The Fragile Society

Walgreens sends me an email that my regular asthma prescription will be ready to pick up this week. Yesterday I saw on WWL-TV a story about a young man named Paul who got off his shift at a New Orleans Walgreens a week ago and didn't get to go home, but was instead evacuated from New Orleans in his Walgreens uniform, to Baton Rouge. He, of course, lost everything but his Walgreens uniform. He walked into a Baton Rouge Walgreens, I believe the company had told their employees to do that, and he told the manager there that he was a Walgreens employee from NO--when I saw him on TV yesterday he seemed rather in shock still, so he probably wasn't his most presentable when meeting that manager--and the manager took him in the back. The manager tried to give him money but he didn't want it, he wanted to go to work. The manager made him take the money anyway, perhaps Walgreens had directed their stores to do so, I don't know. And then the manager said when do you want to start and the man, whose name was Paul, said right now. And Paul began to work for Walgreens in Baton Rouge right then.

Later on, Paul was sitting out in the parking lot, presumably in the dazed state he remained in even yesterday, and a customer saw him and asked him if he needed a place to live and so now Paul lives with her and the 17 others who are now living at her house in Baton Rouge and they look fine.

I remember the Walgreens on St. Charles and Felicity, near where I stay in NO. I have heard that the place where I stay is in process of recovering, they have a web page message out, but of course who knows what will happen to any of us in the long run. Maybe the Walgreens on the corner in New Orleans, which fixed my prescription so quickly for me when I was there, is the one where Paul worked, I don't know. But today I got an email from the Walgreens on the corner here in Tampa. My regular asthma prescription is almost ready.