There are places I that I have sworn never to return - restaurants, stores, homes. So when I received a prescription and a little bell went off in my head reminding me that the CVS on Glebe can be sort of... stressful... and I debated for sometime whether to fill my prescription there or at the relatively abandoned Harris Teeter second floor pharmacy, I am not quite sure what led me to pick CVS. Maybe I was dazed by the dull ache of kidney stone pain that had spurred this little outing. As I dropped of my prescription, a scantily clad woman approached and said, "I've lost a $20 bill!" I dared answer and said, "Could it be over there?" There were a couple pieces of paper on the floor over by the pick up area at the pharmacy. "No, it would be over here... Well, it's gone." She lamented and stormed toward the front of the store. I didn't want to take part in the discussion at all but suddenly I wondered if she thought her $20 was nestled in my billfold. Oh well.
The clerk took my prescription and told me it would be 20 minutes. I am sure that, as with everything, we don't fully understand the complexity of operating a pharmacy. It's more than locating the correct pills, counting them out and pouring them into a bottle with a printed label, there's also contacting the insurance company and putting it in the little bag with the instructions on the front. Oh, and the staple, the all important feature of the pharmacy-going experience. The little staple that says, "We have secured this bag so that you cannot stick a candy bar in it as you prepare to exit the store."
I wandered the store. This part of Arlington has a significant Latino population. The CVS has accommodated this fact with bi-lingual signs and employees. But when I heard someone giggle something over the intercom, I honestly couldn't tell if it was my name they'd said. So I went back to the counter to hover. That's where my story really begins.
The $20 girl was back, but now she had a curious box, she was talking to an employee, and she was feeding something with a syringe. I was about to learn way more about the $20 girl than I ever wanted to. She wanted to use the phone to call her mother to come pick her up so that she could take the "baby squirrel" that she had "rescued" from a tree outside to the vet. The creature looked more like a rat than a squirrel to me and I couldn't determine how she'd come to have the thing in her hands since she kept describing a nest in a tree and I was thinking if the thing was in a nest in a tree, how exactly was this a rescue operation?
She had snagged a case of Similac and a syringe and was forcing the milk substitute into the thing's mouth. I learned she was born in 1963, she really wanted to call her mom, and she "is staying with this guy in an efficiency so I'm effectively homeless right now". She kept saying, "My mom is going to think I'm crazy." And I was all, I've seen you for five minutes and I know you're crazy your mom's known you since 1963 and I think she has a pretty good sense of your mental faculties by this point.
All of this Springer show was going on three or four feet away from a woman who stood oblivious at the check out. She stood at the register blocking access to any staff that might dare show up there for 20 minutes as she read each magazine. I peeked over at the drop off counter which seemed to be getting a little more attention, and heard the pharmacist talking to one of the clerks. "Do you know what's going on with those two older ladies? They've been standing here for a while and seem to getting more and more agitated."
Now we know how I feel about some Agitated Old People in stores, they had my full attention. AOP #1, I soon learned was attempting to claim a rain check on an item that was now on sale, and she wanted to purchase Mass Quantities. The item in question appeared to be some sort of Anbesol thing because when the woman got a clerk to question, the clerk suggested that if she needed 12 of this dental product perhaps she should go see the dentist. The woman was upset about some form of Algebra in which the item on sale, with her rain check was still not cheap enough by the dozen and there was talk of bulk orders, and I don't really know how it happened but soon she was demanding the clerk return the rain check she'd received last week and storming (you know, slowly) out of the store.
AOP #2 looked like she should have known what the hell she was doing, but that was just an illusion. She wandered up to the counter that clearly said "Prescription Drop Off ... Cuidamos" and started trying to pay for her items. She was very insistent that she wanted to pay for them there, at the counter (where there was no cash register). Oh, AOP's, what would I ever do without you?
Because really, I can't count on the young ones for craziness all the time, but $20 girl managed to astound me by wrangling someone else into the saga of her scantily-clad, efficiency-dwelling, mom-calling from the store phone, rescuing a rat saga. Suddenly there was a man, holding the rat in his hands, wielding it about the pharmacy, and proclaiming, "You have to keep it warm, that's the problem, it's too cold." Health code violations whipped through my head. As they continued to discuss the plight of the furry fiend I marveled at how these two had found one another. Then I remembered I was in the Twilight Zone CVS.
$20 Girl: I need to use the phone to call my mother to come get me.
Clerk: The phone is for emergencies only, is this an emergency?
$20 Girl: Well, yes, I have to call my mom so she can take me to the vet.
Clerk: (weight of too many months of doing this job crashes down) Shrug. Inaudible.
$20 Girl: Mom, I'm at the CVS and I need you to come get me. I have a baby squirrel and I need to take it to the vet. Yes, I'm alone. No that's why I need you to come get me...
Things started to get hazy then, the kidney stone pain was looming, my prescription was still a good 20 minutes away, and I wondered to myself, how did I get to Purgatory and what can I take to get out of here?
To go with the lovely green beans and tomatoes we had this Spanakopita. I put it on the top rack trying to make it brown a little more quickly, and that it did. Still, it was delicious, don't skimp on the time softening the onions.
