Looking Good and Glitter at Dairy Queen

Giant spoons and giggles

Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash

My favorite Dairy Queen is looking good these days. It sits in a quiet spot at the start of a residential area just off a busy suburban intersection. In front it has a pebblecrete patio with three tables. Each table has a pair of benches and a Dairy Queen-red metal canopy. Three small box bushes spread along each side of the front door. The drive-thru lane loops around the store, passing a pawn shop on the right, a Speedy Car Wash at the back, and a two-story office building on the left, as you can see in the image below.

A tidy median sits at the entrance to the store’s parking lot. Its grass is thick, green, and trimmed tight by the curb. A small tree centers the median. In the ground in front of the tree Amber the G. M. stakes shiny, catchy promotional signs advertising the latest deals. The image below shows the sign there now. As you can see, it’s advertising the store’s four-buck breakfast. I have never had breakfast at my favorite Dairy Queen but Amber tells me it’s very popular.

If you go in the store’s front door, you go right into the dining room. There are booths and bistro tables with tall chairs. If you go in the side door from the parking lot, you enter into an open area with the counter in front of you where you can place your order. You will also pass by a giant, eight-foot tall spoon, its bowl about three feet from the sidewalk, as shown in the image below.

It looks like the spoon you get with a Blizzard or a sundae or a banana split, except I think that if you were to scale it down you would find that the handle is a little shorter than the real-life serving spoon. But imagine the size of the ice cream treat that would suit a spoon like this! Even I might have trouble getting through something that big. But I would try.

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Jarrod is working at my favorite Dairy Queen this afternoon. Jarrod is a new employee. He started working at the store about a month ago. He is a huge man with a big, easy, happy laugh that makes him go loose all over and almost fold in on himself. We have a lot of fun together.

This afternoon I notice Jarrod has a speck of emerald-green glitter by his right eye. I ask him if he has children, thinking he may have been crafting with little people. He laughs and says the glitter must be from some lotion he’s used. I notice his tongue is green and ask him if he eats his lotion. Jarrod laughs harder. “Oh, man!” he says, “it’s been a day! I need to go to the bathroom!” Jarrod steps away from the register and turns a small circle and then comes back to the counter.

“Large cone?” he asks. “Yes, please,” I say. Jarrod puts a hand on the counter to steady himself, enters my order into the register, and then turns his attention to the very sober-looking county attorney officer who arrived just after I and who’s been standing silently next to me. He’s brought to the counter a large Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard cake he got from the freezer.

The officer is wearing a black polo shirt and khaki-colored nylon utility pants with the works clipped to his belt—handcuffs, taser, baton, pistol. He has not cracked the weensiest bit of a smile or looked my way at all during my exchange with Jarrod.

He asks Jarrod to have the manager Latavia pipe Happy Birthday Brenna! across the top of the cake. I can imagine him having had a long day at work and now heading to a party that he would probably rather not attend.

Catching Latavia’s eye on her way from the kitchen to the ice cream machine to make my cone I say, “Two blobs, please.” That’s how I describe how large I would like my large cone. A blob is about the size of a billiards ball.

Three blobs was my usual for several months following a health crisis a couple of years ago where I lost a lot of weight and needed to put it back on. But now that I am pretty much back to where I need to be, most days my cones are just two blobs.

“Two blobs” sets Jarrod off again. “Two blobs!” he says, laughing. “Oh, man! Two blobs!” He leans over the register, shaking his head. “It’s been a day!” Jarrod says. The officer is staring up at the menu behind Jarrod, tapping his wallet in his left palm.

Latavia comes to the counter. She has my cone in one hand and a piping bag in the other. When she gives me my cone, I apologize to the officer for the nonsense and skedaddle over to a corner table catching the late-afternoon light.

It’s the best place to sit because the sun keeps me warm as I enjoy my cone in the store’s overcooled air. It also has a view onto the parking lot. After a few minutes I see the officer drive off in his tan SUV. I hope he helps himself to a big slice of that cake and has the day off tomorrow.

For more about my favorite Dairy Queen and the people there, please see The Dairy Queen Dream Team, For the Dairy Queen Team, and Free Cones and New Friends at Dairy Queen.

You may also support my work at Buy Me a Coffee.