The summer we went to Dairy Queen
Along the cracked and endless highways of rural Texas, certain types of landmarks appear repeatedly. Whitewashed grain elevators rise on the horizon, like flags marking the settlements below. Larger towns have schools, and almost every town has a water tower. Wherever Main Street is, the courthouse sits at the end of it. There's the cemetery, and there are the churches. Then, if the town is big enough, there's the Dairy Queen.
The Atlantic has my favorite ice cream piece in a while, an understated look at small-town Texas DQs and a secret love letter to soft-serve.
The article brings back the summer we went to Dairy Queen, over and over. Raisin Bran, you see, was for a while the most generous cereal in the supermarket. The time was 1990-ish. UPC symbols had succeeded the boxtop, and at first my family stockpiled baseballs. What Kellogg's paid in real shipping cost, I have no idea. But for more UPCs than cash we sent away for dozens of Tony the Tiger baseballs. They piled in milk crates in the garage, crashed through backyard windows and kept our various Little League teams in shape. Who knew they were $20 balls?
But — back to topic — next came the Dairy Queen. The UPC-to-reward ratio was similarly low. Our household was majority Cheerios, minority Two Scoops, so we couldn't have been working too hard. But we still managed to spend most of a summer vacation at Dairy Queen — or what seemed liked it. The UPCs got you a free chocolate-dipped cone or sundae. We collected them. Washington didn't have Dairy Queens, so we had to make good use of the family beach trip to Nags Head.
Arriving, we knocked over every Dairy Queen on the island, all three, hitting different shacks on different days, taking different cousins on different days, and it was harder then than it would be now because they hadn't yet built the fancy Dairy Queen by the pirate mini-golf. We ate in the sun on the highway, chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream dripping toward the cones, and every second I stopped eating meant losing ice cream. Time was ice cream and ice cream was everything.
If the summer we went to Dairy Queen was 1990-ish, soon after I discovered Blizzards. Upside-down and complicated, Blizzards made the chocolate-dipped cone look like kids' stuff. Islanders raised the new DQ, indoors and air-conditioned with an arcade, and the cereals tightened up with freebies. Or maybe I just stopped looking. Either way, I woke today and wanted to get in line with UPCs in my pocket.
