Bridget and her pharmacy have reached far beyond the borders of our little town, I am getting messages from everywhere asking when the building that threatens  Bridget’s independent pharmacy (est. 1976) is going to be demolished.  She says the building is scheduled to go down at 8 a.m. Wednesday, she is thinking of hiring someone with a trumpet to play taps.

The building next door has been a nightmare for Bridget for years, it was condemned a long time ago and seemed to topple over a bit more each year, but things didn’t get serious – this is a small town – until last November when the town came told Bridget to keep her customers out of the pharmacy.

It was touch and go, but Bridget rallied to have her pharmacy and the town rallied to save it also. Bridget moved the front desk to an adjoining building and her staff rushed back and forth into the big pharmacy all day to fill orders. The town came through for her, all of her customers stuck it out with her, patiently and in good humor. Bridget is a very popular figure in the town, I can say why. When I was being checked out of the hospital after my open heart surgery, the nurse handed me a fistful of prescriptions. You probably can’t get them filled until tomorrow, she said.

I called Bridget – she gives her home phone number to her customers – and she told me to stop by on my way home from the hospital. We did stop and she took the prescriptions, came in early the next morning to have them ready for me when I got up. Everyone has a Bridget story, if there is an emergency, you can drive by her house and pick her up and she’ll open up the pharmacy to take care of you.

And the thing about Bridget is that she never makes it feel like work, she seems to love it. We were all getting worried about O’Hearn’s – more than any doctor, she has helped me understand the medications I am on and their side affects – it looked like the building was getting ready to fall over any second. And the bureaucracy was moving slowly.  The old geezers in town are obsessed with the demolition, they all have their own ideas about how it ought to be done. I’m skipping the last of my codeine couch syrup tonight, I want to be sure and get up on time.

Bridget – like Connie Brooks and her book store just down the street –  is a symbol of individuality and community in the Corporate Nation. It’s a gift to have a pharmacy like that, and a gift to live in a town that knows that.