People have all kinds of comfort food. Mashed potatoes, chicken soup, pancakes. Mine is chocolate ice cream.

For years, my family only ate vanilla at home. We used it in milkshakes and ate it with chocolate syrup (which I would stir into a chocolate slurry when I wasn’t too impatient). If we went out to Baskin-Robbins, my mom and I always got chocolate mint and my dad always got strawberry. But at home, when we had to share, it was the white stuff every time.

For some reason, we switched to chocolate when we moved to Tampa and I was in junior high school. The summer between seventh and eighth grade, I was a total latchkey kid. My parents worked all day and I stayed home, left to my own devices.

That might have been the best summer of my life.

Did I improve myself? Not a bit. Did I walk to the pool? Go to the library? Read good books? Learn a skill? Develop a talent? Hell no.

Here’s what I did. I got up at noon, did the dishes, then watched three hours of soap operas (Days of Our Lives, Another World, and General Hospital) and ate chocolate ice cream. Every day. At 4 p.m., I turned off the TV, cleaned the house, and started dinner for my parents. They’d get home, we’d have dinner, and I’d talk on the phone with my friends while my parents monopolized the living room. Then they’d go to bed and I’d resume my spot on the couch to watch Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and whatever movies til dawn were showing on Channel 44. I’d go to bed around 5, then start over again at noon the next day.

Whenever I would finish the box of ice cream that my parents had bought over the weekend (usually around Wednesday), I scrounged quarters out of the couch, under my bed, our change bucket, wherever, and walked to the corner convenience store and bought another box.

Real life returned with the school year and I gave up the night-owl hours and soap operas. I stuck with the ice cream until college, when ice cream didn’t fit in the mini-fridge, plus roommates snarfed it faster than I could. I fell out of the habit. And when I’d go to B&R, I still opted for more-exotic flavors—not just chocolate mint but also pralines and cream or “gold medal ribbon,” which had streaks of chocolate and caramel.

In the late 1990s, a friend introduced me to Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food, and my love affair with chocolate ice cream resumed.

I don’t eat ice cream as much these days; I try to watch my calorie count and there are other things that fill me up in more efficient and nutritious ways.

But every so often … yeah, that box of Breyer’s chocolate has my name on it. Do not touch.