You Can Choose Anything
March 2024
For as much as I dislike cars, you know what’s amazing?
Eating a Dairy Queen Blizzard parked in your driveway, music blaring.
The first day warm enough for Birks.
A tiny burst of rain leaving a summer storm scent in the air.
This moment is yours.
This gets to be your life.
Dairy Queen isn’t even top-tier fast food (Culvers all the way, honorable mention to Wendy’s chili) but it’s nostalgia with a bright red spoon.
In my hometown, DQ was (and still is, presumably) the place to be after your last community league soccer game of the season, and also if you are a pastor entrusted with a gaggle of teens that you don’t want to teach theology on a Wednesday night.
Our other restaurant option was locally owned pizza joint, serving up squares of flat and rubbery ‘za. (They’re still limping along today, relocating because an exterior wall collapsed. Their new location is a glorified shed foisted on them by a corrupt city manager who formerly used it for his side hustle roasting nuts. It was not zoned for eateries. It’s a whole thing.) Dairy Queen was always my family’s choice—it’s good to have lots of options for a large group.
I’m realizing 90% of my fast food vocabulary is from the dollar menu of the 2010s. You don’t grow up in a giant, frugal family without the coming of age moment where you’re allowed TWO things from the dollar menu.
Now, I can order whatever I want. (With a gift card I’d received as a thank you for a volunteer commitment, like a real grownup.)
Ice cream in a parked car is all the good parts of being a kid. A callback to hometown celebrations and long drives home from big city shopping trips. Only worried about how to make your treat last as you zip home, passenger in the dark.
My Favorite Genre of Walk…
…Is the one where only half the group is walking but they make it happen anyway.
Improv
I have a delicious stretch of unscheduled time before I start a new job next month (I’ll be writing full time at MJM!), and have been swallowed by a quilt project.
It started with a different quilt. I wondered if I had enough pieced blocks to make it twin size, and the easiest method of checking is pulling out a twin-sized layer of batting (the squishy stuff that gets sandwiched between the cloth bits) and laying your pieces on top. Actually, now that I think of it, that’s probably a really inefficient method, but it’s what I did.
So I pulled a fluffy layer of batting from a plastic tub of quilt parts in the basement, and wouldn’t you know, my project was nowhere near big enough. You know what was big enough? All the chunks of quilted bits residing in that same plastic tub.
So I’m finishing this totally different quilt. One I once thought I’d get done in time to display in my Senior Thesis art show. Here I am, 5 living spaces and 6 years later, piecing the final bits.
I began the quilt in the Jeschke Fine Arts Building, a practical building with wide tiled hallways, cold concrete floors, 2 floors squeaking by ADA compliance with the aid of a terribly inefficient back hall route, and swaths of studio space.
As a senior, I had a full printmaking table by a giant window and a track-lit painting corner upstairs, and a moodier drawing setup in the basement. I listened to a lot of Wild Party. My favorite shirt said ‘Happy Alone’ and I believed it. When I packed up the unfinished quilt, all I knew was that I was heading to a summer internship and a new house with roommates I loved.
I sewed a few quilt pieces into a pouch that hot post-graduation summer in our grody rental duplex. Two girls were away for the summer. My remaining roommate was so tired from her summer job painting houses she’d come home, shower, and sleep, killing our plans of a joyous chatty summer. We rationed AC, committed to saving money. I hung around this guy I’d met in the last months of school and pretended it was platonic, glad to not be alone.
The whole thing felt dense, slow and cloudy around the edges—the boy, the sticky humidity of the duplex growing mold on windowsills, the steam of the iron in already heavy kitchen air.
I moved my plastic tub of quilt pieces again when, months later, water dripped from our living room light fixture and our property manager told us it’d take a month or two to get snow off the roof and fix it. We broke the lease, too nervous to fight for our security deposit, and found ourselves in a home still mid-renovation, a place offered by the very kind landlord of a roommate’s boyfriend.
After that temporary spot, my roommates peeled away, one to get married, one wanting a cheap house close to the college campus, another wanting a cat (I’m allergic). I moved to a house with a stranger, recommended by a girl I went to church with. I pulled out the quilt pieces and spread them across the floor of my bedroom—I sewed with my door shut, not sure my housemate would get it.
Now, I’m in that housemate’s bridal party. I’ve embroidered potatoes on a sweatshirt for her. She gets it.
Now, the quilted blocks fill my own home’s kitchen floor. I couldn’t make the same color or piecing choices if I began it now. They were made by someone else. I can still feel the energy in the wild stripes and bright blocks. I can see my confidence. I can feel how much I loved it, the whole immersive process.
Improv quilting is one choice at a time, reaching for a piece that plays off the last.
With some distance from the initial piecing, I lay the large blocks together decisively. I could arrange them many ways, but I don’t move them much. There is no perfect arrangement, just the one I create today. Me of 6 years ago would do it differently.
Me right now builds off of that past self’s work, all her places.
The quilt fabric smells like basement when the iron steam hits. It’ll take a good wash or two to purge the years of lingering.
In these bright days between jobs, I’m reminded of all the choices that got me to today. Devoid of sureness, following one thing after the other. Sometimes I want to go back in time and warn her away from things. But mostly, I want to pull her in by the arms, look into her face, and say “It turned out. We got somewhere good. You don’t have to worry. No, I’m not going to tell you how. You’ll figure it out.”
And right now as I look toward a new job—the result of a hunch more than a 5 year plan—I imagine my future self would grab me by the hands and tell me the same thing today. And then she’ll go finish the quilt I started this year.
Elsewhere
Quilts need soundtracks. Piecing on this one was accompanied by Waxahatchee, a new-to-me artist, discovered after a few people whose taste I trust mentioned her stuff. It’s Americana-ish but hard to define, by design, the way all good stuff is. Start with Right Back to It. The best thing about reverse-hipstering and discovering late is that there’s a whole rich backlog to dig into.
Surprisingly killer: Justin Timberlake’s Tiny Desk Concert. The energy crammed behind the desk!
Why do new cars look like this? "Or, put another way: Just commit to a bright, beautiful, audacious color, no need to dampen it with these swag-depleting grays!"
(The most entertaining thing I read all month. The phrase ‘wet putty whip’ now runs through my head every time I see a new car in the wild.)
A wacko intersection for safety’s sake (according to the city’s mayor, anyway).
Artist Victoria Crayhon co-opts marquees to display poetic messages.
Thanks for being here! What restaurants did your hometown have? Are they all structurally sound?
🧡, Ten
You brought back so many childhood fast food memories for me! My hometown had most of the big chains plus a few local ones. Now I'm partial to Cookout which is apparently only in southern states but it's fantastic.
loved reading about your quilt coming together and seeing it evolve as well!