It was a rainy, cold April 4. Because I got to the office early that morning for a change, I felt entitled to leave
early, at 4:30. I’d been downsizing my personal life a lot lately so that I didn’t have as much do after work, so I
decided it would be nice to just go home and take a nap on that dreary Wednesday afternoon. But there was
one thing I needed to do first to satisfy my quickly crumbling belief that I should always be doing something
instead of doing nothing or just contemplating.
I had been carrying around a prescription for medication for a few days that had to be filled, so I decided to
go to the local drugstore and drop it off. Normally, because I always feel that my time is exceedingly valuable
and that I should be moving on to the next important assignment, I never wait for my prescriptions to be filled. I
drop them off and then return at a later date or time to pick them up. This, my mind used to tell me illogically, is
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Pig Ears
By Michael Domino
Copyright 2007 Michael Domino
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nap on my schedule, and having thought about the wandering that drugstore owners want you to do, decided to
wait while my prescription was filled. I would wander the aisles just as everyone else does to pass the time. I
wondered what I would leave the store with, besides my medication.
Lately, my life consists more of giving things away than acquiring new ones, so I told myself that I would just
look, maybe touch, but not buy. I’d begin in the stationery aisle, and from there I’d work my way around the store
for the next fifteen minutes. The first thing I touched, I decided to buy. The drugstore people are very smart.
They know what they are doing. When people are held captive in a store, they will buy something, anything. I
like those miniature composition books—the very small ones about half the size of an index card. I took two of
them. I use them because they fit neatly in my pockets and I like to carry one with me in case I get an idea for a
short story or a poem or have a business-related brainstorm. One book would have been fine, but I took two. I
felt that this small purchase, costing less than two dollars, would be enough to satisfy my obligation to the
drugstore to buy something while my prescription was being filled as well as my own impulse to hold something
in my hand while I walked around the store pretending to be shopping.
If I ran into someone I knew, I could say that I was there for a reason: I needed to pick up a few things; I
wasn’t a weirdo who should be at work instead of wandering around the drugstore as if it were a museum.
Getting a prescription filled, after all, is sort of a private matter. You just have to wonder what’s wrong enough
with each person at the pharmacy that they have to take medicine. That very thought always crosses my mind
about the person in line in front of me, so I guess that people will think the same of me when it’s my turn: Gee,
he looks okay on the outside, so it has to be an internal matter. Anyone standing behind me could easily
consider that the medication I’m getting will be applied to the top of my bald head—maybe I’m getting Rogaine.
I picked up my pace. If I was going to make it up and down every aisle, I would have to start moving.
Vitamins? No, they don’t work; you just piss them out.
much more efficient and just takes two separate visits to the drugstore instead of one. Furthermore, I know
that filling a prescription merely takes the amount of time needed for the pharmacist to count out the number
of tablets from a big bottle and put them into a little bottle. My constantly running mind, always demanding that
I figure out businesses other than my own, also tells me that drugstore customers are always told that it will
take fifteen or twenty minutes to fill a prescription, when it really takes longer because of the pileup of
prescriptions, because they want you to wander around the store and buy things that you had no intention of
purchasing when you came in. If I had a drugstore, I would do the same thing. Actually, I would probably make
people wait thirty minutes so that they would buy even more stuff while they wait. The new me, having only a