CHRIST IN WINTER: The
Irrelevant Escapades of An Old Pizza Eater—
I was pretty well caught up on meditating, but Helen sent me to the pizza joint, anyway, to get a pizza, which is the other reason to go there. [See the column for 5-28-26 if you don’t understand this.]
Just as I left home, though, I got a text from the CVS drug store, a little farther down the street, saying they had a script ready for me. It was the fourth text they had sent me in the previous 24 hours. They even promised that they would send more texts. The only way to stop CVS from texting is to go get the durn prescription, even though you already have enough to last a lifetime, especially if your lifetime probably isn’t going to be a lot longer.
It takes about 15 minutes for a large pepperoni to bake, so I decided I’d go to CVS while the pizza was baking. I explained to the tattooed lady at the pizza joint that I would be right back and that she should not give my pizza to some other old man who came in and claimed that was really his pizza.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “that’s a problem, since all old men look alike.”
Wait a minute! That’s my line, that all old men look alike. Oh, maybe I’ve been to that pizza joint before.
But wait another minute! All old men look alike? No way! I was wearing a faded blue shirt and an IU ball cap and cargo shorts…oh, wait. That is what all old men wear. They all have white beards, too.
Turned out that CVS kept me for more than 15 minutes it takes for a pepperoni to get ready. They had no record of my prescription, even though they had texted me all those times to say it was ready.
[CVS likes to overdo things. Every time I go there, I regret not having invested in receipt paper. On a recent “Law & Order,” one of the cops said about an arrestee, “He has a rap sheet as long as a CVS receipt.”]
Despite the blunders of the CVS computer, the people who actually do the work at the South Walnut CVS are always kind and competent. The nice young pharmacist said she’d fix up my prescription right then, if I could wait ten minutes.
“Wait ten minutes? You’ve got to be kidding me. That woman at the pizza joint will give my pizza to some other old man if I don’t get back there in time.”
To her credit, the pharmacist understood. I mean, what’s the point of taking medicine to make you live longer if somebody else gets your za in the meantime?
When I got to the pizza joint, the tattooed lady was sitting there with my pizza on her lap. “I’ve been guarding it,” she said, “so somebody else can’t get it, but how do I know you’re not some other old man?”
That’s always the question.
John Robert McFarland
“The young man knows the
rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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