Happy Birthday, Linda

It was Linda’s birthday on Friday.

I met Linda, and her husband Greg, and their wellspoken collection of Harry Potter-obsessed daughters only this evening, so this was all news to me.

My attendance at Linda’s impromptu birthday party was a last minute kindess extended to me at the end of the day by Linda’s friend (and my coworker) Sherin. You don’t say no to Sherin, I have learned. And it’s hard to reason how spending an early evening alone in the Peterborough Diner could compete with the prospect of ice cream and burgers at Kimball’s, an ice creamery of such reknown that everyone at Yankee has exclaimed to me, at least once, “oh you mean you’ve never been to Kimball’s?!”

Greg and Linda and their Mugglets live atop a beautiful hill in a beautiful yellow house surrounded by a beautiful rock hewn landscaping project. Their house has many bleached wood columns on the inside. The have several dogs, many of which struck me as small, curly and scrunched. Except for the lone wolf type dog named Rosie or Rosa or Rosalyn: sleek, black and barky that one.

As the young daughter collection was responsible for looking after Alex and Jamie’s cats while they were in PEI, Alex and Jamie will be responsible for looking after their dogs in return when they go off to Iowa on Thursday. As a result there was much chaotic instruction about garage door openers and outside taps and how to properly measure the dog food. Alex and Jamie’s mother, by the way, is Sherin.

As I said, it was Linda’s birthday on Friday, and so the plan was that in various cars we would make our way to Kimball’s and gather in celebration.

Kimball’s is a site to behold. Every summertime mecca like Jaffrey (which is near Dublin, which is near Peterborough) has a place like Kimball’s. I remember Hamblin’s in Lakefield. Or Easterbrook’s in Aldershot. Or Hutch’s on the beach near Confederation Park in Hamilton. Or that french fry place in Orillia that bought the old bridge to the CN Tower and put it over Highway 11 so that people wouldn’t be killed running over the road to get their fix. And of course there’s the Frosty Treat in Kensington, PEI.

Common features: outdoor ordering through a window to happy mostly female staff (Sherin says it’s because teenage girls are more reliable than teenage boys at that age); expansive menu offering a variety of fried and deep fried items; large portions; paper plates; pick up your order when you’re number’s called; lots of napkins. And ice cream to finish.

But Kimball’s is a particularly remarkable example of the genre. Firstly it’s huge: perhaps a dozen ordering windows and an indoor seating section that goes on and on through a collection of strung together buildings. Secondly they have a uncommonly large variety of novelty menu items like “green pepper rings” (which I was afraid to try, although I did sample their onion rings, which were excellent). And finally their ice cream range is, well, almost infinite. I had “coffee oreo” for example, one of perhaps a hundred flavours on offer including ones with words like “kahlua” and “peppermint gumdrop” in them. And, oh, one more thing: my “small cup” of ice cream was nigh unto a pint in size and almost killed me; even as I write this, several hours later, my brain is coursing through a bizarre dairy + coffee + oreo jangle which might take expensive street drugs to achieve otherwise.

In an absurd attempt to counter the ice cream orgy I knew was bound to come, I ordered a vegi burger, waffle fries and watermelon for dinner; not a dietician approved meal, perhaps, but relative to where I could have gone it was almost granola in stature.

During dinner I learned that Linda once hitchhiked from Key Largo to Miami with a Great Dane, and that Greg works with a company called Tri-Med (which should serve me well if the Island is ever struck by flood or famine, as they’re in the “you’ve got problems, we’ve got logistics” business). Also I learned that Greg prefers his iced tea unsweetened, which means he’s on the right side of that debate.

During the ice cream social that followed dinner, which mostly involved Sherin and I, as the adults had obviously been through the ice cream ringer before and knew better, the highlight was a daring maneouver I completed which involved somehow catching the much-too-large ice cream from the cone of young Haley (one of the aforementioned daughters) as it teetered on the brink of gravel. The mass of ice cream I caught was approximately the size of a regulation sized softball. And she’d already been eating for 10 minutes.

At the end of the evening we all retired to our separate vehicles: Linda and Greg and daughters headed home to do the laundry in preparation for the trip to Iowa. John drove me in the luxury Tiptronic Acura to Carr’s Store to pick up my rental car, and Sherin drove home alone, no doubt allowing her time to recover a little from the ice cream of it all before having to bundle Alex and Jamie to bed.

Happy Birthday Linda.