On Ice Cream and Elections

Hi guys!

I kind of disappeared on you for a while there, huh? Well, I’m happy to report that I am back AND that I am THREE WEEKS binge and purge FREE. This is a pretty big deal: until now, I hadn’t gone more than 20 days without a binge or purge since the bulimia started in January 07. So there’s good news on that front.

I don’t have much time to write since there are supposedly 3 hour lines at the polls here in DC and I want to get my vote in. I originally planned to be up at 5 to get in line at 6, but my car broke down and I had to take it to the shop . They called back a few hours later to tell me it’s going to cost just short of $1000 to fix and it won’t be done until late this afternoon. So my mom is on her way home from work and we are going to go vote together (and get free Starbucks after!), and then when my car is done, I’ll head back to school. I guess this is what I get for not registering for an absentee ballot.

But I wanted to leave you with a little something. In high school, I took a Writing Seminar, and I just discovered one of my essays on my mom’s laptop. I wrote about the Dairy Queen I went to every summer at the beach. I want to share it with all of you because I think this essay was written by a girl with a healthy relationship with food. This is the kind of mentality I am trying to get back to:

(also, please keep in mind this essay is 4 years old- so it’s not a fantastic writing sample!)

Dairy Queen, Milepost 6.5, Highway 158, Outer Banks NC

The Dairy Queen sign is visible for what seems like miles down the main highway—big, red, and glowing with white letters. Beneath it, an advertisement board displays prices for chicken fingers and sodas, but who gets that anyway? Dairy Queen always has been and always will be a place for desserts.

It’s my 17^th birthday and I’m sitting in the backseat of my dad’s Ford Taurus, squished between my brother and my boyfriend, and as we turn off the road I can see the line of people already reaching out to the benches by the parking lot.

I nudge Sam. “Teehee, DQ!” I whisper, acting like I’m 7. He rolls his eyes, probably embarrassed that his older sister could be such a dork, and gives me one of his I-don’t-know-you-but-I’m-going-to-humor-you smiles.

Dad finds a space by the round picnic tables, and we all spill out of the car, racing for the end of the line. I perch myself on the cobblestone ledge there and try to decide on my order. Up until I was 8, hot fudge sundaes were always my choice. But the summer I turned 9 I discovered a new love—Blizzards. These soft serve-and-candy mix-in concoctions were so incredible that I often forced myself to only eat some and leave the rest in the freezer, ensuring myself the same treat 2 (or 3, if I was lucky) nights in a row.

As we wait impatiently to reach the front of the line, I decide on Mississippi Mudslide, chocolate ice cream with bits of brownies and chocolate chunks mixed in. Sam chooses Strawberry Cheese-Quake, my sister Jo picks Oreo (as always), and Kevin gets a Peanut Extreme Sundae, or something along those lines. My dad, a vegan, just laughs and says he really doesn’t miss eating DQ that much—we all know he must be lying.

The line, which is moving ever so slowly, is a mixture of everything the Outer Banks is about. There are the year-round residents—the girls in the cut-off jean shorts with tans darker than the roots of their sun-bleached hair who discuss how much they would looooove it if Tommy’s locker was within 5 feet of theirs and how they ran into Frank in Food Lion and OMG he cut his hair! There are the church groups from West Virginia with matching red shirts, the retired men and women who spend their summers here to get away from it all, the North Carolinians from the mainland who are just hanging out at the nearest beach, and the people like us. We are part of the renter group—the families from DC, Maryland, Virginia—and hey, there’s a Michigan license plate—who come down for a week each summer, stay in someone’s house, soak up sand, salt, and sun, and then head home to dream about next year.

When I was little, the house we stayed in was a mere 2 blocks from the DQ, and on Wednesday night we would walk to get our ice cream. It was on this short walk, as I skipped along through the sand and grasses that bordered the gravelly roads holding my mom’s hand, that I fell in love with the beach every year. I was 6, 7, 8 years old, and somehow, the breezy, summery nights ingrained themselves in my memory, associated only with the beach. The wooden benches, the stones on the ground, the cheap, yellow lights, and the red, plastic spoons became what I needed to complete my vacation. Being at the beach and not going to Dairy Queen was just like missing the ocean.

We finally make it to the front of the line where Olga, a tall, blond, Norwegian girl, takes our order. For some reason, DQ (as well as other places like Food Lion and CVS) is staffed almost entirely by Scandinavians. It’s one of the things about the Outer Banks that has never made sense to me, but I just take my Blizzard and head for the picnic tables, too lazy to think of the reasons for Olga and friends to be serving everything from ice cream to scotch tape.

The wooden table is splintering a bit more than last year, but I settle down in my usual spot, avoiding the sticky soft serve spill to my left. The air smells like salt and is laced with cigarette smoke. My flip-flops are grazed by the ever-present sand stuck in-between the stones on the ground, and beneath my t-shirt and my bikini top I can feel my sunburn starting to sting. I’ll have to find the aloe when we get back to the house.

In the past year, a Dairy Queen has appeared at Montgomery Mall, right next to the Orange Julius. Every time I walk through the food court I find myself tempted by the pictures of the Blizzards, sundaes, and chocolate-dipped cones. And yet as enticing as these desserts are, I know that if I try one, it will ruin the magic of the Dairy Queen. To me, DQ is about more than sugar and syrup and brownie bits. It’s about no school and trashy summer romance novels and flip-flop tans and white nail polish. It’s about losing track of time, warm beach towels, scalding sand, and the smell of Water Babies sunblock. It ties together being a skinny 6 year old in a flowered two-piece and begging Mom for a triangle top bikini, a request she refused to honor until I was 15. It even goes back to acting out Boxcar Children stories on the deck and digging for sand crabs with my dad. I sigh, chewing through a particularly rich chunk of brownie. Some people eat this stuff for how good it is, but I eat it for the memories.

As we all pile back into the car, a mess of half-eaten ice cream and sweet, sticky smiles, I look back over my shoulder at the still-growing lines (we were on the early side tonight). Next year, they’ll all be back. Next year I’ll get out of the car and smell waves and Marlboro Lights, and maybe Tommy and Frank will be with those girls, and Olga and friends will still be struggling with English. And we’ll still be the renters, pink and sandy and relaxed. At the beach, nothing ever changes. I’ve learned to count on that.

happy election day!!!

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