There’s no Dairy Queen around here, a fact that truly bothers me to no end. Some people say I am a bit…obsessed…about this glaring inequality in city planning. But what thriving city of 20,000+ doesn’t have a DQ? C’mon man.
Maybe it’s because we had one when I was little. In fact, it was at the end of my street, and all of my early childhood memories seem to involve it. I have no shame in the fact that my childhood largely consisted of ice cream–it was delicious!
At some point they closed the Dairy Queen down the road, for reasons that I still don’t understand. Sure we have a Baskin-Robbins and about 40 of those frozen yogurt shops, but nothing compares to a DQ. These days, the highlight of a roadtrip anywhere else is visiting their local DQ for a Blizzard.
What does this have to do with anything? My BFF and I scored last-minute, but more importantly FREE, tickets to the LSU game this weekend. It was the first time I’ve been back to Tiger Stadium since I graduated, and it was both fun and a little strange. As I’ve mentioned before, I loved college and I miss it. I had the best experiences and unforgettable memories, and it’s been hard to move on from that. A former LSU football player/ballroom dance friend of mine put it in great perspective recently, telling me “You had a very exciting college career. It’s hard to adjust to the real world after that.” It’s true.
Seeing everything from the perspective of a regular fan for the first time actually helped give me the closure I was looking for, in a weird way. Something has been lingering since my last football game, unnerving sense that I was supposed to be somewhere doing something. Last night helped shut the book on that feeling–in a good way. It rained a little, and we were in the nosebleeds with the airplanes and some really big bugs. That didn’t matter though. The stadium was even more beautiful than the last time I was there, the band looked and sounded awesome, the team played great and we got to relax and have fun.
At the end of the night, we hiked back across campus to find my car and eventually got out of all the post-game traffic. We stopped at the Dairy Queen in Baton Rouge and got Blizzards. On the drive home, I felt like I was moving on…in a good way.
Emilie Bee 