How I Retired And Saved Mankind

I am the very model of a modern major pharmacist
I’m armed with information considered fundamentalist
of uses and abuses and all things memorizable
of dosages that are toxic I know what’s over-sizable.
I decipher scribbles to others quite illegible
am conversant with insurance cards often ineligible
of itches that are topical or twitches that are tropical
I know what is historical from those things just hysterical,
an alchemist, an herbalist, occasionally a sorcerist
I am the very model of a modern major pharmacist.

Ray Robinson, the prize fighter, retired dozens of times. He became famous for his comebacks, alone. Certain athletes don’t know when to stop. 35 years after DiMaggio left the game he was making more money than ever signing baseballs. Dick Cheney emerged from his undisclosed location and can’t shut up. The curtain will never go down on Angela Lansbury.

When I walked away it was because I was a menace to society.

I sold my store in 1997 to a Russian family. Within months English became a second language. Das vidania (goodbye) and spa‘sibo (thank you) didn’t get me very far. It was as if I fell to earth in Odessa in a Black Sea of ink. The whiff of old world herbs filled the store. Where I smelled Valerian, they smelled a buck. Over the next ten years, working for the new owners, the volume of prescriptions tripled. Our Russian patients made an easy transition from Communism to Medi-Cal without missing an irregular heart beat

Both Russian and the vocabulary of my profession had become foreign to my ears. Over my five decades behind the counter I had witnessed a total transmorgrification of the deliberate pharmacist who weighed everything into the fast lane assembly-line factory of today which has been hi-jacked by the insurance industry.

After reducing my hours to one day-a-week I finally retired in 2007. New medications with contraindications and side effects appeared on the shelf faster than I could count to twelve. It was my hour to leave.

There was a time when I was a good pharmacist. No, really, I was. The virtue I possessed, and possibly my only asset, was that I had learned how to listen empathetically. I heard people and they felt it. As for the essential expertise, if I didn’t know it I could find it quickly. When I couldn’t attend to my customer/patients I knew I had lost my reason for being there.

Looking back I recognize that my enthusiasm for pharmacy was never at a high level. It was always the relationships that enlivened me. At seventeen I was a man-child when I made the decision to pursue my father’s profession. Having now left it all behind I find that I am unlearning the nomenclature at a rapid rate. I lost approximately a fact-a-day so that at the end of six months I didn’t know much of anything and I think my small universe is all the better for it.

I’ve got me on the list.
The weary pharmacist
and he never will be missed
I never will be missed.