Entry 1

Dear Dairy,

               You’re probably wondering why I’m addressing you, a dairy, in my diary. Why I’m telling you about what’s going on in my life, all about my thoughts and feelings. If someone wants to address something like this to something other than another person, even a fictional person, then a diary would seem a more natural choice than a dairy, certainly a more common choice, a more conventional choice.

               But I have my reasons! Well, I have my singular reason. I have a reason.

               The last time I kept a diary of any kind was in third grade. I took the diary to school with me exactly one time and what a mistake that turned out to be.

When I took it to school, I had only been writing in my diary for a week and a half, but I was very pleased with what I had written so far. I felt those ten entries revealed me to be a much more interesting person than my classmates believed me to be.

So my idea was this: what if I wrote “my diary” in big, tantalizing letters on the cover of my diary, brought it to school with me, and then left it conspicuously unguarded on my desk while taking an excused solo bathroom break? Surely someone would be too tempted to resist. Maybe someone—probably Muriel Jands—would even read passages out loud, hoping to humiliate me by exposing my secrets, my crushes, my most shameful anxieties to the whole class. But, of course, I wouldn’t be humiliated. There was nothing humiliating in my diary. Everything I had written in it was smart and cool and good. I would return, I assumed, from my appropriately lengthy bathroom break to find my peers awaiting me with newfound admiration gleaming in their gazes.

But what actually happened was I came back from the bathroom and everyone laughed at me because it turned out that although there was nothing humiliating in my diary, there was something humiliating on the outside of my diary. Because instead of writing “my diary” in big tantalizing letters on the cover, I had accidentally written “my dairy.” I knew how to spell “diary,” as the beginnings of all ten entries in my diary could easily attest, but my classmates wouldn’t let it go, even those who were much worse spellers than I was, which was most of them. It was a stupid mistake, but not a mistake of ignorance, it was a mistake of carelessness caused by my excitement to execute my plan to use my diary to improve everyone’s opinion of me. Which is the opposite of what happened.

That humiliation was enough to turn me against diaries for the next twenty years. But you know what, dear dairy? I’ve let the cruelty of children control me for too long. I’m going to write in a diary again. I’m doing it right now. But I’m not going to stop there. I’m going to address each entry to an imaginary dairy—that’s you!—as a way to reclaim my dignity. I will rob that incident of its power over me by making light of it. I will not pretend it never happened. I will instead embrace that moment as an important piece of my overall story.

And, well, who knows? Maybe addressing these entries to you, an imaginary dairy, will be fun? I think it will be. I think it already is. It’s fun to imagine who or what I’m even addressing. Is it the people who run the dairy? Is it the main building? The buildings collectively? Are the cows involved? Or is there some larger entity called “the dairy” that encompasses all of these elements collectively?

Maybe I could better answer that question if I knew more about dairies. I’ve only been to a few, and to be honest, I’ve only been in the store portions of those dairies, the parts where you can buy ice cream cones and sundaes (I prefer cones). My actual experiences with dairies aren’t much different than my experiences with ice cream shops other than the fact that the dairies were located in rural areas where I knew cows to be close by.

I guess since this communication is going to be pretty one-sided—OK, entirely one-sided—I’m not going to learn anything about dairies from you, dear dairy, but maybe this arrangement will motivate me to do some research, maybe it’ll motivate me to go tour a working dairy. Or maybe it’ll just motivate me to go get some more ice cream!

All right, dear dairy, tomorrow I’ll focus more on telling you about my life. I just thought it best for this entry to lay out all the “whys” and “what fors” and to set a precedent for honesty and transparency in the process. Good night!

Entry 2

Dear Dairy,

               I have a confession to make. Yesterday, I concluded my first entry by talking about honesty and transparency, but if I’m going to be honest and transparent, then I need to be honest and transparent about something I failed to mention yesterday. Not that I lied or anything, but I guess, looking back at yesterday’s entry, I can see myself being evasive. And I remember feeling like I should mention something and choosing not to, feeling too embarrassed to tell you about it. But not telling you about it is contrary to everything I’m trying to do here, it’s the exact opposite of facing my long-held diary-related shame in a way that empowers me to

               I sat for a long time just now trying to figure out how to finish the above sentence and I couldn’t decide what facing my long-held diary-related shame is supposed to empower me to do. So let’s just say that it’s supposed to empower me, and then once I’m empowered, maybe I’ll know what to do next. Maybe that’s what I’ll be empowered to do first. I’ll be empowered to know how to apply my empowerment.

               Anyway, so I told you, dear dairy, that I’ve only ever been to the store parts of dairies, the parts where they sell ice cream cones and sundaes and also milk and cheese and so on, and that’s true, that part isn’t dishonest, but what I didn’t tell you is that I had the opportunity to tour an actual working dairy on a fifth-grade field trip. I didn’t take advantage of that opportunity.

But I just knew what it was going to be like, dear dairy. Even though two years had passed since the diary/dairy incident, which is a long time when you’re a kid, the teasing had only just started to fade, and I knew that if I were to allow myself to be bodily present in a real functioning dairy with my classmates—some of whom had been in the room on that fateful day in third grade, some of whom had only heard about it, and some of whom probably had no idea why other kids made dairy jokes at me but laughed and clumsily joined in anyway—then it would all come back in force, maybe even stronger than before, and the story would be given new life, which would give it staying power, which might make it persist into middle school, high school, college, adulthood. What if my future spouse were to occasionally make gentle dairy jokes at me and I’d be forced to choke down my rage and pain so he wouldn’t see how deeply such a silly thing had affected me?

So, fearing that setting foot in a dairy would make people permanently associate me with dairies, I conspired to make my mother believe that, in addition to taking us fifth graders to tour a dairy, the field trip was also going to include a trip to see a PG-13-rated movie in the theater, specifically a movie the trailer of which I had seen her react to with open contempt when it played on TV. I won’t explain my entire process for making my mother believe this, but it required subtle manipulation on my part, I had to make it seem like I was trying to conceal the movie-going portion of the field trip from her without pushing her to call the school to complain. And I nailed it, dear dairy, I got that thicker-than-average thread through the narrower-than-average eye of that needle. By which I mean my mother refused to sign the permission slip that would have allowed me to go on the field trip but wouldn’t tell me why, although, of course, I knew why.

So I avoided the dairy.

The calculated risk, of course, was that my classmates would note my absence from the dairy field trip and harass me about ducking it, immediately seeing through my ruse in a way my mother had not. My apparent fear of accompanying them to a dairy, thereby robbing them of their fun, might invite more abuse in the long run. That was the risk. But my thought process, as I recall, was something like this: if I went with them to the dairy, then they would spend the whole time taunting me about dairies, guaranteed, but if I skipped the dairy, then they might taunt me about that, but also, something else might happen.

And I lucked out. Something else happened.

None of my classmates mentioned my absence from the field trip the next day at school because all the discussion was about how Willy Groffeths tried to touch an udder and the cow kicked him in the thigh and he started crying out in another language which no one knew he knew, and which, when he calmed down, he denied knowing. So at recess, rather than everyone following me around asking me why I didn’t go to the dairy, everyone followed Willy around asking what that other language he knew was.

And I’m not even ashamed to say that I joined in. That is, I followed Willy around and asked what that other language he knew was. He even tried to put that heat back on me: “Why weren’t you at the dairy? Hey everyone, why wasn’t Chloe at the dairy?” But it didn’t work. Especially once I asked him not what the language was, but what he had actually been crying out in the language, and more specifically, had it been cuss words? A masterstroke. He knew it immediately. I saw his spirit collapse.

He should have shown everyone the hoof-shaped bruise on his thigh, but he’d worn jeans and wasn’t able to roll them up high enough, couldn’t pull them down to show off the wound without revealing his underwear and incurring worse consequences. Should have worn shorts, even in a near-record-cold April.

Anyway…

I don’t regret not going to the dairy. Or rather, I don’t hold not going to the dairy against my fifth-grade self. She was doing what she thought best. But I do regret not telling you about all of this yesterday, dear dairy, or I at least regret not mentioning it in perhaps less detail. But now that’s rectified, I feel better about the foundation I’ve established with you, and maybe tomorrow I can write about something other than my own complicated history with dairies. Maybe, other than addressing you at the beginning and occasionally throughout, I won’t write about dairies at all!

Entry 3

Dear Dairy,

               Today was not a good day, but it wasn’t bad in any interesting ways. And I know there’s no expectation that a diary be interesting, but even if I can face the embarrassment of my third-grade spelling error, I guess I can’t shake my third-grade hope that someone other than me will someday read this and find me witty, perceptive, attractive, sharp. Maybe, as I get further into this project, this self-imposed pressure to sound interesting will fall away. I hope it does. But for now, all I can say is that it is beyond my ability to catalogue today’s mild indignities in any way that would not read as trite and tedious.

               I could write about my thoughts and feelings more generally, zooming out to ponder my life on a scale beyond this one day, but no, I can’t do that. Today’s indignities, mild as they were, will shade everything the wrong color, even if only mildly wrong. But, dear dairy, maybe you’re saying, well, wouldn’t a good day also potentially shade everything the wrong color, but differently wrong? How would it be possible to even identify the kind of day I would need to experience to bring a clear-eyed perspective to a discussion of my big-picture thoughts and feelings?

               I don’t know. I just don’t want to talk about myself, dear dairy. I’m not in the mood.

I know I finished yesterday’s entry by saying that maybe today I wouldn’t write about dairies at all, but writing about dairies sounds great right now. Let’s talk about you, dear dairy. Not that you really exist, of course, and not that you can supply any input on what we can pretend you’re like. But I can speculate, can’t I? Can’t I tell you what I imagine you’re like? Because you aren’t just any dairy to me, dear dairy. I wouldn’t address my diary to just any dairy. But that isn’t to say you’re perfect, either. I wouldn’t want you to be perfect. If you were a perfect dairy, I’d address my diary to a different dairy. I would not feel comfortable sharing the kinds of things I hope to eventually share with you with a perfect dairy. Not that I’m an expert on what a perfect dairy would look like, of course. My lack of expertise about dairies has been well established.

               But I do imagine you as having room for improvement, dear dairy. For example, you don’t serve ice cream cones and sundaes in your store. You only sell ice cream in cartons and tubs for customers to take home. But I’m sure lots of customers would like to be able to order a scoop or two in a cone or dish and eat it right there, maybe at a little table, maybe just standing around in your gravel parking lot on a nice day. And I know it would attract more customers. And I realize from your point of view, you might be thinking, if you could think, dear dairy, well, Chloe admitted that her only experience with dairies is buying ice cream cones from the store parts, so of course she would imagine me without that feature in order to enable herself to recommend the only thing she knows how to recommend. Like that saying about when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you know about dairies is buying ice cream cones from the store parts, then every dairy to which you imagine yourself addressing a diary lacks that aspect so you can make yourself feel useful by recommending it be added.

               But that’s not fair, dear dairy. I’m being honest and transparent with you, I promise. I really do imagine you as a nice, profitable, mid-sized dairy with a cute, cozy store where customers can buy milk, cheese, butter, sour cream, and ice cream in cartons and tubs to take home, but not ice cream in dishes or cones to eat right there. And to be fair, I also picture your store as having a good candy selection, t-shirts with the name of your dairy on them (whatever that is) and other things, too. And most of your income doesn’t come from the store, of course, it comes from contracts? That you have with vendors? Something like that.

But even though the on-site store isn’t the most important part of your company, I don’t think that means you should just shrug off my suggestion. Because I really do think it would be nice. I think your customers would like it. I think, because of their positive experiences eating ice cream cones and sundaes at your store, they’d be more likely to buy your other products when they see them at grocery stores, to recommend your products to friends and family members, and to return to your store again and again. You would build loyalty to your brand.

               Like, I get that I don’t know much about dairies, I get that you definitely know more about the dairy business as a whole, but I know I’m right about this. Sometimes you just need an outsider’s eye. It’ll be worth it, I guarantee. At least give it some thought. Maybe this is an idea you’ve already had that you just haven’t taken the time to implement. Maybe there are logistical complications that I don’t know about, although how challenging could these complications really be when I’ve seen many inferior dairies that serve ice cream in cones and dishes to be eaten right there with no apparent problems at all? There’s no excuse not to. No valid excuse. At least look into it!

Entry 4

Dear Dairy,

Today was better, but without the context of what happened yesterday it doesn’t really make sense to contrast them, and I’m definitely not going to circle back to fill you in on all the stuff that happened yesterday, which would be no less tedious today than it would have been yesterday.

               But all that aside, I’ve been thinking more about my suggestion that your store sell ice cream in cones and dishes, not just cartons and tubs to take home. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that you should do it. I really don’t see a downside. I don’t understand why you haven’t already done it. Before I even mentioned it, I mean. You already have the store. You already have the ice cream. Surely you’re aware of the common practices of other dairies. It really seems like somewhere along the way, someone in charge over there made a conscious decision to not sell ice cream in a way that would allow people to conveniently eat it right there.

               OK, so with that established, I have to continue wondering why. I just can’t make sense of it. You like making money, right? If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have started a business. But maybe making money isn’t your top priority. Maybe you’re more focused on making people happy. Ice cream cones make people happy! As do ice cream sundaes in dishes. Is the problem just the initial cost to get it up and running? Surely you can afford a freezer, a scoop, some cones, some dishes, and some spoons. Your store is already staffed with teenagers! Are you unwilling to devote time to training them to scoop ice cream? That’s ten minutes! Maybe ten minutes! And it would all pay for itself in the first week, I bet. With the traffic you already get? Plus the increased traffic when word gets out that customers can eat the ice cream right there without having to drive it all the way home while it melts in the back seat unless they had the foresight to bring a cooler? It might pay for itself in the first day.

               I’m not even saying you should break the bank advertising the new ice cream situation. I mean, I think it would almost certainly work out for you, but I’m not going to be pushy about that part. I’m just saying that with nothing more than word of mouth, you’re going to double, triple, quadruple your store’s sales. At which point, yes, you’ll have to hire more staff, you might need more than one teenager working the counter in the store, but at that point, you’ll be ready, you’ll want to.

               I don’t know, this is all making me feel a little crazy. I feel like I’m flailing and shouting to convince a woman dying of thirst to take a drink of cold, clean, free water. I’m marshalling all my rhetorical skill to persuade you to do something obvious. Why do I care more about the ongoing success of your business than you do? Dairies don’t last forever. They come and go. Time passes and they eventually sink into the earth like the rest of us. But there are things you can do to delay that day. How many generations do you want to know first-hand the quality of your products? How many generations do you want to treasure the name of your dairy, whatever it is, in their hearts? Two? Six? Eleven?

               I don’t even think you need waffle cones or sugar cones. Just regular cones and dishes. That will be enough to prove me correct, I’m sure, at which point you’ll be the one scrambling for waffle cones, scrambling for sugar cones, staying up late looking online for other types of cones in which one can serve one’s ice cream for one’s customers to eat right there in one’s store or elsewhere on one’s premises. But I’m not saying you should allow the customers to carry the ice cream around and eat it everywhere. Is that your hang-up? You don’t want customers eating ice cream in certain areas? You don’t want them eating the ice cream near the cows, for example? Well, I don’t know why that would be a problem. People eat ice cream near cows at fairs all the time and I’ve never heard of that being a problem. People carry giant concession-stand-bought ice cream cones right into the livestock barns. The cows don’t care. None of the animals care. No one cares.

               Are you afraid your customers will drip ice cream on your bathroom floors? I hate to break it to you, but your customers are already dripping far worse on your bathroom floors. I won’t list the fluids, but you know which fluids I mean. You may be a dairy, but I’m assuming a certain level of basic knowledge. If you know how to read, I think you know which fluids a person might drip on a bathroom floor. Not even maliciously, not even carelessly. It just happens, it’s part of life. It’s part of having a body. Not the best part, but not the worst part, either. Although I’ll admit it’s definitely on the bad end of the spectrum.

               Anyway.

               Anyway.

               I’ve run out of things to say on this subject. I hope I haven’t annoyed you. I hope you’re not going to deny your customers ice cream cones and sundaes just to demonstrate my lack of control over what you do. I’m on your side! This is a win-win-win-win-win-win…I can’t even count all the people who would win. You, me, the customers, your employees (serving ice cream is fun and will make the customers more friendly), whoever sells you the freezer, whoever sells you the scoop, whoever sells you the cones. As I think it through, the winners just keep piling up. And who loses? People allergic to dairy products? Lactose-intolerant people? Why would they be at a dairy? They just want to see how a dairy works even though they can’t eat any of the food you produce? OK, great, then they can choose to not eat an ice cream cone just like they choose to not eat your cheese or butter or anything else you make. What about the fact that ice cream is unhealthy and a cone or sundae might tempt people trying to watch what they eat in a way that a carton or tub to take home would not? Like, what if they’re able to resist the temptation of the ice cream to take home because the gratification is delayed but they’re unable to resist the temptation of the cone or sundae because the gratification is instant or, depending on how long the line is, at least less delayed than taking the ice cream all the way home unless they live very nearby, which, considering your rural location, few people do?

               You can’t be held responsible for that. Those people are going to get their ice cream somewhere. At least yours has less preservatives, right? Or it’s better for them in some other ways? I’m not an ice cream expert any more than I’m a dairy expert. Maybe if I’d gone on that field trip to the dairy, I’d know more about how ice cream is made, how ice cream fresh from the dairy is nutritionally superior to most big-brand ice cream you see in the store, but on the other hand, how dare you throw that back in my face? I’m not

Entry 5

Dear Dairy,

               This morning, I took some time to read back over the previous four entries in this diary. I have to admit, I was not pleased with what I saw. Especially the two most recent entries, those being entries three and four. One positive is that those two entries show very little of the self-consciousness I’ve talked about hoping to overcome. It was clear, as I read them, that by about half-way through Entry 3, I was no longer concerned with how someone else might perceive me if they were to read my diary. I was writing in a very free, uninhibited way. Unfortunately, the results of that free, uninhibited writing have left me mortified. I even had the following absurd thought: what if Muriel Jands were to find my diary and read it aloud to a room full of people? No one in that room would look at me, upon my arrival, with newfound admiration.

They would instead think me a psycho.

I wish I could claim to have no memory, or very little memory, of writing at such length in an attempt to persuade an imaginary dairy—that’s you, dear dairy—to sell ice cream in cones and dishes so people could eat it right there, but that just isn’t true. I remember doing it. I remember what I was thinking, what I was feeling as I wrote. I remember recognizing what was happening to me and this diary in mid-sentence, I remember flinging my pen away from me as if abruptly realizing it had been manufactured by a company that donates to causes I strongly oppose. In fact, my decision to re-read this diary was made in the hope that what I remembered was incorrect or exaggerated or in some other way less bad than I thought. It was not.

And do you want to know the worst part, dear dairy? Even now, I find myself wanting to launch into another defense of my idea. My ice cream idea, I mean. I don’t mean to over-clarify, but I’m talking about the idea for you to use your store to sell ice cream in cones and dishes for people to eat right there. Right there at the dairy.

I want to write my way into an argument that will hit home for you. I can’t help but think that if I just keep trying and trying, from every angle I can think of, that I will find the exact combination of words to make you see things how I see things, to make you not just agree with me, but act.

I don’t know why this is so important to me. That would probably be a more productive area for me to explore through uninhibited writing, but don’t count on it, dear dairy. I don’t see that happening.

And I don’t see me writing about anything else, either. Not about how my day has gone, good or bad. Not about my hopes. Not about my dreams. Not about my worries, not about my fears. Not about my thoughts or feelings concerning any subject other than the one subject I’ve managed to consistently address in these pages.

So, that about does it for me and diaries, dear dairy. I thought that addressing my diary to an imaginary dairy would enable me to overcome my decades-long issues with keeping a diary, but what actually happened was that I discovered the issues run much deeper than I thought, but the years have changed them, mutated them into something I can neither control nor understand. I don’t know if this thing with the ice cream is a permanent element of my issues or just how things happened to shake out this time. That said, there will not be a next time. I am forever done, dear dairy, with diaries.

I don’t blame you. I blame myself.

And even now I find myself wanting to add a little caveat where I explain that I actually do partially blame you for not just accepting my suggestion in the spirit in which it was intended. I want to explain to you how if you had accepted my suggestion, then I could have moved on and this diary would have become a document testifying to my coolness, my smartness, my sharpness, or, failing that, my normalness. But I know that isn’t true. How could you have accepted my suggestion? You’re not real. You have no power to accept anything. You have no power to reject anything. You have no power to do or not do anything. You don’t exist.

How can I hold that against you? I do, of course, but how? I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.

Sorry, dear dairy, for dragging you into this. It’s hard for me to say this, which I acknowledge is weird, but in my brain, if not my heart, I know you are innocent.

Entry 6

Dear Dairy,

               You are not innocent. You are not innocent. You exist, dear dairy, and as with the rest of us both fortunate and unfortunate enough to exist, you bear responsibility for what has happened. You exist and I know you exist because I’ve been to you, Hosmer Family Farms Dairy on Long Branch Road in Fruitful County exactly 6.2 miles heading west outside the Brownwood city limits!

               I don’t know how I found you. I mean, I know the series of decisions I made which led me to you, but I don’t know why I made those decisions, not really, although I am suspicious about the actual source of some of my motives. No time for that, though.

               Because I knew it was you the second I set foot in your store, dear dairy. Was there ice cream available for purchase? Oh, of course…as long as I didn’t mind lugging it home in a tub or carton to be opened and eaten at a later hour, possibly even a later date! But what about an ice cream cone or sundae in a dish to eat right there? Not unless I brought my own scoop, cone, and/or dish! Which I had not done, of course, never suspecting that an existing dairy would make the same error I had imagined you to make when I had imagined you were imaginary. Imagine my surprise!

               I approached the bored teenager working the counter, both of her empty hands sized perfectly to wield an ice cream scoop, maybe two ice cream scoops at the same time. I demanded to speak to you. She misunderstood and fetched the owner, Lucille Hosmer herself.

               I won’t recount my monologue. There’s no point. You know my stance, dear dairy, you know my reasoning, you know the breadth of my appeals, both logical and emotional. Lucille listened to all I had to say, nodding gently.

               Then she said they’d already tried selling ice cream in cones and dishes for people to eat right there and that it hadn’t gone well so they’d stopped. I called her a liar. She showed me some marks on the floor that she claimed were evidence of where the ice cream freezer had been installed, but those marks could have been from anything, or almost anything. I again called her a liar, but louder this time. She told me no one had wanted the ice cream served that way. They only wanted to take it home in tubs and cartons. She said they had set up nice tables inside the store—there is ample space, she pointed out the ample space—and out on the patio, but no, no one wanted to stay there to eat the ice cream. I told her that I would have. She said that I was only one person, that I had never been there before, and that, frankly, she hoped I wouldn’t be back. I started in with the “liar” stuff again.

               But I actually think you know all this, dear dairy. You were there, observing, influencing, participating, smiling. All of the above. How could I have ever trusted you enough to open up to you? You used all of this against me. You knew we would cross paths someday. In fact, I think you made sure we would. You made sure we did. And you used everything I’ve told you to coordinate your attacks on my most vulnerable points.

               But now I’ve learned my lesson, dear dairy. Now I know not to tell you what happens next. Now I know to not even hint. I know that what I need to tell you is this: everything is fine, everyone is entitled to their own opinion on how to run a dairy, and you can’t force a dairy to implement your suggestions no matter how good.

How would one even do that?

Where would one even start?

No one knows. Me least of all.