Elegy for People’s Drug Store

A pharmacy without a soda fountain strikes me as a church full of confessionals but no communion, not a bite of wafer or taste of wine to deepen the tongue’s faith. No jukebox with its parables of choice.

At lunch, a scruffy, long-haired man sat next to my revolving stool and ordered a cup of water and a plate. No food. He poured a mound of ketchup from a bottle and feasted with a spoon. They kicked him out. I wish I’d been the counterman and brought him chili and a slice of bread, nothing extravagant, enough to say Brother, if you’re that hungry, it’s on me. I wish I’d thought of doing it myself.

*

The Gas Leak

Mrs. McKenzie, the resident manager, knocked on the door to the apartment shared by my mother and her partner. “Bobby,” she said, “you and Carolyn have to leave right away. The police have ordered us to evacuate the building. There’s a gas leak, and it might blow up any minute.” My mother heard the news as The building’s going to explode!

“Carolyn’s not here, thank God,” my mother said. “Mimi, what am I going to do?”

“Gather your treasures, whatever you want to save, and carry them outside. The rescue squad is on the way. Hurry! You’ve got five minutes.”

It looked like a flea market in the parking lot. Residents had carried out televisions, stereos, easy chairs, vases, photograph albums, whatever valuables they could lug down the stairs. They milled around, as bewildered as refugees, hearing the sirens approach.

My mother looked around her apartment at the gilded mirrors, the crystal ornaments, the land grant signed by Lord Calvert, the boxes of silverware, the framed paintings of her ancestors, the cloisonné jar where she wanted her ashes deposited when she died, the history of her family in the form of belongings, legacies, property, possessions, and obligations. Then she left empty-handed.

*

Happy Hour at Pancho’s Fly Inn

after The Right Stuff, both the book by Tom Wolfe
and the movie by Philip Kaufman

They’re here to drink their nerves back down to earth
in this firetrap of a stick-and-rudder bar—
hotshot flyboys lounging underneath
a wall of photographs (pilots no more—

those faces under helmets crashed and burned).
They need a tall cool one. They need to fly
and break all barriers, their records earned
by staring Mr. Death down from the sky.

They squeeze into a rocket, the X-1,
carried beneath a bomber’s belly, dropped
into thin air, then surging up alone
to the stratosphere until the envelope’s ripped.

Why shouldn’t they get drunk and howl like wolves,
trapped in the cockpit of their ravenous lives?

***

(Featured image from Pexels)