Posted on July 16, 2008 - by Hubba

For Jim

This story is for my buddy Jim Thorp, who is very proud of the fact that he is the “only Yale graduate to work at Wall Drug.”

I too worked at Wall Drug.  I have always had terrible allergies to hay, which made summer very difficult for me on the ranch.  When I was a kid, I would mow the lawn, check cows and fix fence while everybody else hayed.

Of  course these days we have cabs on almost all of our haying equipment, but back then we didn’t.  So when I graduated from high school in 1997, I went to work at the world famous Wall Drug Store.  I worked there from June of ‘97 through the summer of ‘98, and again in the summer of ‘99.

As jobs at Wall Drug go, I had a very cushy assignment.  I worked in the basement, where we kept inventory.  The denizens of the basement were also relatively isolated from the throngs of tourists upstairs, which is why we were envied.

I should explain.  Tourism is South Dakota’s #2 industry, and it would be nothing without the tourists, who can be very interesting, well traveled people.  They can also be the slowest, thickest-headed, hardest to get along with people.  I like to think I am a people person, but my patience was even worn thin by some of them.

Anyway, the “basement people” had certain areas of the upstairs that each of them had to restock every morning.  My areas were the toy guns and the I-Gogs sunglasses.  After you had restocked your area, you could retreat to the basement, away from the teeming hordes of, uh, tourists.

The thing I disliked about them was not the sometimes dumb questions they asked, or their scoffing at the price of a certain item (as if I had set it) but how slow they moved.  Like campers on the interstate, they were always in my way, and always going too slow.

I’m making a short story very long.  One day I was restocking the sunglasses when I saw the funniest t-shirt I have ever seen in my life.  It was partly the man wearing it.  He was a fossil, stooped over, ambling behind his walker, getting in everybody’s way.  His eyes were rheumy, he looked like he didn’t have a clue where he was or what was going on.

I am guessing that the man was as sharp as a tack.  I never got to say a word to him.  He was the perfect man to wear a t-shirt which had a depiction of a Viking on the front and underneath, the declaration “My goal is to live forever.”

He ambled past me, and I glanced up to read on the back of his shirt, “So far, So good.”

I’m still laughing about that t-shirt.