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"RED OR GREEN?" That was the question.

For me and my twin, (a long time ago, I must let it be known) the question was one to be pondered, as we stood at the old wooden counter, peering up at the weathered brown faces of the elderly couple awaiting our response.

Mama had hurriedly wrapped up her shopping trip downtown and hustled us to the car just before the shipyard whistle had sounded. (We weren't very old, my brother and I, but we knew that whistle, and we knew that it meant skedaddle! All those men who were building great ships would be finishing up their shifts, filling sidewalks and clogging streets for miles around on their journeys homeward.) Now Mama was rewarding us with one of our favorite treats as she often did when we'd scrambled out ahead of that mass exodus and left the city limits and the worst of the traffic behind us.

The ceiling fan in the shoppe merely stirred the hot air, so muggy and tidewater-laden, and the old screen door didn't let in much of a breeze as my twinnie and I gave the question some thought: Do I want the cone filled with red this time? Or should it be green?! Our tacit agreement--if one wanted red, the other would choose green; or if green were requested first, the other would opt red. In this way--aha!--between us, we'd always have both!

Dear Reader, I can't tell you what heavenly concoction that old black couple scooped into our cones. (Alas, that's just what I mean--I really can't tell you! Sometimes on hot summer days the mystery haunts me.) It was sort of like a sherbet or some other kind of icy dessert, perhaps a gelato?--the recipe was all their own. And whether "red" and "green" was all they could offer, I'll never know. But I do know the taste was simply sublime!





Epilogue: The elderly couple are long-since departed, the building is long-since torn down. Even my mother has left this world. A few years ago I received a package--a box of brown bulbs with a small slip of paper and these handwritten words:



"RED OR GREEN?"















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