Sometimes we don’t miss really something in life until we lose it or forget about it.
The other night while my wife Pat and I were watching TV, a commercial came on and it jogged my memory about a place I went to fairly frequently as a kid.
I really don’t pay much attention to commercials unless it’s really clever, or cute like the ones with dogs or other animals in them. There wasn’t anything particularly special about this one the other night either.
It just happened to remind me how much I enjoyed walking down to a Dairy Queen with my grandmother and granddad to get a chocolate covered ice cream cone. That was a big deal when I was around 4, 5 and 6 years old.
Of course it’s not now. One can go most anywhere and get a chocolate covered cone. I think, if memory serves me right, it was called a chocolate dip cone.
When I spent time with those grandparents, we’d wander down there on a warm summer evening pretty often. It was on North Pennsylvania in Oklahoma City about a block or so south of NW 10th Street where they lived.
Not sure if it’s even there anymore because it’s been a number of years since I drove down Pennsylvania or 10th Street in that area. I do know that it was still there for many, many years into my adult years because occasionally we would drive by it when we were in Oklahoma City.
There was nothing special about it, other than I really enjoyed walking down with them when I was young and getting that chocolate dip cone.
By the time I was playing Little League baseball in the spring and summer, another DQ popped up that our baseball team would go to after we had won our game.
It had various flavors of slushes and we could a big one for a quarter. Cherry and lime slushes were my favorites, but I enjoyed some of the others as well.
The last time I remember going to a DQ was a few years back. Pat and I and some friends had gone to Texas for the weekend. On our way back, we stopped and had lunch at one not too far from Oklahoma.
We all talked about how long it had been since we visited a DQ. Each of us agreed it had been a long time.
But it brought back some pleasant memories of good times.
It’s funny how something like wanting TV for a while jogged our memories and got us to thinking about those times.