I proclaimed. "We're going to the library."

You would have thought I said, "Come on, kids. We're going to the proctologist." The reaction was about the same.

We had about 1,658 books to return. The library called asking whether we would like to return them or have people come to our house to check them out. I detected the kind of insane, sarcastic tone in the librarian's voice that my mother used to get when she found out I had dropped out of yet another junior college class.

To my children, the two blocks from our house to the library is about as much fun to walk as the Green Mile. My punishment for making them take this trek of terror is this: They walk at half my pace and veer in front of me constantly, like bats with malfunctioning radar. Every three steps I trip over them, stop, let them get ahead, trip over them again and repeat. A walk like this takes 10 times longer than it should and usually ends in tears. First theirs, then mine.

Within sight of the library entrance, the unthinkable happened: ice cream truck music.

Before I knew it or had a chance to say no, we were standing in line behind another family as they placed their orders. There was a mother and father and several kids, the youngest wearing a Peter Pan costume. This seemed perfectly normal. His face beamed pixie-like when his father gave him his ice cream.

As my girls chose that, no that, no that, no that, I realized something that could possibly have affected my relationship with them for the rest of our lives. I had only $1 in my wallet.

Now when I was a kid, this would have bought me and three friends a Grab Bag, which would have made us happy for days. But today there is not much in the world that brings happiness for a buck despite what the fast food restaurants tell us.

When the family in front of us finished and moved on, I gathered my courage and humility and asked Mr. Ice Cream Man if he had anything for (gulp) $1 that my daughters could share.

As Mr.

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