There is a drugstore near our house that has been in business for over fifty years. It is in the old school category. Women who worked there were required to wear skirts or dresses up until a few years ago. There is a free delivery service if you’re too sick to pick up your prescriptions. If you live in town (and produce a driver’s license verifying your address) you can get a bottle of cough syrup with codeine without a prescription.
When I worked at one of the shops in the center, a customer told me about a face cream they carried that was like “a facelift in a jar.” I became a loyal purchaser of that cream until the company closed due to retirement, and though I searched every internet cranny I never found it again.
The face cream was the beginning of my loyalty to that drugstore with its selection of obscure lines and products that I had never seen anywhere else. The mainstay at the register in makeup was 87 years old. She had been full-time there for years until she broke her pelvis and had to cut back on her hours. She still worked the night shift, though, preferring to start at 1:00, work until nine a few days a week and then stop at the Quiktrip on the way home for a coffee.
She loved to talk and would tell you about her deceased husband, the accident that caused her to break her pelvis and why she likes gas station coffee.
It was like paying a visit to your grandma if you stopped in to pick something up. Her coworker was a good decade younger than her and at some point must have had a mild stroke. She is the sweetest thing in the land, calls everybody “honey” and always says to me, “Now how did you get so lucky with all those curls?”
Those gals are my geriatric posse of love.
This past week I have taken some big action on my ridiculous hurting shoulder. It’s either going to be my cure or my undoing. I’ve got my fingers crossed for the cure but since I have only gone once it’s too soon to make any predictions.
On Friday night, though, it was making me crazy. I never got around to ordering the heating pad I pined for on Amazon and I was in a world of ache. I went to my favorite drugstore to get another one. They had a good selection with some intense heat ranges and when I checked out a new-to-me woman was at the register. She was on the young side of seventy.
“Oh dear,” she asked, “are you hurting?’
“Yes. My shoulder is making my life miserable,” I answered.
We talked about her hip, my shoulder. It was a mini AARP convention at the back of the store.
“It always bothers me,” I said. “But tonight it is worse than ever.”
“Well, that’s because it’s raining. Didn’t you have a grandma whose bursitis acted up whenever rain was close by? I did. She knew when it was going to rain better than the weatherman just because of her aches and pains.”
Ah yes………the barometric pressure decided to take me for a ride.
It didn’t seem that long ago that I was a hip forty-year-old. When I turned fifty that was no big deal because actually that was the new forty and not really fifty. But what do they say when sixty is hot on your tail?
They say you can predict the weather, that you’ll frequently need a heating pad with an ibuprofen and Salon Pas chaser, and one day you’ll be just the right age to work the makeup counter at the local drug store.