Absurdly Blessed

I stopped by Highlands Pharmacy yesterday, at the end of a long day, to pick up a prescription for Martha.  Our local pharmacy is a fine one, and it is nice to be on a first-name basis with the pharmacist and everybody else who works there, as it must be in small towns all across America, I suppose.

 
There would be a little delay, I was told, so I wandered down one aisle and then another, trying to find something of interest or amusement to pass the time.  There was a sign at the counter asking that only one person approach at a time because of the need for privacy, and it took me a minute or two to realize that half a dozen other customers were also waiting, all of us standing uneasily 15 or 20 feet from the counter (a distance deemed to be out of earshot), or idly scanning the items on shelves:  lipstick, reading glasses, aspirin.  One young man had plopped down in the only chair and was playing with his phone.  I found some amusement in a display for a product called The Bad Air Sponge, which it was claimed has been sold for 50 years.

Who were those characters on the label?  That guy relaxing in his odiferous easy chair looked like somebody from The Simpsons, and his clean-looking spouse looked like Samantha from Bewitched, or some other sitcom from the 60s.  And "All Purpose" - I love it!

But as the minutes passed by, I found that I had exhausted all of the amusement from this place; I realized that it was all profoundly depressing, this store largely visited by the sick, aisle after aisle of corn removers, bedpans, wart removers, potty chairs, laxatives, cold medicines, trusses for hernias, remedies for chigger bites.  It made me start to feel healthier and healthier, Highlands Roadrunner who had run a little over six miles of hills that morning and needed not one single thing in this pharmacy.  Just a strong desire to get the hell out of there and breath some fresh air and get some Purell on my hands!

My friend Jill came in and immediately asked me if someone was sick in my family.  "Just a little congestion," I assured her.  And than I asked her how she was. 

'I am," she smiled, "Absurdly Blessed."

"How wonderful!"  I said.  "I love that!  It sounds like the definition of Grace."

"Just another way of saying it," she smiled.

And I have carried that phrase around with me all week.