(for the good folks at Vic’s Ice Cream in Sacramento)

The thing is that it’s real turkey,
carved off the bird, all the way
to the carcass, like the afters
of Thanksgiving

when you hack off a piece
of white meat, slap on it on some
good sourdough and layer it up
with, say, with your favorite (savory)
greenery and maybe a tomato,
not to mention the close-to-
your-heart condiments.

Vic’s does this. Burr’s used to.

How we miss Jim Burr’s old spot
across town, its windows long
covered in paper, no sign that
ice cream and sandwiches will
ever emerge again from our go-to
place,

where parents took kids after school,
after baseball, before Halloween runs,
where folks our age took their ancient
parents until they faded away.

Now we’re the old ones.

And now Vic’s is for sale, and we
worry that if it sells, it will get
cleaned up and fancified, the turkey
will morph into slimy, store-bought stuff,
the ice cream no longer conceived
in the back room,

the counters presided over by
teenage judges wielding scoops
and issuing cones with authority
they won’t otherwise acquire
for years.

Everything changes, of course;
businesses, too, have lifespans,
coming and going—the going often
much sooner than we’d like.

But isn’t that life?

So we hustle ourselves over to Vic’s
and snag the last booth in the snug shop
to watch red-shirted baseball kids
twisting on the stools at the 1940s
counter, high school girls giggling
loudly in the booth behind us.

And when the turkey arrives for me,
and the hot dog sliced onto fresh
sourdough for you, we sigh after
our first bites, aware of this precious
moment, wanting to somehow
store more than sandwiches and
ice cream into our cellular memory.

We leave a big tip for the tall boy
with the fabulous ’fro who flashes
two thumbs up when we tell
him how great everything is.

“See you next time,” he says
when we pay at the tablet
on the counter where the cash
register used to be.

We catch that hope like a gently
lobbed ball, and return it.
“Yes,” we say. “Till next time.”