How to Eat Ice Cream: Flavor

On Character, Blooming, and Becoming

Welcome :)

The dictionary definition of flavor is the essential character of something. It’s not who you are on the outside, but what is blooming on the inside. Your essence.

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One: A Love Letter to Flavor

Ice cream is not a visual art like many other desserts. It's a partially frozen blob, and though it can come in many beautiful colors, the most popular flavors are often an uninspiring shade of ivory, tan, or brown. Ice cream is more like a poem; it blooms into meaning as it enters your head. It has a rhythmic, musical quality, each element unfolding as if keeping perfect time.

The shock of the cold on your lips wakes your senses; then you taste sweetness or saltiness as the ice cream hits your tongue; from there, the cream softens, and the scent begins to unfurl from the butterfat. Top notes, like lemon, emerge first, gradually easing into middle and base tones like rose or vanilla and fresh cream. How you perceive these flavors comes from more than just the objective properties of the ice cream itself. As the ice cream melts on your tongue, it is reborn into something more ethereal – scented air, breath, and the alchemy of the human experience: pattern, nostalgia, and feeling.

By some cosmic miracle, this has been my life.

Two: Finding My Flavor

It is mid-August 1989 and the first day of my new job at the local ice cream shop. I am 15 and wearing a floral vintage 1960s Lilly Pulitzer shift dress I found for $1.50 at the thrift store, and a pair of knock-off Doc Martens. I had dreamt of my first job as an ice cream scooper since I was a little girl. I lucked out. A shop opened within walking distance from where I lived. At the beginning of summer, I knocked on the door when they were still under construction, and they gave me the job on the spot.

A few weeks earlier, I had moved from Dayton back to Columbus to join my 35-year-old mother, her new 25-year-old husband, and my 13-year-old sister. I would be attending my eighth or ninth school. I wanted a job. I wanted to be an adult. I wanted to leave school. I wanted to leave my crazy family and be on my own. I hated being a kid.

I was quiet and introverted. I had never raised my hand in class, and I had never done homework (not once). I only wanted to wander outside and disappear into my imagination and daydreams.

On that first day of the job, I was nervous and fidgety. My heart was racing. My stomach, as usual, was in knots. I had endured four major abdominal surgeries as a seven-year-old. Even a whiff of anxiety often caused severe nausea and vomiting (once on a teacher!).

My mother sat on the overstuffed peach couch in our messy apartment. She noticed my pacing.

"I heard that some of the most famous actors are shy. – Like Meryl Streep. She comes out when she gets into character. It makes it easier for her because she doesn't feel like it's her but someone else."

I walked to work considering this.

Who am I today?

I am the best ice cream scooper ever. I stand up straight, look people in the eye, and speak in a voice that can be heard.

By the time I arrived at work, I had stepped all the way out of me and into her.

To my astonishment, I felt alive for the four hours of that shift – more me than me. I was floating on air. Working at the ice cream shop allowed me to put my protective ego aside to pursue something bigger and more fun. It felt noble to serve people. It felt normal to work on a team. I felt free, and connected, and valued. I had never felt those things. And I wanted more.

I started working as much as I could every day after school. She was the first of countless characters I would create to survive and thrive over my very long, often improbable adventure of life.

Three: Invisibility Cloak

The following summer, Nike launched a gripping new campaign. I walked through my front door and was stopped in my tracks by the commercial playing on TV.

Life at home had gotten much worse. My dad was struggling with his demons and out of the picture. We had our demons, too. I had a chronically sick mother and her violent bipolar husband to deal with. And they had a new baby I took care of often. I moved my bed to the leaky stone basement in our crowded 1920s townhouse to get as far away from the madness as possible. It was cold, damp, and crawling with giant, feathery millipedes, but it was my sanctuary. My newborn baby brother was often down there with me in his carrier.

That afternoon, I stood in front of the TV, mesmerized by Nike's new message. It was like they were speaking directly to me:

Just Do It.

"Okay, I will," I said out loud. And I meant it. Something inside of me shifted. A damn broke.

Earlier that summer, I had stolen a pair of 1960s safety glasses from an attic in an old Friendship, New York farmhouse because I thought they looked cool. I put on the glasses and a string of pearls from my mother's jewelry box and entered my junior year at Upper Arlington High School. UAHS was populated with 2000, mostly country club kids and a few scrappy apartment kids like me. Most of the kids had Jeeps and BMWs. I drove a 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme I'd bought off a guy for $250. I ripped out the radio and installed a tape deck. We went to school listening to bootleg recordings of Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Jane's Addiction.

Those silly safety glasses were like a superhero cape and an invisibility cloak. I felt less visible and yet bolder – more me than me. A new character was born. I stopped worrying about people seeing me.

1990 was the first year I raised my hand in class in my entire life. We were reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and discussing what it means to have a name. It's not the letters or the words that matter; it's what people believe about you, true or not — your reputation. I would be reminded of this many times in my life.

My mother's husband would eventually break my superhero glasses in half out of anger. I superglued them back together and wore them for the rest of the school year anyway, tears streaming from my eyes as the glue irritated them.

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A few years later, in 1996, I would be a pink-haired kid who walked out of art class at Ohio State University to make ice cream at my new little shop, Scream, at the local public market. This little shop was like my 'Room of One's Own'. A place I could figure out my own way through. Every failure would lead to something new and become the foundation of something extraordinary.

The business never took off, and it would take me a long time to understand why. I thought the customers just didn't get it. But I was wrong. I had been acting like an artist, making whatever flavors I was inspired to make each day with no consistency. This meant I never had what people wanted: what they had fallen in love with the last time.

I realized my mistake about a year after we closed. Another year later, I opened Jeni's. I did things differently. Namely, me.

Who am I?

I am an old-fashioned shopkeeper. I am here for my community and our customers. I make people feel loved, seen, and inspired.

I cut my hair short, dyed it darker blonde, and ironed my white shirts and long aprons each morning. I had consistent flavors, so you could always find what you were there for. The core flavors were the most requested at Scream. The difference was my character and how I felt in her. I took all of the emphasis off me and put it on the ice cream and our customers. The whole endeavor became an act of co-creation with my community, and it remains so.

I had found my flavor. And the rest is history.

Four: The Essence of Being

On a slow day at the ice cream shop in the early days, I was reading the dictionary I kept on hand (a lost pleasure) when I stumbled across a word I thought I knew well: flavor. The dictionary defines flavor as "the essential character of something."

Isn't that a beautiful way to put it? The idea of "essential character," or essence, struck a chord with me. I began to consider my essence and the essence of our company.

Like our ice cream, I noted that my essential character comes in many flavors and blossoms in the boundless space of my imagination. I am not defined by who I was yesterday. I can be whoever I want.

I love to be in silent reflection, wandering alone in the woods. If my circumstances had been easier, I might have remained in my comfort zone, mostly on my own, forever. I would have been a park ranger. :) Seeking solitude can also allow me to be overly critical of myself, get stuck, second guess every thought, and swirl into my anxieties. We are all like this sometimes. Especially in our current era where we find ourselves staring into the smooth reflective surface of our phone. One of my favorite living philosophers, Byung-Chul Han, said the only person you’ll find in your phone is yourself. He’s right.

When you have no one to bounce ideas off, they become circular and full of self-interest and self-doubt. You can't develop a true sense of self in an echo chamber.

It's like ice cream. Flavors can pop off each other and enhance each other. We need each other to find ourselves.

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I've become known for having endured a lot. It’s true, I have found my way through many battles. I am very open about this with people I meet because I know so many of us have been through it. I've also lived the most extraordinary life I could imagine. I sometimes can't believe how lucky I have been. I am in awe of how terribly beautiful life is, even and especially with the shadow of pain. I have always felt that I am just a spark of light traveling through the universe. This belief gives me the freedom to move on. To pursue what I love. To follow my curiosity. To break protocol. To remain trusting and open to discovery – inside and out.

With love and lightness as always,

Jeni

PS. Here are books I liked on essence, transformation, and self:

How We Fight For Our Lives, by Saeed Jones

Phosphorescence, by Julia Baird

Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith

The Expulsion of the Other, Byung-Chul Han