The ice cream truck played the same twelve notes every summer for fifty years. The melody was a nursery rhyme nobody could name. It was not a song. It was a signal. The truck turned the corner and the melody preceded it the way thunder precedes rain. You heard the ice cream truck before you saw it. You heard it before you wanted ice cream. The wanting came after the hearing. The truck created the demand by announcing the supply.

The driver did not choose the melody. The melody came with the truck. Every ice cream truck in New York played the same melody because every ice cream truck in New York had the same speaker bolted to the same roof playing the same music box that had been manufactured in the same factory since 1956. The melody was not music. The melody was industrial equipment. The melody was a gear turning inside a box on a roof.

The kids ran toward the melody the way iron filings run toward a magnet. They did not decide to run. Their legs decided for them. The melody was a command disguised as an invitation. The ice cream truck was the most successful street musician on the Lower East Side and it could not play a single chord. It played twelve notes on a loop and every kid on the block came running with quarters in their fists.

I played guitar on the corner for fifty years and nobody ran toward me with money in their hands. The ice cream truck played twelve notes and had a line around the block. The difference between me and the ice cream truck was not talent. The difference was that the ice cream truck had something cold and sweet at the end of the melody. I had a hat on the ground and a song about marijuana. The truck understood its audience better than I understood mine.

The melody faded when the truck turned the corner onto Avenue B. The kids stood on the sidewalk with their popsicles dripping onto their shoes and the melody got quieter and quieter until it was gone. And then the block was quiet again except for the sound of popsicles dripping and kids arguing about who got the last rocket pop. That was the sound of summer on the Lower East Side. Not the melody. The argument after the melody left.