The pharmacist was focused on her duties, scanning documents and touching her hand to screens and keypads. The skin on her face appeared to be stretched tightly across her skull, and her mouth was set in a grim line, the edges of which curved slightly downward. The duties that had drawn her from the rear of the pharmacy to the front completed, she turned and went back to the inner regions of the dispensary. On the wall of the pharmacy’s waiting area, a large sign printed in white script read, “The groundwork of all happiness is health. — Leigh Hunt.”
In early November I availed myself of one of the benefits of my insurance policy (thanks, Obama) when I had my yearly at-home examination by a nurse. The nurse seemed surprised by my relative good health, and I was pridefully puffed up by her inquiry as to suggestions as to how others might achieve the same level of healthiness. I had not considered myself to be especially healthy, but I told the nurse that I tried to eat well, exercise and would always seek the company of others. (I forgot to include “always have music.”) It would not be long before my health tripped over my pride and fell, leaving me suffering from a painful attack of gout that brought me into the pharmacy. The sign with the quote from Leigh Hunt interested me because of the one poem that I know by heart, a poem by Hunt named “Rondeau” in some anthologies, but is more familiarly called, “Jenny Kiss’d Me.”
When I was an art director in the 1990s for a retail store’s advertising department in St. Louis, Missouri, there was a moment when a woman passed me in the hallway and commented on the tune that I was whistling. “That song is going to be played in my wedding,” she told me. I was whistling “Rondeau,” the tune commonly played at the bride’s entrance. I was delighted to hear this from the young lady, for her name was Jenny, and I told her that the tune was tied to a poem about her namesake. I recited the poem for her, and she smiled at me; I remembered that smile of delight when later, I sang “Ave Maria” in Jenny’s wedding.
The pharmacist called me to the counter and I paid for my medications. I thanked her and said, “I have some information for you. The quote on the wall is from a poet, and one of his most famous poems is ‘Jenny Kiss’d Me.’” I then recited the poem:
Jenny kiss’d me
when we met,
Jumping from the chair
she sat in;
Time, you thief
who love to get
Sweets into your list,
put that in!
Say I’m weary,
say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old
but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
The woman’s face softened as her muted surprise gave way to an unsaid appreciation for the moment — if not for the poem, then for the unexpected gift of it in the middle of a workday. As I turned away to head for home with my medications, I saw the shadow of a smile, a sister to the one flashed in the hallways of a long-ago time and perhaps, a testament to the effect of the poem.