An honest-to-goodness ice cream truck whizzed by me on 101 this morning. The driver was banging and shouting and honking at the slower, lower calorie cars around him. He must have realized he was late for the nineties.

I suddenly found myself in my childhood neighborhood in Florida, which is not where you want to be when you’re driving next to a deranged dessert purveyor. Back then, the ice cream man wasn’t a person who went on angry tears down crowded highways; he was a smiling head and a hand sticking out of a truck that showed up in front of your house handing out whatever you asked for. You wanted a mountain of cookie dough set afire and sprinkled in moon rock, he reached in the back. You had no idea where he came from, when he’d come back or whether he even would.

When you’re a kid, the world is coated in this thick sheen of the ethereal. Good things pop in and out of focus. If there’s an order to the universe, you can’t see it. When I was 7, I spent an entire Saturday night waiting for the mailman to bring me a comic book. He never came, but only because I didn’t want it badly enough. I fell asleep on the doormat, woke up on Sunday, and tried harder.

Growing up is really a problem of TMI—Too Much Information. You realize that reality has rhythm and rules. Mail doesn’t come at night, ever, even if you wait by the door. The ice cream jingle doesn’t play on a prayer; it comes every Tuesday and Thursday at 4. The hours are on his website. He has a website. And a mortgage. And he’s losing business to Dairy Queen, and his truck breaks down a lot, he’s terribly lonely, and sometimes he goes on angry tears down crowded highways. When you come back in twenty years with your son, he’s there (it’s Tuesday), but all he’s selling now is overpriced ice cream, same stuff they sell at 7-11. You can buy ice cream any time you want, anyway.

You can’t put this stuff back in the box. We know things now about the world—bigger things, far scarier than dessert routes and postal systems—that we stumbled upon in an instant and won’t forget for a lifetime. Our parents did the best they could to freeze our innocence, and we will do the same for our kids. But everything melts eventually.