a thousand furnished rooms

Christmas Eve that year was a blast. As I remember it, it was the last year before the chain store pharmacy, CVS, arrived in town, so it was the last year little pharmacies like Bandy's, where I worked, had a monopoly on the last-minute shoppers.

And what a monopoly it was. From dinner time until the traffic slowed at about 10:00 pm, we were hopping. That Christmas Eve, it seemed that every dad in the neighborhood got off work, stepped off the bus, walked into Bandy's, and bought two or more of the following gifts for their wives: a Timex Watch, a box of Whitman's Chocolates, some perfume (Jean Nate or maybe Chanel for a big spender), and a lady's electric razor. I learned how to wrap presents that Christmas, using precisely the right amount of giftwrap, ribbon, and tape under the watchful eye of Bandy and his wife Estelle. There were small items, too--paperback books, Christmas cards, bags of nuts and candies, lip balm, magazines, cartons of cigarettes. Some of the younger men, married or not, took the occasion to buy themselves the Christmas issue of Playboy. And one neighborhood dad, whom I only knew as the rather intimidating father of two beautiful Italian girls down the block, would buy a box of condoms. I ended up working there four years, and learned this was his precise ritual.

But that was the last Christmas Eve Bandy's had a monopoly. By the next summer, CVS had opened a few blocks away, and even the very next Christmas Eve was a pale comparison to my first one there. By the time I went off to college, the store was closing by 6:00, and by the time I finished college, Bandy had closed the store and retired.

The chain stores had won; as we have learned now, they always do. People got things a little cheaper, and a little faster. But here's to a Christmas Eve remembered, and to small details in lives observed.

Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate. And a wish for a peaceful New Year for all of us.