Chatty Cathy and the Pandemic

Nowadays, picking up medications at the local pharmacy—this particular family-owned one at least—is exclusively a sidewalk affair with medical privacy gone with the wind. Transactions are completed on the outside looking in—if you will—through a locked door and sufficient glass to keep any and all nefarious droplets at bay. Interaction with the staff therein commences with the ringing of a buzzer. Questions and answers are bandied back and forth through the aforementioned glass, which considerably muffles voices. Hand-written notes are sometimes held up to inform customers what they owe in co-pays, etc. Cash or a credit card is then placed in a transaction drawer at ground level, which is a bona fide task, I suspect, for people there for back-pain medications. 

I have seen masked clientele numbering three, four, and five patiently and impatiently looming by the front door, which is understandably this small drugstore's epicenter during the pandemic. I prefer to wait until the crowd diminishes to one or, better still, no one at all. In fact, if you really want to be a stickler for these things, keeping six-feet apart in a situation with five or so people waiting around for their medications is well nigh impossible.

Several days ago, I jumped at the opportunity of being the one and only customer on the scene. My one brief shining moment, however, was especially brief. A woman appeared soon after me and promptly revealed that she was a Chatty Cathy, annoying in the best of times and circumstances. Then a man showed up wearing a United States Air Force cap. Having already suffered an earful—from Chatty—about how wonderful the druggists were come hell or high water, I was actually relieved that another human being materialized. For I instinctively knew that Chatty would immediately hone in on the fellow’s military service and she didn’t disappoint.

Chatty Cathy queried the Air Force veteran as to where he served. She guessed—incorrectly as it turned out—Korea. It was Vietnam. Chatty explained the reason for her embarrassing faux pas. You see, when she was younger, most men of his age—seventy-eight, he later divulged—were veterans of Korea. Now, of course, it’s Vietnam. Listening to this give-and-take was revelatory. I gazed over Chatty behind her mask and it dawned on me that she was most probably younger than me. And she was no spring chicken, I’ll tell you that.

When I was a young boy, a seventy-eight-year-old military veteran more likely served in World War I than World War II. That, by the way, was the “war to end all wars.” An elderly neighbor had lost his leg in that conflict and wore an awkwardly uncomfortable wooden prosthetic one fifty years later.

Eventually, Chatty Cathy thanked the Air Force vet for his service. When her meds emerged in the transaction draw, she opened the bottle on the spot and popped a pill into her mouth. Her newfound septuagenarian friend made a comment to the effect of “let the party begin.” For some reason, Chatty then apprised all assembled—five of us by then—that she hadn’t had a drink in twenty years. My name is Cathy and I’m an alcoholic. Perhaps this was a little too much information to disclose to perfect strangers on a Bronx sidewalk during a pandemic—to masked men and women who just wanted to get on their merry ways with their meds as fast as is humanly possible.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)