A few weeks ago, I went outside to shake my fist at the neighborhood children who had taken to trampling my newly seeded lawn, when I noticed my son and a couple of the younger kids (he’s 10, they’re a little younger, and the neighborhood range of miscreants who run together goes from 5 or 6 to 16ish — which is to say that it’s basically Lord of the Flies, and my son was hanging with the littluns) sort of hunkered down behind the car, which was parked in the driveway. One of the littluns looked over at me sort of guiltily and murmured to my son something like “tell him,” which interrupted my fist shaking. I looked at my son, who had gone kind of a shade of gray.

I should here back up and report that just a few minutes before, my wife and I, both recently finished with work for the day, had been occupying separate water closets. My preferred water closet is a tiny room inside the master bathroom, which is itself buried in the master bedroom (the door of which was closed lest the dog come in and befoul the boudoir), which is upstairs. When I am spending a little time in the old W.C., I am not well prepared to respond to inquiries from downstairs. Yell helpfully as I might, I simply am unable to best the acoustics of our home and make myself heard. So when I heard my son’s plaintive and repetitive cries first of “Mom” and then of “Dad,” all I could do was yell repeatedly (a vein in my forehead no doubt throbbing with the exertion and frustration of it) “I’m finally taking a dump, leave me alone.” And when he kept calling upstairs, I could do little but try to explain my situation more stridently, and perhaps in increasingly colorful language.

I am not a horrible father. My son’s cry was not one of pain. It had much more of the routine “come prevent the dog from trying to escape as I for the 25th time in as many minutes enter and then exit the house again to trample your precious newly germinated grass” pitch. Had the cry been bloodcurdling or one indicating pain or clear emotional distress, I would assuredly have quickly set the affairs of my toilette in order and gone downstairs. I imagine my wife was in similar straits. Eventually, my son stopped calling out.

Let us return to the driveway. A littlun has implicated my son in something. I have ceased to shake my fist at the neighborhood children. My son with trembling lip approaches me and says “I threw a toy at the ice cream truck.”

The neighborhood children leave things in my paper box. I am no Boo Radley. They aren’t making little gifts for the neighborhood recluse (though a recluse of sorts I am). They just leave shit in my yard and in its structures. Sometimes I find cell phones or scooters or balls. More frequently I find trash. One child left a small plastic doll in the paper box, and this my son decided for some reason to hurl at the ice cream truck as it drove by.

I should disclose that I have many times declined to give my son money to purchase frozen corn syrup from the ice cream truck driver. For one, I find the truck’s noise offensive. Ours plays an obnoxious song and then pauses after about every maybe 6 phrases of common measure to broadcast a sardonic recorded “Hello?” For another, I can’t imagine the ice cream is actually any good. I am personally an ice cream fiend. I am well known within my nuclear family for eating all of the ice cream. Often enough of a summer evening, my poor impoverished children will put aside their ribeyes and their caviar and virgin champagne and ask if there’s dessert, and my wife will say something like “beloved progeny, I have procured ice cream for our family’s enjoyment” and I will have to kind of sheepishly confess that I have since selfishly spooned all the ice cream from the carton while nobody was looking, whereupon the rest of the family will rend their garments and roll in ashes (from a mound of burned cardboard ice cream containers) while I wipe ice cream from my moustache. Which is all to say that I am in no way opposed to ice cream. But I am sort of opposed to ice cream driven around in an obnoxious van. I just read a book in which the author proposes a brilliant ice cream truck prophylactic strategy wherein the parents tell the children that the truck plays music only when it is out of ice cream, and I approve of the strategy.

So, my son is starved for ice cream while I am growing fat from Tennessee’s finest chocolate and rocky road cows. He has many times (the very afternoon in question, even) been denied ice cream from a truck. Naturally then as the truck drove by on its way out of the neighborhood, he picked up one of the trinkets that had been left in our paper box and chucked it at the passing truck. Why not do this, in his position?

My wife and I meanwhile were shackled to our separate toilets.

The driver stopped. Whether she emerged from the truck or whether she squrrrrched the truck to a halt and backed up or whether at the time of impact she was simply already in a good position to berate my son I do not know, but the misc en scène aside, she gave him what for. She threatened to call the police. She said that his behavior was the fault of his wretched parents. She sent him in to fetch one of his parents — who were both legitimately just trying to have a quiet dump at the end of the workday as he called dutifully up the stairs so that they might come down and negotiate with the ice cream truck driver to mete out a fitting punishment. He made a good faith effort, but his parents, thrall to their bowels, failed him. Apparently the ice cream truck driver bought it, or was more concerned with terrorizing more neighborhoods with her terrible siren call than with exacting justice.

My gray-faced son confessed all to me. I told him how foolish the behavior was, but told him I had done something similar when I was about his age — but that my missiles had been rocks (if I’m being honest, when I was older, they were occasionally smoke bombs and sparking fireworks) and the road a highway, which had been much more dangerous. He had an opportunity to learn from not only his own folly but from his venerable father’s. I sent him in for the day and let him know that he’d probably lost all chance of ambulatory ice cream for the summer, since the driver wasn’t likely any time soon to forget the long-haired boy who had flung a toy at her truck and raised her ire, and then I continued to shake my mighty fist at the rest of the neighborhood children and to harry them off of my lawn.

Now, when we hear the ice cream truck’s blasted anthem, we also see my son squirt inside pretty quickly lest he be taken to account by a driver who’d be understandably skeptical that both parents were on the toilet at the precise time of the cataclysm I describe. I laugh every time and sometimes give him a wink and perhaps a comment about natural consequences and the likelihood that he’ll ever do anything quite like that again.