When I was in high school and knew everything, I was certain my key to popularity was found at the hip cosmetics aisle in the new drugstore, a chain retail outlet that was a first for Ocala.
My girlfriends shopped there, wearing Bonne Bell lip gloss that smelled like bubblegum, the trademark scent of the “in crowd.”
Only one thing was standing in my way to sitting at the cool table in the school cafeteria: my parents. It wasn’t that they were morally averse to their teenage daughter dabbling in makeup (although I did get the “you are pretty just as you are” lecture many times).
No, what really ignited the protest had very little to do with me – a concept foreign to most 15-year-olds.
They didn’t want to shop at a chain store.
More accurately, they wanted to support the locally owned drugstore.
If you remember what it was like to be an awkward, hyperemotional 15-year-old, this was positively the most infuriating and ridiculous reason imaginable.
Mom and Dad didn’t get it. They didn’t understand that the local drugstore didn’t carry Bonne Bell. It carried ChapStick.
Plain.
No flavor unless you consider wax a flavor.
Each day I’d trek to school, shoulders hunched down like Richard Nixon, and bite my lips so hard so I would at least have a little color next to Susie Somebody with her shiny lips and entourage of shiny-lipped girlfriends. Each day I came home deflated and, yes, a little less shiny.
One day at lunch, Susie Shiny Lips said she’d discovered the most “amazing” thing at the drugstore. Slowly, she pulled an object out of her purse and produced …. a new Bonne Bell flavor! Watermelon! Oh, sweet goodness! I went home determined that I, too, would have Bonne Bell lip gloss. I stated my case to my parents.
Dad asked me to sit down, a certain death sentence for any teen dilemma. He wanted to tell me a story. Sayonara, Senorita Bonne Bell.
Dad said when he and Mom were a young couple with two little girls in diapers, Dad found himself between jobs. Times were tough. Both girls ran a bad string of illnesses requiring expensive medicine. Dad asked the drugstore owner for an extension on his bill. The owner, without hesitation, said “Take as much time as you need, Sherman. We’re not going anywhere.”
Dad said he never forgot that kind gesture.
Times are tough again for many of us, and the holidays are approaching. Gift giving is undergoing a definition overhaul.
I keep thinking of Dad and the local drugstore, which, by the way, I still support. They didn’t go anywhere, a modern-day miracle if there ever was one.
Maybe this is the time we help one another by supporting our locally owned businesses with our patronage.
Because I don’t want them to go away either.
Besides, bubblegum lip gloss is soooo yesterday.