Observations on Life in a Small Town

Last Thursday I went to a doctor's appointment. I was out of several necessary medications and I'd been lazy on making the appointment. After discovering that, for an Old Curmudgeon with two ultimately fatal diseases, I'm disgustingly healthy, I stopped at the pub for a coffee.

After a couple of cups, I walked across the street to the drugstore to pick up my meds. As I walked through the store to the pharmacy counter, the pharmacist (a fellow parishioner at St Wenceslaus) told me, 'I tried to fill your scripts, but the doc said you had to see him first'. I said that I had just come from seeing him and that I was out of two of my inhalers. These are pretty important since one of those diseases is stage four COPD, and without them I was having trouble breathing.

When I lived in a large town and got my meds at a large, chain pharmacy, the clerk or pharmacist would have expressed concern, since neither are the sort of med that an emergency partial fill can be done,and offered to call the doctor's office. Not here!

He immediately filled both prescriptions, and I took my daily dose of each, standing at the counter. The Lord only knows how many laws and regulations he violated in doing that. He said he'd fax the doctor's office again, and I told him I was going back to the pub for lunch, and I'd come by after I ate.

After a wonderful ethnic lunch of roast pork, sauerkraut, and potato dumplings (remember, Wilber is the Bohemian Capital of the US!), which is the Thursday Blue Plate Special, I walked back across the street, only to discover that the doctor still hadn't faxed my prescriptions.

When I told the pharmacist that the only other medication I was totally out of was one of my blood pressure pills for congestive heart failure, he went ahead and filled it. He said the rest would undoubtedly be ready on Friday.

So, on Friday I walked downtown to pick them up and stop at the grocery store, the Food Mesto (mesto is Czech for city). As I walked along the main street there were a fair number of people standing on the sidewalk, which is unusual. Wilber is not exactly a bustling metropolis. The only time there are normally people on the sidewalks is during our annual Czech Days festival during the first weekend in August when Wilber, normal population just under 2,000, becomes the fourth largest city in Nebraska!

I stopped and asked a couple of ladies what was going on. They told me they were giving our local high school football team a send off to the state tournament. There were people holding signs supporting the team, and people wearing T-shirts in the team colours.  I thought there was going to be some sort of parade, so I hurried to the Mesto to make my purchase so I could watch it. 

Nope! As I was checking out, I looked out the front window as a firetruck leading a school bus went by. That was the parade. A firetruck and the team on the bus they were riding to the game.

But people were still out on a chilly day to show their support. Life in a small rural town in southeast Nebraska!