My first job was at the pharmacy where my dad worked.  My dad is a quiet, kind man who did whatever possible to care for his patients.  He even took calls after-hours, driving the 15 minutes to meet a patient – if it was urgent. His pharmacy also accepted their own form of internal credit, and he would work with patients to try and ensure the business was whole, but people were cared for.

When I started joining him at the pharmacy the summer when I was 14 or 15, I was assigned the job of cleaning the shelves where they kept the medications.  I had a small cart, a tub of Pine-Sol and an old rag.  It was a very monotonous task: remove all of the bottles – keeping them in order, so they remained organized and easy to locate, wash the shelf they had occupied, return the bottles, move onto the next shelf…  Over and over and over again.  As you can imagine – there are a lot of varieties of medication, and hence, a lot of space dedicated to storing those bottles.

I would bring my lunch in a brown paper bag and sit in the tiny break room in the stock area with some of the other women who worked at the pharmacy, eating my cold sandwich and flipping through old magazines. 

When it was fireworks season, I got to take on a new job: breaking down the bulk packages of fireworks into individual pieces, using the pricing gun to apply stickers with the prices, and then packing them back into containers for display.  My hands would get black from the gunpowder but it added some variety and allowed my mind to wander: imagining summer parties and time at the cabin up north – lightening off fireworks with my uncle Randy and my grandpa shouting out the window to “stop making such a racket.” And that imaginary trip from the dusty stockroom to the cabin on Rose Lake would transport me to a feeling of carefree satisfaction. Of being held and feeling whole – in harmony with the trees and the walleyes and the frogs and the people who loved me.

These were the days before smartphones and podcasts and I had nobody to talk to and nothing to listen to, outside of the generic radio station providing neutral background music for the customers. So, mostly, I would wander around my memories and imagination. Reliving moments of joy or composing poems in my mind.

My favourite time was the Sidewalk sale.  Similar to the fireworks, I would be assigned a job in the back stockroom, unpacking boxes of aged inventory, applying prices and then bringing the items up to large banquet tables that were set outside the store.  The pharmacy was in a small strip mall with a covered sidewalk that wrapped around the building, and we would display these “treasures” for the bargain hunters. 

As a small-town, family-owned pharmacy, the store carried a lot more than medication.  They stocked all sorts of collectibles and figurines – from Precious Moments to the Dickens’ Christmas Village.  They had a lot of gifts and trinkets: coffee mugs and stuffed toys and lots of seasonal decorations.  These were the items that made up the majority of the Sidewalk sale, and I still have a mug that I snagged from one.  It’s been a favourite from my early teen years, following me to college, surviving several moves: California to Minnesota to Wisconsin to Toronto.  It’s white with a little cartoon scene of a cow, staring up at the moon, with the words “aspire to great heights.”

At 6 pm, my dad would have to close the store, turning off the cash registers and the lights. Locking the doors and enabling the security system.  He would have me close down the register in the front of the store, near the candy aisle, and as I passed by, I would sneak one of the foil-wrapped Ice Cube chocolates from the plastic tub, letting it melt in my mouth as I collected the cash and added it to the zippered bank envelope.  It was my little moment of bliss and rebellion.