She knew,for example,more about baseball and its history than my father did and was always ready to argue the merits of Pee Wee Reese(her favorite shortstop)against Chico Carrasquel(mine).The one Mrs.Knapp incident that will always remain engraved in my memory didn’t happen at school,however.It happened on a deserted country road that divided corn-fields on the afternoon of the last day of that,my first fullfledged school year.To celebrate the beautiful weather,she’d taken us on a field trip,literally,through the bright yellow and green of corn and wheat stalks that were taller than I was（and than she was,too）but still two or three months shy of their harvest.
We wandered,as large groups of children are wont to do,our eyes catching with fascination on every bug and bird and leaf,every one of which,unfailingly,Mrs.Knapp had explanations for.We trekked along utterly untrafficked gravel and dirt roads that had been bulldozed just wide enough for tractors or a single car to travel.There were no trees:The Ilinois prairie land was flat,and we could see only the blue of the horizon and an occasional farmhouse rooftop beyond the fields of grain.We ate our lunch sandwiches along a roadside,listening to the rustle of the wind through the gently waving crops,the cries of the crows,the chirrs of the crickets and beetles.After lunch we walked more.Now,though,the trip had become repetitious—more fields,more crops,more birdcalls—and I,certainly among others,was becoming impatient.Then,it happened:There,in the absolute middle of nowhere（straight out of what,some years later,I would think of as The Twilight Zone or a Stephen King novel）,on the side of another single-lane road hundreds of yards from anything that resembled civilization,stood an ice cream stand.Nothing fancy,just a wooden counter six or eight feet wide,five feet high,two feet deep,with poles supporting a wood sheet that served as sun cover for the grizzled,but smiling,middle-aged man who stood behind it.
The words“Ice Cream—10 Flavors”were painted prominently on the front.The man and Mrs.Knapp greeted each other as old friends.She turned to us and said each of us could have an ice cream cone,any flavor we wished,her treat.Our enthusiasm was,naturally,boundless,and debate over whether to stick to the known delights of chocolate or vanilla or whether to experiment with the exotic Rocky Road or Blueberry raged among us.But we each settled on something,and the man scooped large scoops into waffle cones and handed them out.We savored and devoured.Then he asked Mrs.Knapp,“What would you like?”I like to think there was a twinkle in his eyes as he did and that what followed was a ritual between them,although the few kids who’d attended Mrs.Knapp’s classes in years before hadn’t been to the stand.She paused thoughtfully,
then said,“I think I’ll have a cone with a scoop of each.”He didn’t bat an eyelash,but we did.A scoop of each?All ten flavors?In one cone?Mrs.Knapp,this woman who was smaller than the oldest of her students,was going to eat a ten-scoop ice cream cone?With the same aplomb she displayed in the classroom,she took the mountain from him carefully and licked the top.She said something like“Mmm”and smiled.
And we watched,agog with envy,as she consumed every sweet mound, moving her tongue up and down from vanilla to strawberry to butter pecan,not losing a drop to the heat of the afternoon.Afterward,we walked back to the school,perhaps just a mile or so away,packed up our things,said good-bye to her and each other,and walked home or waited for our parents to come.Of course,I told my parents about the event,and,of course,they smiled.We drove past the school the following week.It was closed for the summer and Mrs.Knapp was off somewhere,with Mr.Knapp,I supposed,eating copious quantities of ice cream stacked in sky-high cones.I never saw her again,and though we looked,I never found that ice cream stand,either.Now,fifty years later,though the little else I can recall about that first school year is only dimly remembered,Mrs.Knapp and her ten-scoop ice cream cone remains one of my clearest childhood memories.And often,as I watch children sitting in the sun outside modern twenty-or thirty-flavor ice cream emporiums,I wonder if perhaps she isn’t somewhere watching,a well-filled waffle cone in hand,still enjoying it mightily.
