For this series, we reach out to a member of the department who has a very particular obsession and ask them to share it with the world. In this edition, Assistant Professor Jacob Risinger writes about his destined obsession with ice cream.

Late in the evening, on so many evenings in the mid-90s, the steady clank of a spoon colliding with a ceramic mug hovers just at the edge of my attention. It won’t clank long before I’ve climbed the basement stairs to find my dad digging scoops of ice cream from flimsy cartons and easing them into squat, sturdy mugs. “I’m making a milkshake,” he’d say. “You want one?” The question, of course, was rhetorical: who could turn down a small, delectable dose of ice cream stirred to perfection? I never could, and still often can’t, so let’s call ice cream the earliest and most obvious of my obsessions.

The nightly milkshake was a family ritual—a sober, irreproachable nightcap—almost always stirred into existence and then eaten with a spoon. In my family we never bothered with the blender, and we spurned the straw: who’d want to mess around with simple and complex implements premised on the removal of all texture from a good shake? Rough-mixed in a hurry, our milkshakes could be consumed in celebration or consolation, standing together against the counter or solo on the couch. And if (as experts say) it takes between 18 and 254 days to form a habit, my early sense that a decent day ended with a good milkshake has never gone away.

At age fourteen, I turned an obsession into an occupation. Like Gwen Stefani, I got my first job at Dairy Queen, a plum position that entailed much power and privilege. I learned how to make the trademark curl atop a Dairy Queen cone, and like a true Zen master, I served all my Blizzards spoon-in and upside down. Sure, gravity dashed my Blizzards against the counter on a couple of mortifying occasions. Mistakes were part of the game, and in fact, one of its rewards: if someone “mistakenly” made the wrong Blizzard, it was free game for anyone on staff. When my classmates drifted to the DQ from the community pool across the street, only I had the power to “treat them right.” It would be hard to underrate the brilliant awkwardness of the Dairy Queen uniform from those far off days: the irresistible combination of red visor and striped khaki polo shirt…

My vast enthusiasm for ice cream played at least a small part in my decision to go to college in Vermont, a state where the cow-to-human ratio is about 1 to 3. In my mind, the fact that Vermont was home to Ben & Jerry’s made it the Mecca of the Ice Cream world. With each pint of Ben & Jerry’s I consumed I could entertain the vague utopian notion that eating ice cream would make the world a better place. I dutifully made a pilgrimage to the Ben & Jerry’s Factory, where I paid my respects to flavors that could no longer be experienced in this world. I also relished the unique camaraderie of tackling a Vermonster—a twenty-scoop sundae of epic proportions—with friends.

But the costly decadence of Ben & Jerry’s had its quick counter-reaction, and after a year I became a devotee of a subtler pleasure: what Vermonters called the Creemee, a soft-serve cone with an especially high butter-fat content. You could find Creemees everywhere—at gas stations, at pizza joints, even in hardware stores. My avid exploration of Vermont’s history and landscape had a secret logic to it. I constantly plotted to put myself in the way of new Creemee stands. If you, dear reader, ever work your way to western Vermont, you can stand at one of the epicenters of my ice cream obsession: the Village Creemee Stand in Bristol, the site of many rapturous ice cream evenings, not the least of which happened to be my thirtieth birthday.

As far as I know, William Wordsworth (another obsession) never wrote about ice cream. Perhaps he never tasted it? (His loss). But in The Prelude, his long autobiographical epic, Wordsworth spends a decent amount of time thinking about how the most ordinary aspects of life conspire to inform us in unaccountable ways:

Who knows the individual hour in which

His habits were first sown, even as a seed,

Who that shall point, as with a wand, and say,

'This portion of the river of my mind

Came from yon fountain?'

I sometimes wonder whether ice cream has conspired to shape my destiny. What are the odds that I would marry the grand-daughter of a dairy farmer? Or better yet, how strange is it that my mother-in-law happens to operate her own homemade ice cream shop? My partner Memory and I planned a cakeless wedding, preferring instead the sublime simplicity of a milkshake. As we started our collective life together, everyone had to make a choice: chocolate, vanilla, or “khaki pants,” a family recipe that mixes a great deal of vanilla with a single, essential scoop of chocolate.

I came to Ohio State for an interview in the dead of winter. The Polar Vortex was in full swing, and campus had been closed for two days. The Oval was a frozen tundra, covered with snow. All the external signs pointed to the desirability of sipping hot coffee, but my future colleagues humored my insatiable, perhaps unreasonable, and certainly unseasonable desire for an ice cream cone. On a dark January night, I experienced the rapture of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams for the first time. Now, five years later, just about 1500 feet stand between my front door and Jeni’s. But don’t imagine I tread that path all too often! These days, maybe I’ve come to realize that ice cream is a dangerous daily pleasure. Maybe there’s also something about the thrill of the chase—the long-imagined, long-delayed ice cream cone that tastes all the better. And then there’s this: if you’re sharing your ice cream with a one-year-old who drops most things on the floor, Jeni’s is something of an extravagant investment. Lucky for me, there’s the lovely walk-up Dairy Queen at the southern edge of Clintonville. Here, on Arcadia Avenue, I’ll watch my daughters carelessly take down kiddie cones while I wield one of those matchless red spoons.