Midway

Six months after Pearl Harbor the U.S. defeated the Japanese at the battle for Midway Island. It would seem foolish to say it was a turning point in the war, yet it was. That name Midway became a symbol to rally our forces in the Pacific Ocean.

A few months later a new movie house opened in my neighborhood named Midway theater and a couple of blocks from there a pharmacy renamed itself Midway Pharmacy.

I worked in that store while attending college. It was a typical 1930s drugstore complete with fifteen stools at the soda fountain. I remember the soda jerk who greeted every customer with, Thanks for coming in today. His name was Buddy and he lived it.

My time at Midway Pharmacy was also midway for me at Brooklyn College of Pharmacy. By 1952-53. it was increasingly clear to me that the profession I had entered was no longer the one I would be practicing. Pharmacy, as I knew it, had died along the way. 

The mortar and pestle would soon fall into disuse. Even the torsion scale would rarely be used. Apothecary jars would disappear and, over time, that distinct drugstore smell vanished as fountains became a relic of a bygone age. Inexplicably, the olfactory sense has its own recall mechanism. I can still conjure that aromatic air, part perfume, part egg salad or malt from the luncheonette and part crude drugs in a mix whose vapors blew away in an enormous exhalation.

The previous summer I worked at Perry’s Pharmacy; a store so resistant to change there wasn’t even a typewriter. Perry, himself, wrote directions with his fountain pen on labels which were not yet gummed. We made our own glue from acacia which smells rancid after about five days. Midway was a giant step into the future and besides I couldn’t turn away the raise from thirty-five cents/hour to fifty cents. At this rate I might someday become rich.

At this midway point I should have known pharmacy would never be my passion. I could have pursued a career as a power forward in the NBA or more likely in academia. The education I was receiving prepared me for a bygone world of Materia Medica and pharmacognacy (recognition of herbs and other flora). We were asked to memorize botanical origins of plant-based remedies which, upon my graduation, had largely fallen into disrepute.

I look back at all the scribbles I straightened, even as my back bent. The grinding, the grind / the pouring, the weighing, the weight / spatula, slab, Galenicals / a world fatigued into words / Something lost in this long letting / minim by dram by grain.

It took me decades to find my creative juice as a pharmacist. By the late 1980's our role was redefined from dispenser to counsultant. Conferring with patients was my salvation. It happened in mid-life.

 

Life and Death in the Pharmacy

Abel Mehana, your wife is here. She says you died last Thursday,

A good customer seven years for ten minutes a month.

I knew what kept you alive but I didn’t know you

except for the stones in your pockets clinging against the nitro and digitalis.

You dealt in turquoise. There was turquoise in your voice.

Now bargain with me once more with Damascus in your eyes.

Haggle with those magnificent arms that signaled the gods.

Fling your hands across the counter, veins blooming into rings

Chips of earth swinging from your pulsing neck.

I will meet you as an alchemist performing miracle healings.

Each tablet carries my blessings. They create small uprisings,

realign organs and confer with microorganisms for a new homeland.

My incantations label the bottles. So much passes through me

lids on apothecary jars lift with the power of rhizomes and roots

and any potion in my hands contains everything I believe in.