I Feel Like A Criminal At The Counter

Marguerite has started going on Wednesdays because Wednesdays are quiet.

That is where it began, and she wants you to understand that it began as nothing. Wednesdays are quiet, and at seventy-eight standing in a line is not free, and it was practical.

Then it became Wednesdays before eleven, because after eleven the school run people come. Then it became the one over on Chestnut instead of the one three streets from her house, which she has used for thirty years, because the girl at her own one is somebody's granddaughter and knows her name.

And she stands in that line and she practices what she is going to say.

She is picking up medicine that a doctor prescribed for her. There is nothing irregular about it. She has never taken more than the label says. She has never asked for it early. There is no crime anywhere near this, and she stands third in line with her stomach going and a sentence rehearsed in case anybody asks a question, which nobody ever does.

She is not a fool and she knows what has happened. She has read the pieces in the paper like everybody else. She knows the medicine she takes has a name that appears in those pieces, and she has watched the pharmacist's face for a look that has never actually been there, and she has started to hear a tone in ordinary questions.

I am seventy-eight years old and I feel like a criminal picking up my own prescription.

And here is where I quit talking about Marguerite, because you have your own Wednesday, and your own window, and your own sentence you have practiced in a line for a question nobody has ever asked you.

I want to say the first thing before anything else, and say it plain, the way a neighbor would: what you are carrying to that counter is not guilt. Guilt is for something you did. This is shame, which is a different animal and attaches itself to what a person is, and it got on you from the outside, out of the air, from newspapers and looks that were not there.

He says the old age part out loud

Let me set the true thing down first, plain, before we get anywhere near a pharmacy.

You are not a burden and you are not a suspect and you are not a case being tolerated. God has something to say specifically about people your age, and He is unusually direct about it, and He puts it in the first person: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

And even to your old age I am He; and even to gray hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Count the verbs He puts His own name to in one sentence: I am He, I will carry, I have made, I will bear, I will carry, I will deliver. Six, and every one of them is Him doing something and you receiving it.

And notice that God says gray hairs out loud. He does not soften it or leave it implied. He names the season you are actually in and attaches Himself to it by name, which is more than most of the world does for a woman of seventy-eight standing in a line. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.

So you are carried, at your age, in that queue, and Scripture is where I get that rather than my own comfort, and God's Spirit is not watching that counter for the same look you are.

Two things at once, and both get said

Now let me be honest with you the way a neighbor ought to be, because there are two true things here and most people can only manage one at a time.

The first is that the shame is unearned and it should come off. You are picking up medicine that a doctor prescribed for a body that has done seventy-eight years of work. Standing in that line is not a moral event and it never was.

And the second is that you have started managing something. The Wednesdays, the eleven o'clock, the pharmacy on Chestnut instead of the one that knows your name. None of that is criminal either, and I am not going to make it into something ugly. But it is a person arranging her week around a counter, and it is worth saying out loud rather than letting it grow.

Both of those go in the same sentence and neither cancels the other. The shame is not yours and the arranging is real, and you can hold both without a verdict on yourself anywhere in it.

Hear this: your worth was settled long before any of this and it is not adjusted by what is in the bag. God said He made you and He carries you and He will bear you to the end, and that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a thing you can stand in a line holding rather than a thing you agree with in church.

And now the plain half, and take this exactly as carefully as I am saying it. Do not stop, reduce or space out anything on your own, and do not go without to prove something to yourself. At seventy-eight that can be genuinely dangerous, with some of these more than others. What to do instead is tell your own doctor two things: the real amount and frequency, and the sentence about Chestnut Street. That second one is not embarrassing, it is clinical, and it tells them something they cannot see from a chart. And if you are ever in danger, if you have taken more than you meant to or the thought has turned toward not being here, get medical help right away and tell one person the same day. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. There are people awake this minute.