Sling Blade. Rite Aid. You say potato, I say...

As a parent you often find yourself not having a regular bar/restaurant/cafe hangout, but a drugstore hangout. It's the neighborhood drugstore where you end up multiple times every week to pick up children's cold medication, slip'n'slides, cheesy tiki lamps because they make your son bray with laughter, lunch boxes, discount flip flops and a whole host of other dollar items and actual necessities that the grocery store never has or offers for double price. So you go to your local drugstore because your kid likes to wander down the aisles and touch each and every thing in his special Monk-like way and you think you can save some bucks. But you still pay. Oh, you pay.

This morning we went to Rite Aid to pick up some bug spray, and after picking up six other things we did not need, we got in line. The checker was clearly annoyed to have left her trailer far too early in the morning and itching to git out fer a smoke to further damage her 60-something skin and add additional weight to the bags under her eyes. Looking balefully at the line she called for back up. "Second checkerrrr," she drawled into the microphone.

Minutes passed as she examined each and every item in the basket of the person checking out. The man in front of me left in a huff after 4 minutes of "well, would you look at that" exclamations from the checker. The manager came up twice for price checks and averted his eyes from the line of increasingly antsy shoppers. Finally, after no second checker appeared and multiple people in line bailed, it was our turn.

The first item in our basket was a child's electronic piano. She stared at the shiny buttons, hyp-mo-tized. Then hit the first button, setting off a tune from the piano. She laughed like an infant who had just discovered her own feet. "I like that," she mumbled like Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade, approximating his voice and oddly, as I just then noticed, his clothing style as well.

This commentary and amazement at each dollar item continued for several minutes, executed with an underlying score of Mac the Knife that she sang under her breath. Shawn Joaquin gaped at her from just below countertop level as she checked each item, before she turned her squinty eyes on him. "You sure are a cutey," she said and began to sing Lemondrop while swinging her hips, snapping her fingers and looking up at the stained ceiling. He was terrified and mute at her sudden attention, frozen in time and space like a small animal that is trying to evade the continued attention of a predator. Another minute passed before she regained her focus on the task at hand. "Did you need something?" she asks kindly, not noticing the pile of unbagged and unpaid for goods before her.

It’s like when Shawn Joaquin begins a conversation mid-sentence, leading me to believe I have perhaps blacked out or lost time. It takes me a few seconds to realize that NO, I am not the crazy one, she is. And that even though I have given up my past hangouts, I can get the same level of incoherence, entertainment and insanity I experienced at The Alley and other dive bars…along with similar juke box tunes…just by going down to the local Rite Aid. Suddenly trips to Rite Aid were no longer about the trip but about the journey I have while there, and the camaraderie with the other patrons that's not unlike that morning-after kinship one feels after a night of witnessing bad bar behavior.

So give me some Dramamine, those dollar flip flops and a water back, lady. And keep my tab open. I’m sure to be back.