You hear the jingle before you see the truck. Three blocks away and already the kids are running. Mister Softee. That song. That melody that loops and never resolves. Nineteen fifty-six. The Conways built a truck with a soft-serve machine and a speaker on the roof and drove it through the streets of Philadelphia. By nineteen sixty-three every block in New York had a Mister Softee truck and every kid in New York had that jingle drilled into their skull like a lullaby that never ends.

You stand in line behind six kids and two adults pretending they are buying it for the kids. A vanilla cone is thirty-five cents. Sprinkles are a nickel. The man in the truck has been driving this route for twelve years and he knows every kid by name and every kid knows him and this is the economy of the neighborhood. One man. One truck. One song. The ice cream truck is the only business in New York that comes to you. Every other business makes you walk to it. Mister Softee delivers joy at three miles an hour.

The turf wars. You do not know about the turf wars. Mister Softee drivers have territories. You do not park your truck on another driver's block. There was a fistfight on Delancey Street in nineteen seventy-four because one driver parked two blocks into another driver's territory. Two grown men fighting over the right to sell ice cream to children. The police came and both trucks drove away and by the next day they were back and the jingle was playing and the kids did not know that their ice cream came with a side of territorial violence.

The jingle at midnight. August. Ninety-two degrees at midnight and the windows are open and you hear that song coming down the block. Who is buying ice cream at midnight. Everybody is buying ice cream at midnight. The city does not sleep and Mister Softee does not sleep and at midnight the line is longer than it is at noon because at midnight nobody is pretending they are buying it for the kids. At midnight everybody is buying it for themselves.

They tried to ban the jingle. The city said it was noise pollution. The city said the jingle was a public nuisance. The same city that lets jackhammers run at seven in the morning and garbage trucks at four and car alarms all night said that a melody selling ice cream to children is a nuisance. They did not ban it. You cannot ban joy. You cannot pass a law against a song that makes a kid run down the street with a fistful of quarters. Mister Softee is still out there and the jingle is still playing and the kids are still running. That is the only thing in New York that has not changed.