Had a cough that lasted so long I was going to name it (“Sputum” has a nice ring, plus it’s an olde family name) but first went to the doctor.
I picked the right one because he was familiar with the condition known as “cough” and knew just what to do to get rid of me. A few minutes later I was at the pharmacy to pick up cough medicine.
Not just any cough medicine. Robitussin is the Cadillac of cough syrup and it had been a long time since I’d had a fat slug of the slurpy stuff.
But to acquire Robitussin is complicated. Here we are in 2025, a time of many scary drugs, but Robitussin is one that demands antiquated 19th century purchasing procedures. Maybe addicts are different in North Carolina, but when I told the nice cashier lady I had come to pick up Robitussin she turned from the counter and disappeared.
Many minutes later she returned hauling a great big leather-bound book with lined yellowed pages. She wrote down the date, the Rx number, asked for my driver’s license, jotted down a few more things, and turned it 180 degrees for me to sign. For cough syrup.
I mean, excuse me, but . . . cough syrup?
Given the competition for consumer dollars in a marketplace thick with druggies, addicts, users, losers and all the rest of the flotsam, do authorities think the most menacing of drugs is cough medicine?
In a world of glue sniffers, fentanyl abusers, Red Bull, pot heads, Vicodin, Valium, Vodka, Viceroys and Vicks Vapo-Rub, sudafed, paint huffers and oxycontin, the most closely monitored drugs are cough suppressants?
Is the South troubled by codeine fiends? I can’t imagine anyone but a poor old granny who’d run out of snuff wanting to pour herself a bracing nighttime tumbler of grape-flavored, codeine-enhanced cough syrup, and that would have been around 1915.
The capper: I was given a four-ounce bottle of Robitussin, barely enough for the short walk home, then phone in a refill. There was a time in my life that four ounces of codeine-enriched Robitussin poured into a 16 ounce can of beer would have made a nice flavoring agent.
And a prescription refill? Sorry. No can do. No refills. You gotta go back to the doc and get a fresh order.
Better idea: Score a quart of street NyQuil from some guy in an alley.
LADYBUG, LADYBUG
Lying in bed, barely awake, the morning light filtering through shades, I stared at the ceiling. I saw a ladybug.
Some background: Two years ago I spotted a dark nub in a corner of the same ceiling and, mildly alarmed, hurried downstairs for a ladder and some Raid.
I climbed the stepladder, which at my age is equivalent to a 100 mph twisting, screaming amusement park ride, and realized my tight little bundle was a big herd of ladybugs all huddled up.
Now in 2025 my solo ladybug clambers along in her busy slow way across and criss-cross my ceiling. Up this, over that, north for 12 or so inches, a left turn across hilly beadboard seams, then a stop that lasts 30 seconds. Maybe a minute. She turns and heads back the way she’d come.
The ceiling runs maybe 25 feet north and south and about 15 feet wide. A comparable playing field for you and me might be a hundred miles one way and not much less the other. Considering the size of a ladybug compared to you is what I mean. She’s as big as a red pea and has to walk the ceiling upside down. Although, to her advantage she’s got like eight or twenty legs.
She’s marooned on this great big white island with no family, no companions, and no food and no map. If she has eyes, the horizon must look like the Sahara Desert or the surface of the moon. No matter where she walks she’s nowhere.
And she sure does walk. Whenever I go upstairs I check to see if she’s there. Affirmative; present and on duty.
By Sunday morning when you read this it will be 14 days of me watching my tiny anonymous insect work her way round and round the ceiling. She goes over near the heat register, circles out to the chandelier, then meanders around some more in no particular pattern.
Also, whenever I come into the room and look up I am always staring right at her. She’s a tiny speck in a massive playground but I always spot her without having to scan the ceiling.
I’m not saying we have a psychic connection. I haven’t even considered naming her, and besides, Sputum is already taken.
But whenever I look up she’s right there, no bigger than a ladybug.
(TWK and his employer, Thomas Hine, are now in the Carolinas where it has been mostly cold and rainy. This message brought to you by the Ukiah Chamber of Commerce.)
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