Pharmacy Life and Times

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 which to others seem illegible
am conversant with insurance cards oftentimes, 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.

I retired from pharmacy about twenty-five years ago having sold my store to a Russian family. At least I thought of them as Russian since they spoke the language, hated Gorbachev and greatly admired Putin. Gorby, they said, was weak and destroyed the motherland. But Vlad had muscles. In fact, they were from Odessa. Go figure.  

Looking back, I recognize that I never had a passion for pharmacy. At seventeen I was a man-child when I made the decision to pursue my father’s profession. It was a life of counting and pouring. The old vapors of crude drugs which I had grown up with in my nostrils had long given way to deodorized tablets and capsules on the shelf. Gone were the mortar and pestle, ointment slab and spatula and even the torsion scale and weights.

Over time, I realized it was the relationships with patients that enlivened me. Even if I didn't fully know them, I knew what kept them alive.

I stayed on after I sold the store, but the clientele slowly became Russian-speaking and my two-word vocabulary of goodbye (das vidaniya) and thank you (spasibo) didn’t go very far.

The virtue I possessed was that I knew how to listen empathetically. I heard people’s woes, and they felt received. As for the essential expertise, if I didn’t know it, I could find it quickly. When I couldn’t attend to my customer/patient I knew I had lost my reason for being there.

My father, in his corner drugstore, had presided on a raised platform between globes of colored water. Over the years, pharmacy lost its mystique. We had become human vending machines. At some point, I started to write poems in between labels; my prescription for myself. Das Vidaniya, pharmacy.