I ducked into a small neighbordhood mart to see if I could get my hands on a couple boxes of Nerds. I’m not sure what else to call it. “Mart,” is just the term of best fit here. “Bodega” seems too New York-ish and “convenience store” just feels wrong. I’m telling you, if you start referring to stores as “marts,” you’ll give yourself a good laugh each and every time you do. It is a hilarious word.
This mart had been something of a haven for us, Lucas and I regularly stopping in to pick up various sundry items, it always feeling like a small victory if they happened to have what we were looking for. This tiny store was, in fact, supremely inconvenient; it was often hit-or-miss as to whether or not they’d have what you needed at any given time. They always had a lot of candy, though.
You know you’re starting to morph into your mother when you begin injecting words like “sundry” into your general vocabulary.
Anyway, it smelled like stale fried things and industrial bathroom cleaner in there; the cigarette smoke from the young employees out back wafted in at regular intervals.
We’d turned a page on the calendar recently – it was now June 2010 – the last month of grad school for me. I had plodded along and made it almost all the way through to the other side. While the unknown of what lay just beyond loomed, scary and threatening to tear at my peace of mind, I looked forward to not having to write any more papers. A lack of group projects also held a strong appeal. All that remained now was a thesis.
ˈthe-sis \: a statement or theory that is put forward as a premise to be maintained or proved.
What the hell was I going to try to prove? To maintain? I’d yet to figure that part out – did not have the slightest scrap of an idea – so I took to procrastination methods both mild and extreme to support me through the fog.
***
A school friend of mine had become intrigued by my recent admission that as a kid in the early nineties, my sweet treat of choice was a Nerds Blizzard from Dairy Queen.
“Nerds?! Nerds in a Blizzard? Wait a minute, was that really a thing?”
“Of course it was. I wouldn’t dare lie about this.” I laughed then, always sufficiently amused by the sheer depth of the rabbit holes we’d fall down during our study sessions.
“They discontinued it, though.” I said. “But you can really ‘Blizzard’ anything, you know? I’m not sure people realize that.”
The electric doorbell was triggered by my entrance into the small, crowded mart. I waved to the cashier, who’s name I never put to memory. He was fulfilling someone’s scratch-off lottery ticket request when I approached the counter, ready to pay for the two large boxes of Nerds which I’d been happy to see were well-stocked in the candy land that was aisle three.
Feeling a little too conspicuous for comfort, I did my best to hide the boxes of candy I was holding. I looked around for something else I could add to my purchase, to somehow water down the awkwardness of the Nerds, which was currently the only thing I was in line to buy, which felt weird, juvenile. I needed a buffer item. My eyes landed on some two-for-one bags of salt and vinegar potato chips and I grabbed them, feeling immediately like less of an oddball.
Did anyone in that store give even a whiff of a shit about what I was holding as I stood there in that line? Of course not. They had their own purchases, buffer items, lives, and thought bubbles to consume them. This truth – the reality of that – didn’t affect my self-consciousness one bit, it didn’t help matters. At 26 years old, I don’t think enough decades had elapsed in my life to afford me the time-earned luxury of not giving a rat’s ass about what others think of me, perfect strangers or otherwise.
I don’t know when one typically gets to that point, the point of true self-assuredness and confidence; finding comfort in your own skin. What’s the median age for that, I wonder? Or maybe it’s that there is a catalyst that battles our insecurities away – like parenthood, or financial success, or maybe a really harrowing health scare. I’d yet to cross any of those bridges, and was still very much clinging to my diffidence, my self-doubt, like a wet blanket dripping with ice water. I still needed buffer items. Those bags of chips crinkled in my hands like grease-slicked, individually packaged totems of Grade A insecurity.
My study buddy had accompanied me on this Nerds acquiring quest and threw up her hands in victory when I emerged from the mart with the neon-hued boxes in tow. The breezy coastal winds whipped my hair into a rat’s nest of tangles that I worked to unsnarl with my fingers once I’d returned to the passenger seat of her gold Honda Accord.
“Success!” She drove us to the nearest Dairy Queen, parking in the spot closest to the entrance. I slid the boxes of pebbled, rainbow-hued candy across the counter as the clerk on duty gave me a quizzical, albeit intrigued-seeming stare. He looked twelve.
“Sorry to throw you a curveball today, fine sir, but I’ve come toting my own mix-ins.”
He stood there just blinking at me, mute. The humming sound of giant industrial freezers that is omnipresent in all Dairy Queens provided the soundtrack of the moment.
“For the Blizzards,” I explained, not sure if he quite got it, not sure that he wasn’t high. “I brought my own candy – these Nerds here – for our Blizzards. DQ used to offer Nerds Blizzards as a flavor option, but you don’t anymore. So here we are. Trust me, this will be your new favorite flavor. You should probably just go ahead and make three – one for each of us, and one for yourself.
So that’s what he did. He pushed all of the buttons and pulled all of the requisite levers. He dumped the contents of each box into our large cups and crafted the custom order with a precision and care that was, admittedly, impressive.
“This is brain fuel, no doubt. Thesis papers better watch out!” My friend beamed with the spontaneity of it all. How adorable we were, us youths. How very charming. Me on the other hand? I was fraught with anxiety over the one long paper that stood between me and my receipt of the other single piece of paper that would mark my two years of graduate work. The period on the end of the self-imposed scholarly sentence.
Sitting down to write can sometimes feel like you’re entering a sort of faceoff with a faceless adversary. It can intimidate, it can frustrate, it can devastate, it can destroy. It is an immensely powerful thing, the blank page. Writing really can be thrilling, it absolutely can. Not always, maybe not even most of the time. But when you hit your stride and things click, it brings about a degree of satisfaction, a high, that is hard to find anywhere else. One by one, you string letters together in their parallel rows; they march in form across the page. An army of words defending a world created by you.
In the best of times, it can pitch you forward over cliffs of self discovery and growth. In the worst, it can spin you around and around in circles. Even though it feels impossible at times, it’s worth fighting for.
My study friend cracked herself up as she pretended to applaud the boy as he turned each Blizzard upside down, demonstrating the concrete-like consistency, which both of us cared about not at all.
We deemed him the Prince of Dairy Queen and then all knocked our paper cups together in mock cheers, celebrating his most esteemed coronation and the bespoke concoctions that we had before us.
The room grew quiet as we each sampled our Blizzards, pulling large, candy-coated spoonfuls of the ice cream up and into our mouths, brains primed and ready for a freezing. I pointed out the true appeal of a Nerds Blizzard then, which is that, as you work your way down, the little gravely bits of multi-colored candy leave trails of their coating behind them, staining the creamy soft serve in a very wild-looking, Jackson Pollock sort of way. A hand-held polychromatic meteor shower, set against a vanilla sky. The affection I’d had as a child had not gone anywhere, it seemed. Wonder held its ground.
“Wow,” said the Prince.
“Yeah really. Wow!” concurred study buddy. “This is honestly like, so so much better than you think it’s going to be. You’re really onto something here! You should, you know, write a cookbook or something.”
“Ah yes, I can see it now … A Cookbook for Nerds,” I joked. She’d laughed at that, the throw-your-head-back kind that puts your whole throat on display. The Nerds had colored her tongue a deep purplish blue that made her look like a giraffe. The Prince laughed, too.
“I’d buy that book,” he said without looking up from his ice cream. We realized then that, with the exception of “Wow,” those were the only words he’d spoken since we arrived.
Thanking him for indulging us, we popped the Blizzards in some to-go containers. We had intentions of revisiting them later, when we were deep in the throes of thesis writing and would need them most. We bowed to his royal highness and turned to leave. The freezers hummed at our backs, sending us on our way.
***
