Small town, old school pharmacies often feature in classic films, even prominently ala It’s A Wonderful Life, but as with so many things Hollywood, the truth is not quite as the big screen might lead one to believe. My dad was a small-town druggist and a man of deep personal reserve. Those two plot points (if you will), along with his profound sense of responsibility toward his neighbors, customers, and profession, meant discretion was key, truly the better part of valor. It also made for an interesting frisson of tension in our lives, the lives of his family – weighting what would have seemed to be casual social encounters with those whose secrets and secret (or not) illnesses he knew.
This is an aspect of our childhoods I have only understood with the passage of time, remembering the discomfort, the familiar feeling of the confessional in so many spaces outside the store, because my dad often did function as a listener to adult confessions. We were also raised Catholic, knew that feeling, a repeated energetic hush that was palpable and real, a heightened sense of the unnamable, unmentionable, unknowable (for us) floating in the familial salt water.
My dad would laugh so hard at any idea he resembled – in any way or particular – a Catholic priest. Along with being irreligious, he was much too kind, and non-judgmental, to fit that particular mold. Too much of a horn dog, as well!
My parents had friends, a close group of peers with kids mostly our ages, but my dad especially didn’t have many close connections other than with those men he either knew from high school, and one or two others who were also local businessmen in our tiny town. But not the snobby ones. Those he was polite to, always, but his friends, the one or two men he enjoyed spending time with, were beer drinking working class types, whether they owned a business or not. And one of the local docs, a charming man who also knew too much, who grew up on a farm like my pop, and who loved women and gin martinis equally as well.
How could we – my father’s children – not notice who came into the store for drugs and more drugs? Who begged for early, illegal refills, or picked up a carton or cartons of cigarettes or condoms, or – shockingly!! – both? how could we not notice who purchased tons of porn magazines (Oby, I’m looking at you, dude), or talked in whispers with our dad behind the door to the old pharmacy counter? We only worked weekends, and occasional days in summer when my dad’s regular clerks took vacations, but that was enough time to see – enough.
In retrospect I remember how, meeting a customer outside the business, there was an awkwardness, a jolt of ‘oh shit’, even if thereafter the ‘oh shitter’ would shake my dad’s hand and laugh, secure in the knowledge that our own Mr. Gower would never tell, never say or share, the secret, the details, the unknowable, unspeakable knowns.
I believe this is one aspect – along with my dad working 7 days a week – that circumscribed our parents social lives, and ours. Even as much as my dad was trusted and respected, there existed a charge in almost every room and situation, undermining ease and connection. Small town druggists know a lot; they tend to know, perhaps, too much, like that charming small-town doc my dad could fully relax around, sharing a common knowledge of the vagaries of human lives, behaviors, and consequence. Sharing, too, a circumscribed life weighted and bound by those same vagaries and secrets.