“…I do appreciate very much that someone outside our family circle remembered my son, John…” — The Ice Cream Man’s mother, Rosetta Laura
The Northern Irish poet Michael Longley had been botanizing in the Burren and writing down the names of all the wildflowers he’d seen that day. But when he returned home his young daughter told him that the Ice Cream Man had just been gunned down. This was during “the Troubles”—and Longley’s daughter who knew by heart in her young girl’s rhyming cadence all 21 flavors that the Ice Cream Man carried had already bought carnations to lay down where he’d died.