I took a well needed break over the weekend and made the 5 hour drive up to Bonneau, South Carolina to spend a couple days at Carrie’s lake house. We arrived late friday night in good spirits, followed shortly by the reverse: some good spirits arriving in us. I had resolved to drink moderately and to stick exclusively to my favorite low-carb sauce, namely whiskey and water. I took it easy and started drinking water around 12:30 so by bed time I was feeling pretty normal actually. Ended up being the last one to go to sleep so I rocked quietly on the darkened porch, staring up at the glittered night sky and reflecting on some of life’s greatest mysteries… like why no one has ever taken a pot of boiled peanuts and mashed them up and sold it as boiled peanut butter. I came up with plans to mass produce jars of it and, now satisfied with my contribution to humanity, went inside and to take my contacts out, brush my teeth, and climb into bed.
The next morning I awoke to the sound of someone vomiting in the bathroom. Simply glad it wasn’t me, I waited until they finished, rolling back over in bed. After a while I then got up and got a towel and went in to take a shower. Unfortunately it ended up that the toilet had overflowed and in the process of cleaning everything up, my contact case (along with the contacts inside them) had been knocked over and whoever had cleaned it up apparently didn’t understand the concept of contacts, and had just rinsed out the case and put it on the magazine rack to dry.
Upon learning this, I of course started freaking out. The entire weekend was ruined for me now — it was my only pair of contacts obviously, and I’m sure as hell legally blind without them. We were a 5 hour drive from my spares at home, we were 15 miles away from any kind of town and it was a Saturday. Lauren suggested we go to a walgreens and just buy a new pair. The problem with that (aside from the fact that Walgreens doesn’t sell contacts) is that, in case you didn’t know, contacts aren’t like underwear or paper towels or ibuprofin. You can’t just walk in somewhere and buy them, they are prescription only. Not only that but the prescriptions only last a year, and every year you have to take a full eye exam to renew the prescription. That meant that, out here in the middle of nowhere, I’d have to find an optical place like Pearl Vision that not only was open on a saturday, but that had a doctor in who could somehow both give me both an exam AND have my contacts in stock. Knowing damn well that this tiny town didn’t even have a Kroger, let alone a mall with a Pearl Vision in it, I was dejected. There was simply NO WAY I’d be able to buy new ones, the weekend was completely down the drain and I already started plotting how many ways I could be miserable.
However Carrie was adamantly claiming that my contacts were probably in the washing machine — as if they’d been wiped up in a towel along with the vomit and toilet water and had been thrown in the washer, and would be fine once the load was done and we’d be able to find them. The sheer ridiculousness of this idea was just infuriating me, so feeling the need to just get out, we attempted to go to walgreens anyway, knowing damn well that there wasn’t even a walgreens in town, and even if there was, they didn’t sell contacts, and even if they did, they wouldn’t sell them to me without a prescription, which I’d need to take an exam for. And even if they DID have exam giving capabilities, there’s no way their optical doctor would be in on a SATURDAY to administer it. There was simply no way I was getting any new damned contacts and I sobbed uncontrollably for the entire car ride into town.
Then, arriving into town, rising up from the trees, was a glorious blue and white sign, towering above the land, beaming down on me, the sun shining on it like a beacon of hope that it was. Something I normally hate and despise, yet at this moment made my head snap up in attention. Dawning on me that it was truly my one and only chance at saving the weekend, we turned and parked in the parking lot of the now-greatest store ever developed by man kind: Walmart. Walmarts have optical centers. Optical centers have doctors with exam rooms and the ability to write prescriptions. Knowing full well still that there’s no way the Dr. would be in to work on a Saturday, we went in anyway to see if I could convince them to sell me some contacts anyway, or maybe just shoplift them, or pretend to have a gun, or call in a bomb threat, or anything. I didn’t care.
We go inside and a lady comes out to talk to us. At least I think it was a lady, I of course couldn’t see anything at all still. I told her my plight, the whole sob story, and at every turn she responded exactly how I knew she would. No, she could not sell me contacts without a prescription. Did I know who gave me my presciption so she could call them and get it? Of course I didn’t, and not only that, it was somewhere in atlanta, I’d need an Atlanta phone book to look it up, which no one had. Of course even then, the presciption was long expired.
“Well you’d have to take a new exam then”, she said. No kidding. Really? I totally didn’t fucking know that at all. What surprise. Hey lady, surprise me again. Tell me the doctor isn’t in.
“And unfortunately, the doctor isn’t in.”, she said.
Of course he’s not. Why the hell would he be? I knew he wouldn’t be. Dejected, I turned to slowly walk away, my soul crushed a thousand times, defeated, utterly ruined.
But then, she said, “If you want to wait 20 minutes until 10:00 when he gets here, we can probably squeeze you into his schedule.”
I stopped, looked up, and saw on the wall the doctor’s weekly schedule: Monday, 10am to 2pm. Tuesday, 10 am to 2pm. Wednesday, closed. Thursday, closed. Friday, closed. Saturday, 10am to 2pm. The dude was only in 3 days a week, for 4 hours each day, and one of them WAS saturday!
I got on my knees, angels starting singing, David Hasslehoff started dancing with spiraling rainbows spinning behind him, and somehow, some way, I was the luckiest person on the entire planet.
Yes, I will wait the 20 minutes, I said. I will wait indeed.
One exam, 45 minutes, and $142.58 later, I had 7 new pairs of contacts (wasn’t taking any chances!) and was on the ride back to the house, the windows down, the 80’s music was blaring, and life was good. The probability of that situation occuring was so mind numbingly improbable that it made my head spin. The walmart had only been there a month, it had just opened. We didn’t even know it was there, and had just happened to drive past it — Lauren not even noticing, I had to spot it blind and squinting. A doctor who’s only in three days a week happened to be in — and they squeezed me into a booked schedule with no openings.
Walmart, I take back all those horrible, awful things I’ve said about you in the past — about how you’re destroying this country in your relentless pursuit of profits and all. I take it all back. Every bit of it. Walmart is my savior, and I will forever hold it in reverence.
The rest of the weekend was fun, lots of drinking, spaghetti was in there somewhere, got to have some Yuengling, I got sunburned, and Scott and I came up with an idea to make millions of dollars. And all would have been lost if not for a certain quaint little blue and white store.
Sometimes it takes a brush with disaster to allow you to truly sit back and recognize just how grand life really is.
