Pizza Kings and Dairy Queens

 

This is actually an abandoned Dairy Queen, not Pizza King, but I promise I'll circle back around to this.

Yesterday, my sister and I helped my mom out with a craft fair she was selling at.  We live in a suburb that is doing everything in its power to appear sleek and modern and artificially create a sense of culture and failing completely.  However, this fair we were working was at a 152-year-old covered bridge just outside the county seat, and I am constantly reminded of how quickly Indiana becomes rural.  How quickly it becomes a John Mellencamp song.  You know what I mean?  It's all little pink houses.  It's all farmland and trees and old bridges over the White River.  

It's the magic of the Midwest.

I'm someone who happens to think Indiana is incredibly beautiful.  While there are things I absolutely hate about my state (such as Republican supermajorities), there's something about crossing over these old bridges that have been sitting there for a century and a half, under a canopy of trees, over the main tributary to the Wabash.  Living here, you learn to appreciate the beauty of the farmlands and sunsets over a flat horizon.  I went to IU, and southern Indiana is all hills and limestone and the best sunsets I have seen in my life.  There are glacial lakes, deep ravines, and corn fields full of cryptids.  (Probably.  Maybe.  Who knows.)

And then there's places like Noblesville.

When I was in high school, we called Noblesville "Nobletucky" because I guess we needed someone to look down on and everyone decided that Noblesville was just full of rednecks, as if the good folks of Fishers aren't a bunch of new money crackers.  But I've always liked Noblesville - it's got a lot of nice old houses, a real town square, the county fairgrounds, and, well, the last covered bridge in the county.  And we here in Indiana love our covered bridges.  

See, the way I see it, even if we are all a bunch of crackers, at least Noblesville has its covered bridge and its fairs.  It embraces the ruralness of our state.  What the fuck does Fishers have?  I love it because it's where I'm from, but I sometimes hate it because every little piece of ourselves that was authentically ours is being stripped away and gentrified.

Anyway.

After the fair yesterday, we went into town to pick up Pizza King for dinner.  Now, if you're not from Indiana and you've never been to Pizza King, I'm sorry for you.  You're missing out.  It's an Indiana pizza chain, and until recently, the closest one to us was in Noblesville, which automatically makes them the superior town.  (We have one now, but, like...it's new, so while it would taste the same, it's not really the same.  If you know what I mean.)  There's just something about, it, man...eating Pizza King makes me feel like I'm living in 1980.  Like Jimmy Carter is president and I just saw Ordinary People.

They don't deliver, so after we went to Barnes and Noble, we sat outside and ordered over the phone for pickup, then we went to Meijer so I could grab what I needed to make cinnamon rolls this morning.  Then we drove to the restaurant, and stepping inside that building is like using a time machine.  I hadn't been inside in a while, but it was exactly the same as it was the last time I had been, about...oh, ten years ago.  Maybe more.  The same beige and wood-paneled walls, the same low lighting and those hanging lamps with the flowery designs on them that you see in every pizza place.  And I can't imagine that the Pizza King has ever looked any different.

And that's how it is here.

The abandoned Dairy Queen comes into all this as we were driving to the restaurant.  We come up to sit beside it as we're waiting at a stoplight, and I look out the window and see an abandoned DQ during golden hour with this on its sign:

"Thanks for your support."

For whatever reason, I felt compelled to take a picture.  I think maybe it was the message on the sign and its heart wrenching simplicity, or the lighting, or just the sad knowledge that one can't get a Blizzard from there anymore, but my sister and I both agreed that there was something sad but beautiful about it.  There's something about abandoned places, about old towns that quickly turn into farms and rural routes.  Something about Pizza Kings that never change and never will, and that's why you know the food will always be good.

And that's Indiana.  It's sad, but it's beautiful, with it's abandoned Dairy Queens and farmland sunsets.