One Pharmacist's View

My mother sometimes got onto me for daydreaming so much. I had a teacher or two over at Stonewall that agreed with her too. She always admonished me to quit my daydreaming. As though one could. Like most people I think I was meant to travel. Go places. Someplace where they speak different languages.

Sometimes this old Shakespearean quote applies to us. It sure did to people in Allen in 1938—a tough year for people here in Mustang land. I know it was for the Bullard’s. The business dad worked at in Allen was shuttered and gone. Whipped away by the dusty winds of the Great Depression.

Texas has a lot going for it. One of the things -- there is a lot of wealth and pride residing south of the Red River and the growth of North Texas continues unchecked. I remember back in the 1950s when I lived in a Dallas suburb and worked for a company called Chance Vaught, building jet airplanes.

You know, after a man retires he has more time to think. To think and perchance to dream. So said the old Bard. I saw in the Daily Oklahoman this past week that experts who do the “Farmers Old Almanac” are, again, predicting a harsh winter for Oklahoma and Texas. Sort of like last year, I wondered.

Covid perils are still holding forth. But just not so bad now as perhaps a week or two ago. And will it reload and again assert itself as the big news story of our time and be the killer it has been. I hope not. This Covid has terrorized the world long enough. Well, long enough for me.

Last Sunday was a great day here in Allen. Anyone who ventured downtown last Sunday morning would notice that starting at the intersection of HWY 48 and Broadway, the street was closed. Big fire trucks had closed it both ways and on both ends.

It’s sometimes hard to realize it in the moments they occur, but we are living tumultuous times. How do you reach back in America’s long history and try to harmonize our times with the rigorous and dangerous times in America’s past? Pearl Harbor perhaps?

Now that I am an 86-year-old person I am reminded anew almost every day about how forgetful old people are. But as I look back on my somewhat lackluster life I have to remind myself that my old age isn’t wholly responsible for my absentmindedness. I had a little bit of this even as a child.

Last week I wrote about getting rid of the itch. This disease is sort of like getting rid of ISIS. You felt like you had gotten rid of it only to discover next week that it was back in full force. Such was my battle in the 1940s with the itch infections.

It was windy and lonely looking. And it was cold that day, like it was this last winter. Yep, the spot being perused by my brother Gerald and I was the place where we had lived once upon a time a long time ago. An old grocery store site with a small apartment in the back—all gone now.