Mythical City

Have you ever played Scattergories?  It's a delightful, mind-stretching game, where you have a list of categories, such as "Famous people" and "Things you like to eat."  You also have a letter, and your answers all have to start with that letter.  The person who gets the most unique answers out of the group, wins the round.  It's very fun.

So our family was playing this game at Thanksgiving.  My aunt and uncle and cousins, and another cousin and her husband, and our grandparents had joined us.  There were way too many of us to each play on our own, so we got together in groups and played in teams.  It's a good way to play, because when one person has their mind go blank, their teammates can carry on.

The team with my uncle and my cousin and her husband were the especially weird team, coming up with goofy answers and all that.  One of the categories was "Name of a capitol."  My cousin's husband came up with one that I'd never heard of.  He is from South America, and it sounded Spanish or Portuguese or something, so I didn't bother to question it.  I figured he knew what he was talking about.  But my aunt called him on it - "What country is that the capitol of?"  He didn't even miss a beat - "New Ecuador," he shot back.

It actually got a few of us for a moment or so, he was so absolutely positive about it.  That became the standing joke of the evening.  I don't think I've laughed so hard in a really long time.  Every so often, it kept coming up again and again.  Mythical City - New Ecuador.  Ha!  Makes me smile even now.

The Actual Ice Cream

So it all started back in Nauvoo, Illinois.  My family went back there this summer to be volunteer performers in the Nauvoo Pageant, displaying the history of the Latter-day Saint Pioneers who founded the city and were then chased out.  Perhaps more on that later - if you want to know more, you can check out the Nauvoo Pageant Facebook page.  Anyway, we were there for two weeks and it was an absolutely wonderful experience, and I recommend you all should go see it.

This was our first year being involved in the Pageant, and we quickly found out that there was an established custom of going to a frozen custard place after the show each night.  The place was called Annie's and it purported to have three flavors of frozen custard - vanilla, chocolate, and a mythical ice cream - salty cashew.

Everyone claimed that such an ice cream actually existed, but I never actually met anybody who had seen or tasted it.  We even asked people who had been coming to participate in the Pageant for years and years, and they all swore it existed, but had never actually had it.

We decided to track down this mythical ice cream.  Only having two weeks, and only being able to afford a few visits to this expensive but delicious place, we decided to use strategy.  The Direct Approach.  We asked the lady who ran Annie's, and she informed us what time to show up during the day, right when it would come out of the machine.

It worked!  And we had our salty caramel cashew.  The mythical ice cream actually wasn't as good as it might have been, but it was fun to know that we had been able to track down our mythical ice cream after all.

So that is where my obsession surfaced with what I now call the "mythical" aspects of my life - the things that are elusive, not entirely real, or made to be searched for.  I'm not sure that exactly makes sense, but here goes - I'm on a quest for more "mythical ice cream," in my everyday life.