What America Cannot Lose

Elliotts Pharmacy since 1914

Yesterday, I encounter flair in a drugstore.

My husband's family owns the independent pharmacy in the honest town of Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina.  If you've lost faith in good people and genuine community living, come visit downtown Fuquay to inspire your heart.  The folks in this place live with the kind of flair that has motivated me since the day I first visited. 

This drugstore, Elliotts Pharmacy, has served the community since 1914, and it still has the fountain to serve customers vanilla cokes, pimento cheese sandwiches, sweet tea, and the best milkshakes in town. 

I had never used the words pimento cheese sandwiches before I married into this town.  I had never seen folks line up for sausage biscuits and orangeade.  If you've never had these things, you are not fully alive yet. 

We walk in, and we enter another time and place--the kind of era when folks stop everything, come out from behind their cash register, and shake your hand.  It's the kind of place where you know everybody, and everybody knows you.

You can spin around on the bar stools, just like your granddaddy did when he came to Elliotts after school with a nickle to buy a cola and a dime for square nabs or a candy bar. 

You can talk to the pharmacist about anything you want, and he'll remember everything about you if he doesn't already know.  He will not rush you.  People in the South don't know how to rush. 

I know for a fact that he once brought a customer a heating pad in the middle of the night, and he answers his phone during Christmas dinner to take care of any customer in town who needs him.  Right now, I asked him to read this blog before I posted it, and he said he'd be right back because he's delivering medicine to a customer.


Would a big box pharmacy do that?  Have I ever once sat around a chain drug store, eating lunch and shaking hands with my neighbors and asking about their relatives?

Grandpa says his store is "a modern pharmacy with old-fashioned qualities."  I love that.  I want my whole life to be modern with old-fashioned qualities like Elliotts.

I'm not ready to let a place like Elliotts go.  While so many downtown stores close because customers go to Super Centers, places like Elliotts wait patiently on the corner.  A drugstore like that symbolizes what we cannot lose in America.