We Keep on Waiting

03 Mar

Posted by: Lizzie

I spent yesterday afternoon with Corey. He’s been sick with a fever, so we went to the doctor, who diagnosed him with strep. From there, we went to the drugstore to pick up his medicine.

On the way to the drugstore, we were listening to the radio and singing along to our favorite tunes. When the John Mayer song came on, Corey asked me to turn it up. We listened for a few minutes and then Corey asked,

“Why does he want the world to change?”

I was floored. How do you explain things like war and hunger and other disasters to a six-year-old? I thought back to when we were in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. A family was there: mother, father, and two pre-teen daughters. The daughters were well-behaved, but the mother seemed to be generally angry at everything. They arrived mere minutes after we did, and after being there only ten minutes, the mother felt they had been waiting long enough. She went up to the front desk, came back a minute later and proudly declared,

“We’re next.”

She spoke to her daughters as if they were stupid, likewise to her husband, who sat idly by. When one of the girls picked up a book to read, the mother, without so much as glancing up from the game she was playing on her cell phone, told her to put down the “disgusting thing” because “who knows how many kids with their germs” had been touching it. Meanwhile, Corey was innocently thumbing through a Clifford book and laughing at the picture of Santa Claus falling into a giant Christmas stocking that hung on Clifford’s dog house.

If I could change the world, I’d change that mother into a kinder person.

While we were at the drugstore later, we sat in the waiting area in the pharmacy. We had already been there an hour and we had shopping a little. Corey was exploring the contents of our shopping basket while I watched the people walk by.

A man joined the line, or rather, he sketched his way into the waiting area, and I immediately pinned him for a meth head. He fidgeted, dug in his pockets, shifted from side to side, and looked around constantly. After watching him for a minute, I decided that it wasn’t fair of me to judge him. Maybe he was a paranoid schizophrenic who was just there to pick up his medication. Maybe he was having a hard day. Maybe he was in a hurry. Who was I to decide after seconds of observation that this dude was some drug addict?

When he was next in line, he leaned on the counter and pointed to the bottom shelf behind the pharmacy tech. The technician picked up a box of store-brand Actifed, and asked for the guy’s driver’s licence. He dug around in his back pocket, produced a card, and all but juggled it until it was in the technician’s hand. After entering the driver’s license number, the tech shook his head, told the man that he’d already reached his limit for the month and put the box back on the shelf. Without a word, the guy turned around and sketched his way out of the drugstore.

In our community, we keep waiting for the meth problem to change.

After Corey asked me why John Mayer wants the world to change, I didn’t have an answer. So he thought about it for a second and said,

“Maybe he just wants the grass to be purple.”

All I could do was laugh. So we came up with more ways to change the world.

Corey thought maybe he wants people to be blue, or maybe we shouldn’t have mailboxes–just horses. After thinking about that one, though, he decided that there wouldn’t be anywhere to put the mail. So I offered my suggestion:

“If we had horses instead of mailboxes, maybe the horses could wear pants with pockets. Then we could just put the mail in the horses’ pockets.”

Corey found that to be a hilarious solution to the mail problem, and we laughed as we pulled into the drugstore parking lot.