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.