My niece’s boyfriend thinks Dairy Queen has the best hamburgers in the world. He’ll take a DQ burger over anybody else’s. A lot of people agree with him because Dairy Queens are seen as frequently in these small West Texas towns as the solitary traffic light on Main Street. I prefer their ice-tea, although I agree their burgers are just fine. Large, unsweet tea. It may be the ice I like and not the tea. I’m not sure.
Some afternoons–especially if I need to make a last minute 3:00 o’clock run to the Post Office–I go through the drive-through window at the Dairy Queen to get me one large unsweet tea. There usually isn’t much of a line or a wait, unless it’s Happy Hour and the school crowd has beat me to DQ. More often, it’s the old guys drinking coffee inside as they talk about bad crops and bad neighbors and bad knees.
One of the best reads I’ve had in a long time is by Archer City boy-made-good Larry McMurtry of “Lonesome Dove” book and TV fame. About fifteen years after he earned his chops with “Lonesome Dove,” he wrote a more personal and more philosophical little book that he called “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.” It was never made into a move, like McMurtry’s “The Last Picture Show,” a downer of a story about a movie theater in Archer City, and the less-than-picture-perfect life of a couple of teenagers in town. It won two Academy Awards.
McMurtry claims he read the writings of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in the Dairy Queen in Archer City on afternoons when he’d gone there to see the local crowd and to have some coffee. The philosopher made him think, which is what philosophy is all about–the art of thinking. In the book McMurtry ponders the dying of small towns like Archer City and the simpler way of life of locals and where in the hell everything is headed in a country where bigger is better. With six decades behind him and a lot less in front of him–conditions great for philosophy–McMurtry looks back and looks ahead and considers how long his impaired heart will last and if Archer City will last any longer than his heart. You read that book and you walk away with a greater respect for the Dairy Queen, or surely for the way of life that the Dairy Queen in small town Texas epitomized before the world developed a serious case of acid reflux.
Like I said, I drink Dairy Queen’s unsweet tea, not the coffee, and I don’t read philosophy books there either, but I do drive away from the DQ thinking about a lot of things. There is something about a Dairy Queen, I believe, that makes you ponder life’s big questions. Maybe it’s in the water. I like to think the slower pace and the smaller feel and the bigger smiles at the DQ are what sets the mind to take a long hard look at life in general and turns us into plastic chair philosophers.
One of those big thoughts seems to cross my mind as I drive away with my unsweet tea. Here’s the reason. When I pull up to the drive through window of the DQ, I wait maybe a minute. Then, a woman–I don’t know her name–opens the window and hands me my large unsweet tea. The smile she gives me is sweetener enough. Here’s the thing. I don’t have to tell her what I want. I don’t have to ask for the tea. She apparently recognizes my old car and she brings me my large tea without sweetener and without a single word from me. That small act of kindness on her part makes me wonder–in the true sense of the word. I am surprised by this simple but exquisite, unexpected, inexplicable gesture of goodness. That Styrofoam container of unsweet tea is as holy as it gets. Like Franny tried to make Zooey understand, it’s the love that consecrates the chicken soup.
For me, one of the most troubling and most confounding and most challenging words from that carpenter-turned-second-career-philosopher-turned-Savior of this going-to-hell-in-a-hand-basket-world is the time he said to his wild and wooly followers, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” It has to be one of the most enigmatic, just-doesn’t-feel-right utterances he ever made. Or, so I thought–until I met the woman at the window of the Dairy Queen.
This Jewish philosopher–sounding a lot like the Buddha who also spoke in conundrums and sometimes in fortune cookie aphorisms–would have us believe the wild belief that our God knows each one of us so well that we don’t have to give him an oral argument on what and why we need something right now. He has our ice-tea ready and waiting for us. All we have to do is drive by and he’ll hand it to us with a smile on his face.
Something in us makes us believe the opposite–that the Great and the Awesome One who is Other and who is in charge of answering our prayers has to be convinced by our contrition or by our conniving that we really need what we’re begging from him. That attitude or approach, the Galilean named Yeshua bar Joseph tells us, turns us into babblers or pagans or lawyers like the Pharisees. The Giver doesn’t like bribes or bullies or big mouths because his generosity comes from a deep well of goodness that never dries up, but flows continuously from his heart to our parched lips without a word off our tongues.
Somewhere, sometime, somehow we turned the source of answered prayers into an impersonal, impatient, and practical dispenser of goods, too much like the utilities person we try to convince we need a few more days to pay our bill or, you know, surely our check got lost in the mail. Perhaps it’s our insecurity in believing we’re worth all that much to him, or our doubts that he’s interested, or our adolescent minds that coax us into arguing even when arguments aren’t necessary or helpful. Whatever the cause, we pile up words like we’re scrabble players out for the double-valued words instead of beloved children of a proud parent who knows more about us than we know about ourselves and who knows what we really need is to be held in his arms to get us through a bad night’s sleep. Our Father knows what we need before we ask him. His son gave us his word on it.
That gentle carpenter with a soft spot for short people, working girls, and guys whose minds were clouded by too much booze or too much something was so serious in what he was saying that he issued a command prior to his statement to chill out. That command generally is overlooked because it sounds like bad advice. Here’s what he said–“Do not be like them.” The “them” here refers to those babblers earlier referred to–people a lot like us who put more stock in word power than in celestial largesse.
When we behave like that–like answered prayers depend on our fluency in celestial language or on our big vocabulary or on our argumentative skills–we end up in the same ugly place where big talkers and big-egoed politicians do at the end of the day–in a seedy bar where words are used to manipulate and to move someone to our way of thinking. The Maker of the high heavens and all the earth below surely deserves better treatment and more respect than a rambling argument in a dive.
I am nobody’s fool. I know we–more times than not–don’t get the answers to our prayers that we wanted. But we were not promised everything we wanted. We were promised everything we needed. And when we’re able to accept with gratitude and with grace from the all-knowing God what we need, even if it isn’t what we want, then we have reached a level of spiritual confidence and deep trust that befits old friends and old soldiers and old dogs. That point came home to me the afternoon I decided I wanted a hot fudge sundae instead of the unsweet tea. The window opened and the woman gave me my unsweet tea. I drove away with the calm certainty that she knew what I needed, not what I wanted.
I just know that after a trip to the Dairy Queen for my unsweet tea, my life is much sweeter. That woman knows me and she knows what I need. I don’t have to say a word. She comes to the window, hands me my tea, and makes my life better, lighter, fuller. It is an intimate moment–without a single word said.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 