What Four Overpriced Ice Cubes Taught Me About Grief
Let's establish the baseline: real ice, the kind that mattered, came from a plastic bag at a gas station, or better yet from a tray in your aunt's freezer, dropped into a shell-pink tumbler that probably counted as a Superfund site. It clinked in Pepsi. It went milky and cloudy as the cola ate at it, wore down into little sucking-stones with star-cracks in the middle, and you crunched the last of it against your molars while dripping pool water into the grass. That was ice. That was free, more or less, and nobody thought about it for longer than the time it took to drink the Pepsi.
Aldi would like you to reconsider.
Aldi Crystal Clear Frozen Ice Cubes come four to a box — a box, mind you, sized for a cheesecake or a frozen pie, dignified with actual directions printed on the side, as though ice were a delicate technical procedure and not something that happens to water when you leave it alone in the cold. Four cubes. $4.99. That is roughly $1.25 per cube, which is a genuinely unhinged number for something whose entire selling point is that it used to be tap water.
Everything about the packaging insists you take it seriously. There's no whiskey talk, no font implying a country club membership, no little essay about the Scottish Highlands the water supposedly came from — this isn't that kind of nonsense, or at least it's pretending not to be. It's just a very plain, very confident box announcing that inside are four ice cubes, perfectly square, ninety-degree angles, and they would like you to wait three to four minutes before use. Like the ice needs to compose itself.
And here's the thing: it's kind of beautiful. Once it clears — and it clears fast, all the way to see-through, none of the milky imperfection of the '80s Pepsi ice — you drop it in a glass of lemonade and it becomes a little window straight down to the bottom of the drink, a clean square porthole surrounded by cloudy liquid. Ice-enthusiast forums will tell you people go to enormous lengths for this effect: directional freezing, degassing, boiling the water first to strip out the bubbles. My aunt never did any of that. She just wanted it cold. Clear was not a metric she cared about.
She died recently. We'd seen each other exactly once in the decade since my wedding — the kind of family estrangement where the actual grievance has nothing to do with you, but you get misted with the fallout anyway, a sort of ambient eau de beef that settles over every gathering.
So there I was, staring into this small clear shard of unnecessary packaging, this tiny monument to shipping costs and plastic film and climate indifference, and it had somehow become a lens — not a metaphor I asked for, not one I particularly wanted, but there it was, a perfect little window straight back to a hot day, bologna sandwiches, and someone hollering at us to pick up our cups before the bees got interested.
Humans are meaning-making machines, especially when someone we loved is gone, and apparently mine just needed four wildly overpriced ice cubes and a cardboard box to get the job done. Pepsi and pink plastic tumblers turn out to be the madeleine I didn't know I was carrying around.
Anyway. $4.99 at Aldi. Get them while you can — not because they're good ice, particularly, but because apparently they come with a peephole into whatever you've been trying not to think about.
Distilled from McSweeney's (Comedy)