By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I’m a curmudgeon on a mission. My granddaughter’s crime? She wants Dipping Dots, and I spend about a third of the walk to the ice cream store railing against them.

If you’re eating Dipping Dots, you might as well be ingesting linoleum, I tell my granddaughter. They’re chemicals; they have to be. How else does something that looks like colorful dots morph into ice cream when you touch it with a spoon? Would you eat driveway pavement if it came in primary colors? I really shouldn’t expect an answer from a three-year-old.

Dipping Dots are an affront to the wholesomeness of our biweekly ice cream parlor expedition. My rant does not faze my granddaughter. She pedals her bike with training wheels over the bumpy cement sidewalk, and when I put my hand on her back to provide some stability, she tells me she doesn’t need it. No Grandma, she says; I got this.

Apparently she knows what else she’s got: a simp for a grandmother. I’m just the grandma who can’t say no. Much as I hate Dipping Dots, we stop at the newsstand that sells ice cream in packages and gummy things made out of sugar that are terrible for her teeth. She chooses Dipping Dots in American flag colors — oh goody, patriotic tooth decay — and something green that will no doubt remain in her teeth for the duration. As usual, she tells me not to worry. Her other grandma is a dentist, and I feel a vague sense of foreboding that multiple dental visits are in my son’s future as I pay for the Dipping Dots and the olive green gummy thing whose name I do not remember. We’re saving these for later, I tell my granddaughter, and I hope by the time later comes, she will have forgotten about them.

Are you sure you don’t want real ice cream? I finally ask. It’s way better than Dipping Dots. The truth is I want real ice cream. I am just using my granddaughter as an excuse — you know how it is. I want to set a good example of what it’s like to be a woman who eats healthily and at almost 58 has no illusions about having the body of a 20-year-old. It’s not because I love ice cream and crave chocolate. Oh, the lies we tell ourselves.

Luckily, my granddaughter agrees to actual ice cream as long as I hold onto the Dipping Dots. Really? I’d like to demote this plastic-covered imposter to the garbage can — permanently. With all the plastic I’m toting, I worry that in the town I’m babysitting in, I’ll be outed as some kind of an environmental pariah.

The plastic bag goes on one of the handlebars and the bucket of chalk she insisted on carrying goes on the other. I’m not sure what we’re meant to do with the chalk other than transport it. I imagine us as sidewalk artists, a la the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins or creators of colorful hopscotch boards. This is not to be.

The town ice cream store has become our thing — or at least that’s what I tell myself. It’s our routine, what I hope she will think about when she thinks about grandma. My granddaughter and I set out from her house every other week for this simple errand. I get a vegan scoop, so I can feel virtuous. My granddaughter always chooses a flavor called Superman and she adds sprinkles. Superman is a red, white and blue concoction that is an amalgamation of food coloring and sugar and that, I suppose, would be better eaten in a cape. It mostly makes her sticky, and we always ask the boy who sells the ice cream to wet the napkin we give him in the sink that’s behind the counter. That’s part of the adventure — the wiping of my granddaughter’s face and the end point on this ice cream eating journey, the indication that it’s time to turn home.

Going for ice cream with my granddaughter is not just about ordering kid-sized cups. Her innocence and enthusiasm are infectious. Every man of a certain age who walks in is a daddy. The little girl with a plaid skirt and pink backpack who, like my granddaughter, orders a Superman cup is a long-lost friend. The ice cream scoopers who also roll the pizza dough for the pepperoni pies the store sells are curiosities. Grandma, what are those men doing? Everything she sees is new, and being able to view it with her makes even the mundane seem exotic.

And therein lies my real objection to Dipping Dots. They’re artificial. Their fake-ness makes them an outlier on this ice cream journey. You don’t scoop them. They have no smell. No one over the age of ten even eats them.

And as if to punctuate the point about how unwelcome they are, the Dipping Dots ultimately end up in a melted mess on the sidewalk, back on the cement where they so clearly belong. They co-mingle with the chalk after the two wheeler that I’m walking for my granddaughter, who runs ahead, topples over. Kaboom. My granddaughter laughs. It’s a Dipping Dot disaster, I tell her. A point of interest: Dipping Dots don’t only turn into ice cream when they’re poked with a spoon. The same thing happens to them when they have a collision with a bucket of chalk on the sidewalk. They liquefy and become a sticky atrocity, a breeding ground for desperate Dachshunds and frenetic flies.

Adios, Dipping Dots. We hardly knew you. All I can say is thank god, we never ate you.