The dull brass box slammed down onto the table in the showroom. It was about as big as a box of matches, and it had made its appearance in the hands of a very old friend of the jeweler's. The box contained ten pills, one day's supply of MS and diabetes medication that cost more than $40 a day, and he had come to have a duplicate created in solid gold.
He told about joking with his wife several years before about going to jail for possession of illegal drugs if a policeman ever pulled him over. "Eh, lock him up!" was his wife's playful reply.
Back to the box. The man wanted it engraved with his initials, and the jeweler pulled out a bracelet he'd engraved that morning as an example of depth and font. The jeweler mentioned that the bracelet belonged to the late wife of an old friend and customer, and was being given to the man's teenage niece.
The man was interested, and began to list off the jewelry his daughter-in-law inherited when his own wife died. "She was lying in her hospital bed a few days before she died and she asked me 'What are you going to do with my jewelry, Jerry'? I told her 'Baby, I'll do whatever you want with it'. It was such a tender memory, it was almost uncomfortable to witness.
Again, business with the pill box;
Getting the initials right - J.R. for Jack the Ripper;
Complaining about the pills the box held, in the voice of someone who has dealt with their chronic condition for a long time and has learned to deal with it in cantankerous good humor;
Pills, $6,000 worth, ruined when the fridge door was left open;
Doctors' impossible orders not to get hot or stressed -
The unavoidable heat, which reminds him of his years in the deserts of New Mexico.
"I knew a guy who was drafted into the Service when he was 45 years old. They gave him the dummy test and and told him 'We're putting you in nuclear' - he was that smart. He was from a real small town in Southeast Oklahoma, and they gave him a bus ticket home; 'We'll let you know when we need you'.
"Sixty days and he'd heard nothing. So he went to the post office in the next town - and there was no bus ticket waiting for him. So he says 'Can I use your phone'? He called up the government and they said 'You just wait. We'll send you your bus ticket when we're ready for you'.
"Thirty days later he got his bus ticket to California. He stayed there for 34 days, did just what they told him and nothing else. After that he was bussed to New Mexico in a bus with the windows tinted black. They unloaded him straight into the barracks and he worked in nuclear until he was 80. He saw his best friends die of radiation poisoning, and you never heard a word about it. Having kids was never even a possibility.
"He tested the first atomic bomb at the White Sands Missile Range in '45. After it went off, he stood up and walked away, saying 'Well, the blankety-blank thing worked after all'. "
After the man left with his old brass pill box, the jeweler told me more about the man. He had been with him shortly after his MS diagnosis, when he was still struggling to keep the tears from his eyes. The jeweler remembers one thing from that conversation - "Money can't buy happiness."
Some people never learn to face their illnesses. The jeweler said his friend was never the same, but he was never a coward either. He faces MS with courage every day - and has the reputation to prove it.
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Testing the Atomic Bomb:
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/trinity/index.html
http://www.takemytrip.com/06newmex/06_15a.htm
http://www.kilroywashere.org/004-Pages/Trinity/Trinity.html
Multiple Sclerosis (MS):
http://www.nationalmssociety.org/index.aspx
http://www.webmd.com/multiple-sclerosis/guide/multiple-sclerosis-faq
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