“Can we have dessert?” my four-year-old grandson asks, a conspiratorial half-smile pulling down the right side of his mouth. He knows full well that this is not dessert time, but also knows that spending special time with Mama Dora means tossing all parental restrictions to the wind. Ice cream? Yes! Cookies? Why not! Chocolate? Of course! As far as I’m concerned, a grandparent’s holy responsibility is to spoil the grandchild. The parents’ holy responsibility is to deal with the aftermath—a sugar-filled, hyper child, who’ll climb up walls and spin like a possessed dreidel. So! We will have chocolate, I silently decide, my own mouth watering.
“Two,” he negotiates. “Two what?” I ask, as if I don’t know. “These tiny square, brown things,” he says, without naming chocolate, as if voicing the magic word might summon his parents, heaven forbid. “Ok,” I reply “two.” So we march to the kitchen, arrange the table with china plates and napkins. It’s important to set a good example even, or especially, when chocolate is at stake. I put two chocolates on each of our plates. Help him up the stool and sit next to him.
I blame my mom. Growing up eating her hearty Italian pasta dinners has made nearly all other grains seem insubstantial. Rice is good, but you have to eat more of it to get full. Wheatberries are filling, but they take too long to cook. Couscous is, well, wimpy. That's right, couscous is wimpy. How can anyone get full on a dinner of delicate, fluffy couscous? I can't. That's why I have relegated it to breakfast. 
.
In Margate, New Jersey, there is an ice cream shop that time forgot. It
is called Two Cents Plain and it has little white wire chairs with red
and white striped seats, red and white wallpaper festooned with
whimsical line drawings of flappers in long necklaces and gents in
boaters, and a jar on the counter where customers can deposit tip money
for the scoopers’ college funds. It looks just the same today as it did
in 1979, when I had my fifth birthday party there. 
Built in 1933, the handsome round red brick building was called "La Ronda de las Estrellas" (the round court of the stars) which provided Westwood village with its early identity. On the south wall of La Ronda (on the Lindbrook drive side) is a hand painted fresco (now faded) of a maid and a man of old Spain, playing his guitar, painted by artist, Margaret Dobson, who flew in from France to do the work, when the building was erected.