Leprechaun

Two Old Men at a Pharmacy

February 16.

The final days of the third year since Russia invaded Ukraine, drew near.

As it had in the first, Galanthus nivealis, had apparently been a favorite among prior owners of the farm, and it sprang up everywhere. It had bloomed the same day the invasion had begun in 2022, and would do so this year in another week.

Each year, the first snowdrops melting snow and pushing green shoots upward, which once reminded the onlooker how close Spring was, now recalled the blood and destruction of Bucha, Mariupol and Bakhmut, and the blessings ancestors from there had been given, when they arrived at Ellis Island in 1910.

Valentine’s had come and gone, as had the first week of illness, and that had fallen into a new routine of fitful sleep the first half of the night interrupted by the witching hours.

I had read that pattern was the norm during the Middle Ages in Europe: four hours’ sleep; a midnight waking for two hours followed by another four hours until dawn.

My personal Walpurgisnacht consisted of a meal of pills, a trip to the loo, and a resettling of the scrambled blankets and sheets of the first hours.

The ten days’ utter sleeplessness of early February had passed in a flurry of medical and imaging appointments and a struggle with various combinations and permutations of over the counter pain relievers, accompanied a reasonable daytime occupation as a winemaker, most often requiring four to six hours a day with minimal discomfort.

Between fits of sleeplessness my bedside notebook had filled with drug-sodden dreams and sudden impressions strong enough to merit the light of a bedside lamp and a phrase or two jotted in sextodecimo black notebook. These small enough for the pocket, and bound tight enough to resist the abuse of carrying each day, and for years thereafter.

That fresh booklet of bound, heavy pages had been my habit for the preceding fifty years. My library at home had bookshelves, each with a neat white-lettered plastic marking strip on the spine to denote inclusive dates.

Life, notions and writing were sandwiched with no thought to what might become of such a personal and intimate library of many years.

What I found myself scribbling that predawn Sunday morning of the liturgical date called Septagesima, while propped up against a reader’s bolster in bed, as Holy Week slowly appeared on the temporal horizon. The script was a potpourri, a rhapsody, a ragu, and gumbo of Robert Graves-Siegfried Sassoon style notes, the hibernian constellation of Irish-Gaelic myths, metaphor and magic thinking occasioned by an actual Leprechaun with whom I held a Saturday conversation worthy of recalling in writing.

* * *

The man had attracted my attention out of the corner of my eye as I had given up waiting for my prescription at the pharmacy section of the local grocery. Pharmacy seating had been arranged for those waiting the obligatory twenty minutes for their orders to be filled.

Never mind that the customer was early or late: twenty minutes was still the delay no matter what.

A pharmacy attracts ill people: pills, you see, and the promise of relief from whatever ails you.

Most of those waiting in line to be told twenty minutes by the pharmacy desk clerk, were old, although one ahead of me had come for her dog’s prescription, about which I overheard the details as the pharmacy clerk explained, as he had so many times before, that my own pain relievers would be up in twenty-minutes.

After wandering off toward the sleep and pain meds aisle to pass time, I came to realize that twenty-minutes was standard fare, whether the stock jar was in front of the pharmacist close at hand or on some nearly impossible to reach high shelf in the dimly lit corners rarely visited.

There is little chance of spending twenty-minutes wandering the aisles in a blissful state as an adult man, with no objective in mind but the passing an increasingly painful time.

At any rate, some of my twenty-minutes resulted in a brown plastic hand basket of strictly unneeded and unnecessary grocery items I felt compelled to drop into the basket, not that I needed them, but the whimsy of their purchase was too strong to resist.

The pretense of being ill absolved me of any accusation of impulse buying: I felt authorized to pamper myself in this one instance with any and all items my wife often forbade me to eat.

I had had the notion to replicate the classic egg McMuffin recipe with grocery supplied components, substituting a freshly baked Portuguese or Kaiser roll for a muffin, or, if they were fresh, a bagel thereby inventing the new breakfast term, the Egg McBagel.

Given what happened next, perhaps Egg O’Bagel might have been more fitting, with the lovely thought in mind on an empty stomach, and St. Patrick’s not too far down the line. I concluded that it was best to seat my weary self down in one of the black naugahyde arm chairs lined up, perhaps a half dozen or more in all, within sight and oversight of the pharmacy staff.

In general, a grocery is an unlikely venue for seating of any sort.

I often sport a leather or faux-leather vineyard doublet vest over my usual winery work clothes.

This offers a broader repository of supernumerary pockets for those necessaries that will crowd a jeans pocket beyond what is reasonable, or slightly, on an older gentleman.

Since the tools of the trade that must be at hand at any time for a winemaker may be unfamiliar, let us drop that plastic handbasket beside the chair for a moment to rummage through jeans and vest for the small black notebook in which notes for passing the twenty-minutes offer something with which the impatient patient can occupy himself.

A tape measure to gauge the depth of wine in barrel or tank; two high intensity miniature flashlights to the same purpose; coins and keys; a patch cord for a cell phone; a small ex-TicTac box just large enough for a few pills held shut with a rubber band; a sturdy pocket knife large enough to skin a deer, whose long broken plastic handle had been replaced by a hand-carved walnut one, including transfer of the tiny metal inlay brand name, “Remington” or perhaps “Winchester”.

No sooner had I settled in, notebook and pen in hand and comfortable in my lap, but out of the corner of my eye, a form shuffled over from the pharmacy countertop (I had just heard the refrain twenty-minutes seconds earlier).

Thought nothing of it, except that as I focused attention on the blank page, his appearance struck me as odd.

It was a sort of modified, dandified almost theatrical jogging suit of the type worn by those who never jog. Curiously, the aquamarine and pale green color scheme and piping were vaguely reminiscent of a Star Trek uniform, new boots included, latest microfiber materials, too, mind you.

Across from me, the man settled into a chair and seemed insistent that I not be left in peace to my pen and sextidecimo booklet which, I was certain, was the skeleton form of the world’s next profound but entertaining novel that would sooner or later arise, to stun and stagger the pop literature markets of the world.

“Crazy, these times…” I heard him mumble vaguely in my direction. “These kids, they just don’t understand. Like it is a different language…” he offered tentatively.

The man apparently mistook me for an old man his own age, a mistake I rarely indulge.

He was stout, not exactly fat, but short and heavy limbed with that long, ruddy Hibernian face that betrays ethnicity. The mop of curly white hair grew thick, exposing a high forehead. A good looking Irish man of a certain age, in good health but for the confusion of any right thinking man of the sixties confronted with what passes for contemporary news and acceptable social behavior.

Under other circumstances, that opening glance would have led to the nearest Irish pub and a pint between lost souls from the Age of Aquarius, as if happily reunited sojourners.

It occurred to me in a flash that my subject need not be invented and I lay the sextidecimo booklet aside to engage my newfound companion more directly.

It is best not to attempt a full reconstruction when the gift of gab is in full swing between survivors of the lost age of youth, some six decades earlier.

“Hendrix: sure, I saw Jimi Hendrix live at the New Scotland Avenue Armory in ’67…”

He had seen Jagger a few times, back when pop music was in its heyday, none of that Kendrick Lamar litany of presidential insults at Half Time in the recent Supa Boe.

“Yeah, and Jagger and McCartney are still at it,” he said proudly as if their success were his own.

* * *

My prescription became available and I was off with a passing fist-bump to my Irish-American looking friend, making a mental note that his people had come to America via a coachman for the New York Astor family, and that he had served the same coach the bore Ulysseus S. Grant through the streets of New York City back in the day.

He had not been to the Saratoga race track, near which a cottage in Wilton had been built to house the elderly and ageing Grant as a living but destitute tourist attraction. Grant at the time, was dying of throat cancer.

Nevertheless his literary and historical masterpiece, Memoirs of U. S. Grant, had been penned longhand, a single perfect draft, as he sat in an opposing pair of Russian leather side chairs, his bulk in one and his feet resting in an identical second facing him.

Grant’s sole inheritance to his family, as he slowly lingered and his health slid, was the publication income generated by his book.

It was an inspiration for any self styled, first time author, great or modest.

The prior night’s hiatus, as I walked away thinking, also brought to mind John Milton’s great religio-philosophical masterpiece Paradise Lost, mostly composed during his sleeping hours in 1667. He would dream the perfect couplets of one of the greatest pieces ever written in English, and simply recall and copy them out each morning.

Such a production demanded almost inhuman discipline.

I had to be content with a few almost illegible notes of a phrase or the psychological sense of a drug-sodden dream.

The full content might be condensed into three phrases, Fate Anticipated, Fate Apparent and Fate as It Transpires.

But enough of the possibilities…

* * *