This afternoon, I’ll drove over to O’Hearn’s Pharmacy for the last time, I have some medicine to pick up and some skin ointment to buy, but mostly, I’m going to give Bridget a hug and say goodbye. She is pretty drained from several days of tearful fearwells, memories, and laments. Even, she says, some anger. She is closing the pharmacy after more than 40 years.

The best way to describe it, she said, is that it’s like an Irish wake. It is the end of an era for the town for sure, an era that has already vanished for most of the country. Small things and independent things do not fare well in the face of big regulation, big government, big chains. It is almost impossible for businesses like pharmacies to complete with big chains.

I’m been thinking about how to get my head straight about all of this, and I’m going to once again recall the sage advice given me some years ago by the Rev. Billy Graham, who I was writing a story about on one of his crusades through America. He told me to never speak poorly of my life or lament it. Taxes will always rise, gas and food prices will only go up, change is the only constant. Don’t spend your life complaining about it, he said.

I am not likely to ever get better advice than that. And I have mostly honored it.

If we cannot accept change, we cannot understand our own lives, or accept the true nature of life in our world. Change is not good or bad, it simply is. The old days were not better than the new ones, young people are not dumber or stranger than they used to be, they are smarter and far more interesting. The world is not a more dangerous place, it is a mess as it has always been.  Everything we love in the world is likely to die or change in our lifetime.

That does not make the world a bad place, it makes the world a real place.

Bridget understands this as well as anyone. The pharmaceutical profession was destroyed the day Wal-Mart started offering cheap prescriptions in their chain stories decades ago. She has not set foot in a Wal-Mart since. I don’t go there either. After that, being a pharmcist was no longer about relationships or personal service, it was all about money.

That’s how America works. That’s how capitalism works. That’s how corporations work. That’s how globalism works, that’s what the economists and politicians have  decided upon.  Small and individual are not big words in the new economy. What are people for? To be pawns, tools and enablers in the new economy.

This is the world we built, the way we choose to live. If profit and loss is our only faith and the lowest price always our spiritual life, then the florists and the bookstores and the family restaurants and Bridgets of the world and the corner grocery stores – and the mid-list authors, too – will ultimately all be gone. We don’t know each other any longer, that is the price most of us have chosen to pay for the lowest possible cost, that is what Bridget will take with her.

Something new and different will replace us, that is the nature of things.

The town is hurt by it, there is a lot of pain about it.

I am looking for my place in this. I owe Bridget much. It is not the end of the world, for sure. My Rite-Aid is nearby, the people are nice, the service is efficient and prompt. Computers don’t really need to know who I am to collect and sell me my medications. I accept change as a spiritual and personal challenge. Do I mean what I say or am I just blowing smoke, like people who run for President? I don’t really know.

I don’t wish to speak poorly of my life, or lament the way life is. If I wish to be better known, I can make some new friends. I can do the work. Lament and nostalgia are a reflex, I hear people lamenting the nature of life all the time.

Bridget is closing on September 2, I don’t want to be there when she takes the sign down, as required by law.

Today I’m going to get my pills, I will pay for my last order from Bridget, give her a hug and close the door on this chapter. I will move on, swimming in the tide of life. I will look ahead, not back.

The Rev. Graham cautioned me to never speak poorly of my life. You life is listening, he said.