The strip malls grew up around the ice cream.

STRAWBERRY

It’s called Original Rainbow Cone, but I don’t know why they felt it necessary to add the “Original.” This isn’t a New York pizza place, Oregon-based chain of pancake houses or any other place that needs to declare itself “original” because it isn’t.

It’s the Original Rainbow Cone because it’s the only damn one.

PALMER HOUSE (New York Vanilla with cherries and walnuts)

According to Rainbow Cone’s website — the surest source of information on how any company wishes it could see itself — the location was chosen to hit the return traffic from Chicagoans hitting rural cemeteries on the weekends. A cold treat after cold graves.

They opened in 1926. It’s the 92nd year at 92nd Place and Western Avenue.

PISTACHIO

Sure, there are other ways to get it. There’s a Rainbow Cone at Navy Pier, I hear tell. They do a booth at the Taste of Chicago.

But the they who say things say the only real way to get that Rainbow treat of five seemingly disparate flavors slapped on one cone like a wedge is to head down to Beverly and wait in a long line on a hot day. That’s the best, they say.

I wouldn’t know. I’d never had it.

ORANGE SHERBET

We went down to Original Rainbow Cone, a road trip to the miles of strip mall that grew up where grieving families once stopped for post-graveyard treats. We waited for friends and chatted as this year’s crop of smiling summer-job teens scooped wedges.

In the heat out back, after a photo op for some Beverly-born relatives of my wife, the cone licked and drooled over my hand. We had to eat quickly, racing against the melt.

It tastes like tradition, I guess, or some other dramatic intangible. It tastes like summer days and kids’ laughter. More concretely, it tastes like orange sherbet, pistachio, New York vanilla with cherries and walnuts, strawberry and a layer of chocolate, flavors I’ve never had together before and can never have anywhere else. 

Read about a summer tradition of fire and hula

And one of drums and communion

The Flutes of Aïn Draham

And the children waved and tossed candy. And the candidates waved and tossed smiles. And the white-and-green poms of the floats flittered and fluttered and pamphleteers working the crowd feverishly pressed fliers advertising the dubious benefits of wads of dough you don’t actually want, but know you’ll end up getting in the end, like Krispy Kreme doughnuts or J.B. Pritzker.

If you were to seek a cable-knit sweater, flat cap, Guinness logo or Kelly green version of a local sports team’s paraphernalia in Chicago on Sunday, I know where you could have found it. And I’m wearing the sports team thing right now.

Sunday was the South Side Irish Parade, the former drunken spree of Celtomania and green-hued alley pukes rebooted as a zero-tolerance family-friendly spectacle of step dancers, pipers and politicians showing they’re of the people.

Local unions and more high schools than I thought existed in the Midwest blared music and love for the people of Beverly as the parade jaunted its way between 103rd and 115th on Western. St. Patrick walked waving down the street next to an Uncle Sam as three bike cops and a ruddy-nosed senior with a tartan cap and a wolfhound walked across the foreground because sometimes life captures a moment to a T.

It was wonderful. Full-bore wonderful. Kids loved it, we got a great spot to put up folding chairs along the parade route and I’ve got fewer aches in my head and gravel shards in my hand than the last time I attended this particular affair.

I like local festivals, fairs and parades because they’re like costume parties where regions come dressed as themselves. Not themselves themselves, but a better themselves. A nicer themselves. A fun, wholesome, tradition-laden but still funky and individualistic version of themselves. It’s a sneak peek into how these places actually see themselves, or would like to.

North Side neighborhoods full of sports bars have hipness-drenched craft fairs, giving a hint they still see an artsy enclave when they look in the mirror. Downtown, the broken heart of a fractured and divided city, forges an image of unity, peace and everyone coming together for a joyous family meal, or at least a little Taste.

And Beverly, dear Beverly, sees itself as a place that celebrates family, education, church, politics, police and cable-knit sweaters.

Or would like to.

I attended a South Side Irish Parade before, did a lot of the thing it was famous for. And I couldn’t tell you right now which is the real Beverly — the boozer or the family haven.

The children laughing and running and the ones shyly giving out candy from the parade line were there, real, open and honest. The young men wandering from bar to bar with the slight annoyed look of the overhyped and underwhelmed were real too. They had been told of more party than existed, but were trying to make up the difference themselves. Real.

The cop getting Italian beef hot and dipped after the crowd dispersed was real. The mom cop who hugged her kid and put him in his dad’s lap for a squad car ride to the float he’d wave from was real.

The people who wore less charming but equally authentic sigils of Chicago — the sneers, the divided wealth, the joy of a self-satisfied enclave and my North Side home is as enclavey as they get — we were there too. The barricades that held in the parade line were unhooked after the show by low-level DUIs and reckless drivers sentenced to the SWAP program. Boys jeered at floats from rival schools and an overheard snippet revealed at least one teen girl thought the Marist High School girls softball team was “a bunch of bitches.”

It was life in all its beauty and ugliness. They weren’t divided equal — it was a wonderful day, the ratio of charm to murk dialed brightly toward the former.

Under a yellow sun and a flat cap, a community took a chance to dress as itself, or at least the self it wanted to be.

Meet a former Beverly hat shop (now downtown)

And a mainstay bookshop (moved since the story, but still in Beverly)

More on the divides heading south to north

And a St. Pat’s story from the site’s early days

Yes, that Jefferson Davis.

Yes, the Confederate president or czar or whatever the title be.

And, yes, I alluded to it a few stories ago when I plucked it from a North Center dumpster and, yes, I do plan to completely mock its belligerent racism when I do my next “Chicago Review of Terrible Books” for Third Coast Review.

And, yes, that was a plug.

But now I don’t want to talk about belligerent, mockable, historical relic (1980s) racism.

I want to talk about Chicago. About America. About white culture in 2016.

It goes like this:

On Jan 21, 2016, I walked into a South Side medical center to meet a friend. I wore the dirty old pea coat I’ve worn for a decade plus sumpthin, a somewhat muggerish stocking hat and a beard I’ve recently grown but have convinced myself looks like Commander Riker instead of skeevy ratty coat hat man.

After walking straight past the security guard, I lingered in the second-floor hallway for no good reason.

A lady passed by. She smiled at me.

Scrubby, scruffy, no reason to be there, I got smiled at rather than questioned and credentialed.

That’s white privilege.

My friend and I hopped in his car to head down Western Avenue to a reading on the souther South Side. As the night dimmed and the city turned neon, we went through what I once called and call again a pinwheel of color.

Black neighborhoods, brown, black, brown spinning around before we ended up in Beverly, in the land of the South Side white. Each neighborhood a distinct color of resident, very little crossing the lines.

That’s segregation.

The event was lovely, a live lit reading with more shades of skin than most you’ll find on the North Side. But the whole experience reminded me of “The Jefferson Davis Coloring Book,” soon to be mocked in a different blog.

It’s easy to make fun of stupid, obvious, silly racism. It’s easy to look at “The Jefferson Davis Coloring Book,” read about how the Civil War was really about states’ rights and how Abolitionists really made slavery a big deal when it wasn’t and just feel nice about yourself.

It’s easy to tut tut more obvious forms of racism and cast a blind eye to your own.

I live in white privilege every day, and I’m not going to stop. Any place I please will let me use the bathroom. I don’t get questioned or prodded when I’m going about my business. I’m more likely to get a job, less likely to have certain health statistics apply to me and, you know what? It’s just sort of swell. A lot’s geared toward me and mine. It’s nice to have so much of the world laid out for you.

“The Jefferson Davis Coloring Book” is silly and stupid, and deserves to be mocked. It will in the other blog.

But it’s dangerous because it is so stupid. It’s so obviously wrong, it momentarily distracts from the living, viable racism around every day in this city. It gives a bit of moral high in a city that needs to feel low in order to realize how much work needs to be done.

A woman of my acquaintance likens white privilege to the moving sidewalk at the airport. Do nothing and you’re still carried along it. You have to walk against it.

I don’t yet know how to walk against it, in what way my contributions would be useful beyond pledges of equality that seem to save my soul but improve no one’s life.

But in this segregated city with pinwheel neighborhoods, smiled-at ratty coat men and moving sidewalk privilege carrying us toward a destination we don’t want to reach, I’m trying to figure it out. I hope that means more someday than just saving my own moral high ground.

Until I figure that out, I’ll take a little solace in the fact I take no solace in being better than “The Jefferson Davis Coloring Book.”

The story where I mentioned the book before

The story where I called it a pinwheel

“A woman of my acquaintance”

“The Chicago Review of Terrible Books”

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EDIT: Here’s my review of the coloring book

He was eying either “Madame Bovary” or “Lord Jim” if I was following his eyes correctly. He was eying them in a bookstore in Beverly stuck next to a 7-Eleven. For 24 years.

“It used to be a White Hen but otherwise it’s been pretty much the same,” the woman at the counter told me that cold February day as I killed time in a bookshop on the far South Side.

In the little strip-mall space designed for convenience stores, Bookie’s Paperbacks & More is piled to the ceiling with books, shelves cobbled ’round forming an intricate labyrinth of Mystery, Classics, Romance, History and categories not seen in other stores. Eight shelves dedicated to books on Vampires. Three dedicated to Ireland, fiction and non mixed as long as it’s Irish.

Bookie’s knows its market. Outside the little storefront, along the long, broad streets where city blends with suburb, the lamps were lined with banners for the then-upcoming South Side Irish parade.

“You’ve got some books for me,” I hear the woman at the desk say as I’m lost in Mystery.

A man who came in, presumably with a box full of books for Bookie’s huge used paperback trade, responded in the affirmative with what my notes called “redic SS accent.”

She asked for the name on the account. That ludicrously South Side accent, one you could practically hear ordering mustard on a hot dog, listed his wife’s. My notes say “redic Irish name.” Mary Reilly or something.

The story of Bookie’s the South Side bookstore isn’t a story of what’s there. Books and South Siders. Done.

The story is what’s not there.

There’s no artifice at Bookie’s, none of the air of smug overknowledge that pervades many establishments. There’s none of the arched-eyebrow hipness of a Myopic, none of the firm impatience of the old guy at Ravenswood, none of the academic lack of nonsense of a Seminary Co-op.

If Myopic is Wicker Park and Seminary Co-op Hyde Park (and Ravenswood Used Books Lincoln Square for some reason), then Bookie’s, in it’s little suburban style strip-mall front next to a 7-Eleven, is Beverly.

No fuss. No pretention. Just nice folk from the Sout’ Side.

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Visit Bookie’s

Read why I was in Beverly that day

It takes a while to realize it’s a foot pedal. At first it seems the steam’s just there when it needs to be, curling and whooshing around what in a few seconds will be an elegant beaver felt homburg.

“The kind of hats we make have basically become extinct,” hatmaker Graham Thompson says as he flicks the steam condensation off the hat with what looks like a paintbrush.

He flips the hat over in his hands a few times, giving it the expert peer. A few more brush strokes on his canvas and it gets the mental OK. I’m reminded of something he told me a few moments earlier.

“It’s a good investment,” he said. “You get one of our hats, you’ll have it your whole life.”

Optimo makes hats. Optimo makes Hats.

In their workshop on the far South Side, just north of a sketchy “School of Beauty” that looked like it had been carved out of a laundromat and a “Tax-itician” with a handwritten sign on butcher paper promising good IRS results, Optimo makes and sell men’s hats that cost anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars.

Some of Optimo’s hats kept the classic names: trilby, homburg, bowler, top hat, stingy brim. Some are bathed in Chicagoana: The LaSalle, The Rush Street, The 47th Street, The Dearborn. Some go by the name of the wearer most might recognize: The Cagney, The Dunaway, The Mitchum, The John Lee Hooker.

They’re works of art for your head. No costume shop feltwork or Indiana Jones licensed spinoff these. The bowler turns you into a British lord, the porkpie to a South Side pool hustler.

“That’s one of my goals,” the hatmaker says. “To be an iconic Chicago product.”

Graham Thompson is a slim, fit ginger who says he’s 41 but looks a decade younger. He took over Johnny’s Hat Shop from his mentor Johnny Tyus in the early 1990s. He was young, he admits.

“It was going to be closing, sort of retiring right at the time,” Thompson says. “The timing was perfect.”

There’s a framed photo of Tyus on the wall. He’s working in the shop, working on a fedora while wearing a cabbie flatcap. He’s wearing what looks like a denim shirt and jeans. He’s got a workman’s nimble, thick fingers and slightly bulging belly, but it’s the smile that gets me, that elfin smile that seems more a function of his eyes than his lips.

Johnny was happy. Graham is happy now, making these amazing hats in Beverly.

“The South Side of Chicago is really where the hat culture never died,” Thompson says. “Hats meant something to them. They grew up with them. To me, it’s a real Chicago thing to wear a hat. It never went away, especially among our African-American clientele.”

Yes, Optimo now has a West Loop shop for the tourist and businessman crowd. Yes, the homburg undergoing the last steam is destined for a hat-wearer in California. Yes, people have sent their own hats from as far as Europe, Australia and Japan just to have them cleaned, blocked and renovated.

But the heart of Optimo has stayed in Beverly, on that little strip of Western just north of a sketchy beauty school and a “Tax-itician.”

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Read another story of hats

Watch video of Optimo’s hatmaking process (and buy a hat while you’re there)