There is an old lady at work. She doesn’t like me. Each time she sees me, she stares at me for a few moments with undisguised contempt. Each time, following the stare, she reaches in her purse, grabs a bottle of pills, which shakes and rattles and sounds for a moment like rapid tapping of many pencils on a pad of paper with the eraser end, and she pops what appear to be at least two or three of them into her mouth, swallowing without any assistance from any liquids in what looks to be, based on her squished-up face, a resistant fashion.

I’ve asked my physician on more than one occasion if he would be good enough to prescribe that stuff for me, but he tells me he can’t be sure what she is taking. So I have no solution to my problems, and I am forced to watch this old lady, and I feel substantial envy as she pops her magic pills, her remedy to life’s most severe aggravations.