“Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
On the corner of Charles and Mount Vernon Street, in Beacon Hill, Gary Drug Co. has been open since 1934, seven days a week. From eight to eight on weekdays, nine to five on weekends, the pharmacy fills prescriptions; sells lotions and cosmetics, stacked on high wooden shelves that smell of pine; offers copy and fax services, and free delivery to the neighborhood’s residents.
Gail, the clerk, lives upstairs. Right upstairs; the window over the gold and green, wooden sign looks into her living room. She has stood behind the counter for the past twenty-two years. Her sister Eileen, niece Danielle, and nephew Tom also work at the pharmacy.
“Every Wednesday I bring down dinner for whomever is working, and the leftovers I bring for lunch on Thursday,”
On Mondays, she brings freshly baked cookies, brownies, coffee cakes. Customers are offered some too, and are greeted by name. Those too old or ill to come, Tom visits with their medication.
There is nothing extraordinary about this pharmacy. It is just a shop on Charles Street. There is nothing extraordinary about Charles Street. It is just a street, at the base of Beacon Hill, in Boston, Massachusetts. Brick sidewalks and gaslit streetlamps, New England style buildings, on whose ground floors cafés and flower boxes, this year, were mostly empty.
But inside certain windows, of even some shuttered shops, ravaged by a pandemic, there are signs, glimmers of…
miniature carrousels; blue, white, red Ferris Wheels; wooden ducks and train sets … in the grocer’s shop! They turn, twirl, light up, and sing even when he is gone. The realtor, further down, displays a proud collection of snow globes. The owner of the chocolate shop makes gelato, from scratch, from a recipe that crossed the ocean, a hundred years ago, from Naples.
In the liquor shop across the street from Gary’s, one used to see a cat reign over the wine, whiskeys. Every customerknew Bordeaux, and when she died, paid their respects to the owners, Gene and Rebecca.
They also live upstairs, and know everyone by name, and which bottle of wine to pair with every dinner in Beacon Hill. On Tuesdays and through the window, they wave people in for a champagne tasting, because it is Tuesday.
And Ali, three blocks down, in the loveliest art gallery, must be the only human in the world to invite toddler twins to enter.
There is nothing extraordinary on Charles Street; grocers, bakers, clerks, small business owners. Ordinary people with lives “at once ordinary and mythical,” who, a year and many lockdowns later, still remember me.
“We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters…”
made of the same carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, as ants, volcanoes, stars. As that one burst light and glitter 13.8 billion years ago.
“We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.”
People know people by name on Charles Street.