Medicine

Good Medicine

The first time I heard the word, medicine: I was sitting on the toilet, my bare feet not yet touching the floor. My mother was kneeling beside me, my father mopping my face with a wet cloth. Pouring liquid from a brown bottle into a silver spoon, he said, “This medicine tastes just like Coca Cola.”

The power of suggestion being what it is in the mind of a two-year-old, that’s exactly the taste I remember--though I can’t be sure which came first, the medicine or my first actual taste of Coke, icy and cold in a green bottle. In 1950, at least in our house, soft drinks were not refrigerator fare, but were rare treats reserved for road trips. My brother and I would split a coke in the back seat, our parents singing forties love songs in the front.

Any illness or injury was my father’s domain. I remember spending days in a darkened bedroom after a massive bee sting, a poultice of his chewed up tobacco on my swollen eyes. If a splinter of glass or wood burrowed into my foot, he’d wrap the foot with a slice of raw bacon, which would--magically--pull the splinter out of the foot and onto the bacon-greasy cloth.

We rarely went to a doctor. If one of my father’s remedies didn’t work, he would drive to the drug store and ask for whatever pill or liquid he deemed best. The pharmacist never hesitated to fill a bottle of penicillin or cough syrup, no prescription needed. Then, at home, standing at the kitchen counter, he’d crush pills into a peanut butter and sugar paste, then spread it on white bread, crusts cut off just the way I liked it. Then we’d sit at the table together, each eating half of the same sandwich, his without a crushed pill.

In the months preceding my divorce--after a nearly thirty-year marriage--I wrestled with insomnia and depression. The medicine I took to alleviate one seemed to worsen the other, and I discovered that I couldn’t blast the pain away with pharmaceuticals. To add to the soundtrack of it all, I developed an angry hacking cough.

When I did sleep, I’d wake up at three in the morning, feeling ragged and alone. My parents were four states away, and I stared at the blank walls of a sickness without a name or a home remedy.

On those mornings, I got into the car and drove in the darkness. At the twenty-four-hour convenience store, I’d buy a large fountain Coke and two miniature Reese cups. Soothed by the combination of Coke and peanut butter, I’d drive back home--such as it was--and find a peaceful sleep.

Fifteen years later, the ache of divorce a distant memory, I still start every day with a drive, now in my own car, and get a fountain coke with two mini Reese cups. The combination of coke and peanut butter follows well-worn grooves in my psyche. Together they lead all the way back to childhood. My morning ritual is my path back to a time and a place where I had the good fortune to grow up with a beloved medicine man, my father.