A Diamond in the Ice

Author © Scott D. Zachary

       I don’t recall any of the conversation, but I do remember my mother handing the sales clerk a one-dollar bill. My footsteps to that large, oblong, white-vinyl box are not clear. I can still sense the overextended tendons in my armpit as I tried to feel the substance of ice touching my fingertips. Only air. I reached harder. More air. Taxing my arches and ankles to maximum extension—nothing, just lousy air!

       Feeling the glare of my audience’s critical stare, I twisted my trunk as would a contortionist. On-lookers giggled, stiffening my resolve. I exasperatedly chafed my soft, delicate underarm along the length of the rigid barrier. At last, a cold sensation! I wrapped my fingers carefully around the ice cube and delicately extracted my prize.

       I trotted through a small crowd gathered around the hotplate and offered up my ice cube to a man wearing a colorful tie. He placed the cube in the center of the reddening circle. Crack! Pop! Expectancy titillated every synapse in my body as I strained to will the diamond into existence. I had never seen an honest-to-goodness diamond before, nor did I know of its worth. You see, I was only five years old. It was purely a matter of proving my worth—showing all those around my ability to accomplish the improbable.

       I have total recall of watching that ice cube liquefy into a puddle. That diamond—my diamond—magically materialized in the center of its now-sizzling watery birth. The room around me burst into applause!

       This diamond in the ice is my earliest memory of which I have full possession, unlike those others that are the backwash of echoed stories. You know, the ones that adults love to joke about, like my escape from the confines of our fenced yard in England at three years old using my tricycle as a battering ram to charge the wooden slats. For years, my mother and my brother, Steve, chided me about how they were able to find me by following my yellow footprints from where I had frolicked in the street crew’s puddle of paint to the little girl’s house far down the street. One would think that I’d remember the thrill of splashing in all that yellow paint, but I don’t.

       Throughout my childhood, I would periodically go to my mother’s bedroom, remove my treasure from her jewelry box, unfold the crinkly bluish paper, and gingerly tweezer my diamond between thumb and forefinger. Splaying across Mom’s bed, I held my earliest memory up to the light and re-entered its orbit as I fiddled kaleidoscopic twinkles from its prism.

       I have no idea how many of the ice cubes in that jewelry store’s promotional event contained diamonds, but even at five years old, I was well aware that I had accomplished an extremely improbable feat. I suppose the experience of plucking that ice cube with its encased diamond from that freezer chest was the impetus behind my knowing that I would win every raffle drawing, scratch-off, or any other random-chance contest in which I participated. And I did, too! Little Scotty was the menace of the old folks at the VFW, the ones who huddled on their barstools cranking their paychecks into the “cookie jar” machine. After they had spent hundreds of dollars trying to win the $50 prize, I would confidently stroll up to the machine with my lone pair of quarters and peel off the jackpot.

       Three sevens and sparkles are vivid among my childhood memories!