Day: January 28, 2015

A cold but beautiful day, the sheep rushed Red to try and get to the donkeys’ grain, a battle ensued, he drove them back to their feeder and stood close guard, ready for more trouble.

Today was Maria’s 51st birthday, I have never really made a big deal of birthdays or known quite how to celebrate them. Our day was fragmented, we got up early to see the demolition of the old Ackley Building, next to O’Hearn’s pharmacy, then we had to meet with our lawyer, then Maria had her weekly lunch with her friends, and tonight, the second rehearsal for my play, “Last Day At Maple View Farm,” which opens tomorrow at Hubbard Hall.

I snuck out after lunch to buy her some flowers and a pendant I liked, she bitched about my buying her too many presents – she always does and I always will. But she loves flowers and they brightened up this cold winter’s day. How does one celebrate the birthday of someone like Maria. Dinners and pendants seem pretty shallow. I wish I could take her to Florence for a week or two, but this is not going to happen anytime soon.

In the meantime, we continue to work to get our act together, our finances in order, our creative work vibrant and flowing. In some ways, my life began when my daughter was born, in other ways it began when I met Maria. We both saw deeply inside of one another, we have always encouraged and supported one another, our souls are fused in our love of creativity, animals, the natural world. And our little town.

We stand together in truth and commitment and love. Happy Birthday girl, you deserve 100 more good ones.

The economists and politicians sometimes seem to have forgotten what people are for. In the new global economy, in the Corporate Nation, it seems our ideology is profit and loss and people are now expendable, from family farms to bookstores to small business and independent pharmacies. People are for working in good times and getting tossed into the street in bad times.

If you stand in line at O’Hearn’s Pharmacy and watch Bridget work, or if you listen to Connie Brooks talk to her customers in her bookstore, of you watch Scott Carrino prepare his sandwiches at the Round House Cafe, you understand that there are still some places left that are about people, not just profit, where we still recall what people are for. Those places tend to me in small towns and rural areas, places the government has forgotten.

In these places, people are the point. The new global economy has moved beyond that idea, it is considered inefficient and old-fashioned.

This morning, in the minutes after dawn, when the thermometer was 8 degrees, Maria and I had the pleasure of witnessing this beautiful tableau of people, gathered across the street from Bridget’s pharmacy to celebrate the survival of a rare thing, an independent, family-owned pharmacy.

One day, I waited for a prescription to be filled and a woman came in and burst into tears, she had been fighting with insurance companies and could not get a prescription filled for her sick father until morning. But, she said, she lived two  hours away and could not leave work again, she wasn’t sure what to do. Bridget put her hand on her arm, and asked who her father was.

The woman told him, and Bridget said, “oh, I know him, I know where he lives. I’ll run the prescription out there first thing in the morning.” The woman was astonished, it never occurred to her that Bridget might do that, she had no experience in her life with a pharmacist that would do that, she lived in a suburb outside of Albany.

But Bridget does that all the time. She knows what people are for. And people know what she is for, and that is why so many of us came out on this frigid morning to congratulate her on her great and unlikely triumph.

It was an extraordinary sight in our little town. Main Street was closed off in front of O’Hearn’s Pharmacy, the street was lined with tractors, trucks, police cars. The mayor was there, the police and fire chiefs, the O’Hearn Family, the staff at the pharmacy, many loyal customers, a score of townspeople braving the bitter cold. Bridget had a bottle of champagne and glasses, there were beeping tractors, a dozen demolition workers scrambling and measuring and taping windows, the pharmacy is closed all day.

It was a big deal for the town. Yesterday, the original owner of the doomed building died at his home nearby, the current owner’s whereabouts are not known. The town has been wrestling with the issue of the building for nearly 15 years, there was a sense of celebration and resolution that the leaning building was finally going to come down, and a sense of relief that Bridget’s Pharmacy would remain in business and would be okay. Bridget said that once demolition got underway, she was heading to the Round House Cafe for some coffee and muffins.

Looks like the demolition will go on all day, I’ll check back in this aternoon.

Family businesses, like family farms, were an integral part of American life for centuries. O’Hearn’s Pharmacy was started by Bridget’s father Dick in 1976, he returned a few years ago and Bridget took over, he and the rest of the family showed up in force this morning to help Bridget celebrate her liberation from the toppling building next door. Bridget’s  mother told me a wonderful story of a man who ran an adjoining pharmacy who loved to drink and sat in his pharmacy all day in a wheelchair in a three piece suit with a bow tie. Sometimes he needed help filling prescriptions, he slept on a mattress in the rear of the pharmacy, the town police officer found him dead there one morning.

It was freezing cold, but this was a happy crew. The town’s mayor showed up, the fire and police chiefs appeared, the street was clogged with trucks and tractors.  There is something quite beautiful about the O’Hearn family, they love and support one another very strongly, there is a thread of generosity and community that seems to run in a straight line through them all.