A customer's tongue flicks at the scoops of ice cream, sitting high on top of the chocolate-dipped waffle cone, like a lizard's tongue flicking the air.

But her flicks just aren't fast enough.

Sticky streams of chocolate-chip, cookie-dough ice cream coat her fingers, stain the lavender picnic bench she's sitting at, and even smear her face.

Her stomach says do it, her eyes say no way. It's the largest ice cream cone she's ever seen.

"And it's only a single," Henry Jones winks.

For seven years, Jones has been running Coneheads Ice Cream World at Cultus Lake.

It's a dream job, he says. A dream he never knew he had.

Jones spent 25 years working on the landing strip for Air Canada, 13 years working in maintenance for the Chilliwack Society for Community Living, and three years operating his own sign-making business.

And then, he became an ice cream scooper.

Jones, 62, was looking for a good retirement job, something that wouldn't take up too much of his time, and something he could easily fall in love with.

Who doesn't love ice cream?

Standing behind the counter of his small parlour, Jones is surrounded by flavour after flavour after flavour of ice cream. Vanilla. Chocolate. Strawberry. Pistachio. Licorice. Maple Walnut. New York Cheesecake. Twenty-four flavours in total.

And most days, the cool, sweet temptation, staring him straight in the face for more than 10 hours, is often too hard to resist.

"Believe it or not, I didn't have any yesterday," he says. "But almost every day I have some ice cream, just a small cone usually."

Small to Jones' eyes, but likely huge to everyone else's.

Jones, being a lover of the oldies, fashions his petite parlour after parlours of yore. With Johnny Cash's gravely voice singing Ring of Fire through the speakers, Jones digs the scooper into the hard-packed bucket of ice cream and piles three apple-sized scoop onto a cone. He presses down on the whip cream dispenser, and outlines the top scoop with a crackling sploosh of white air-filled cream, then adds a rainbow of sprinkles, and finishes it off with a cherry on top.

"My arm gets pretty sore by the end of the day," he chuckles. "One time, it almost felt like I had tennis elbow. I probably put through 900 people that day."

Being an ice cream scooper is just a seasonal job, four months at the most. It's also weather dependent. If the temperature drops, even just a degree or two, his customer output tends to drop too.

And yet, even with those "minor" drawbacks, it's the perfect life, says Jones.

The expression on a child's face when they're handed a cone, or the size of their eyes when they see the sprinkles, or their wide open mouths trying, unsuccessfully, to devour the ice cream in one fell swoop is the only bonus Jones needs.

And having endless supply of Maple Walnut, his favourite flavour, at his fingertips is the cherry on top.

Late in the afternoon, customers start driving into the lot, one after the other. Jones runs inside and puts his scooping arm into action.

A young girl, about 10, walks out the exit doors, and with eyes beaming up at her big brother, she shouts, "I got cotton candy!"

She digs her tongue into the cool sprinkle-topped sweetness. She lifts her head for just a second to savour the taste, before diving right back in, tongue first.

krobinson@theprogress.com