Priest to the Temple 

R. Andrew Newman

R. Andrew Newman is a writer whose work has appeared in Modern Age, Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, and National Review.

At the back of the drug store, the pharmacy stood elevated. If the rest of the store was the nave, with its aisles of glassware, cards, toothbrushes, perfumes, and candies, this was the altar, the holy of holies, where pills were counted, powders ground, and medicines dispensed.

I remember those days well. Farm kids grow up in the tractor seat. Military brats follow their uniformed parents around the country. I was a store brat. I spent my early years in my mom and dad’s drug store in a small western Nebraska town.

My father was always vested in white, as if there were no somber seasons of Lent or Advent and a perpetual Easter and Christmas had settled in the land. Day in and day out, he donned professional white smocks before ascending the step into the sanctuary.

As a child I watched TV in the small office in the back, read the Avengers, Richie Rich and Archie comics while perched under the rack of magazines and paperbacks, and pretended behind the store to fight super villains and score game-winning touchdowns.

Growing older, I helped unpack freight of boxed candies, aspirin, and tooth paste, swept the sidewalk, and cleaned the windows. I remember getting ready for the annual sidewalk sale in July. Businesses up and down Center Avenue provided tables of bargains for shoppers and the street was closed for kids’ games. I played the games and helped behind the makeshift counter on the store’s sidewalk. Many of our vacations incorporated trips to merchandise shows.

I also watched, attentive as an acolyte, the work at the altar. My father never sat while he worked. The walls were lined with bottles; other drugs, narcotics, were kept under lock and key. I couldn’t touch anything, but I kept vigil as he counted bright pink and red pills into prescription bottles. Other times he filled capsules with powder, or, on rare occasions, ground medicine with mortar and pestle, the traditional tools of the trade, into a fine powder.

These were the days before computers were commonplace, and on an old manual typewriter at one end of the pharmacy he banged out the labels. The filled prescriptions, now bagged, he slid reverently across the counter to the waiting clerk, who, in turn, rang up the customer’s bill. The sacerdotal and the pastoral combined as often he answered the customers’ questions or offered suggestions or reminders on the dosage.

When I turned 11, this world came to an end. My father died. The altar wasn’t closed. Hired pharmacists filled the appointed liturgical role at the store. They didn’t always wear white, and, true enough, it seemed Christmas and Easter had passed. After a couple of years, my mom sold the store.

To this day I can’t visit a pharmacy without my thoughts turning to white smocks, elevated pharmacies and, again, if only for a moment, I’m eight years old watching intently as my father performs the mysterious rites behind the counter.

“A state without some means of change is without the means of its conservation.” –Edmund Burke