Before you saw anything, you heard it. Three streets over, thinned by distance and bent around the corners of houses, a music box the size of a paperback was broadcasting through a horn speaker bolted to a roof, and every child on the block lifted like a field of prairie dogs. The ice cream truck is the only store in American life that hunts its customers, and its weapon is a song. I grew up inside that ambush on a grid of flat streets in Lincoln, Nebraska, where sound carried forever, and I live now beside another version of it on the sidewalks of New York, where the song obeys different laws, sells a different menu, and means something different to the children chasing it. One machine, two rituals, and the split between them is the story.

Continue reading → The Song Arrives Before the Truck