The Breakables

My grandfather was a pharmacist. He owned his own pharmacy next to Hinshaws, a slightly upscale department store. This explains why while some use a bathroom cabinet, my mom owns a bucket of medicine that cannot not be held down by the confines of a couple shelves in a mirrored door. Everyday he sat behind the window separating pills of assorted colors, filling wide mouthed orange bottles, and running labels. He was a good man who loved his customers. My grandmother was in charge of the toys and extraneous items to fill the store, to make the prescription pickup a more joyful experience.

The back of the pharmacy was our playground. Among the plastic bottles and stacks of label stickers, my cousin and I would run wild, sticking the defunct labels from the trash onto our own fake perscriptions...filling them with Russel Stover jellybeans. Russell Stover candy was everywhere in the back of the pharmacy. There was something vintage about that candy that I liked, but resented at the same time. It lacked gimmick...a child's nightmare. It was candy for the elegant elderly. It foreshadowed a long party involving many older people telling you how old you are.

The best thing about the back of the dimly lit pharmacy was the shelf of broken items...titled, I believe by us, "The Breakables". It was the shelf of temporarily lonely items that took one for the team...became destroyed either by customers or in their travels from the delivery to the glass case. It was on this shelf that my grandmother lay the items with battlescars and wounds for us to play with. I suppose the title "The Breakables" lends itself to the possibility of the items being put back together, for it was clear that they were already broken. A title filled with hope.

Every time we visited, we raced immediately to the shelf. My cousin hand her hands in something...dissecting the broken typewriter or wrist watch with a cracked face, examining the pieces under her telescope. Struck by the porcelain deer missing an ear, the glass skunk without a tail, or white bear with Slurpee spilled on his face, we bartered and debated over who got which item, trading the paraplegic toucan for the deafened rabbit. Their handicaps were all equal in our eyes; it wasn't a matter of which was less broken, but which animal was in question.

I wonder what impact "The Breakables" shelf had on us. Is it possible we became lovers of character over quality? That we learned early to accept faulty items? Or do we ache for new things more now, after we playing with handicap toys for years? "The Breakables" shelf was relished and in it we replaced their broken appendages in our minds and mended their wounds in our imagination.