HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

It’s been said that if a pharmacy opened in Oak Bluffs, a lot of us would never have to leave town. I’m not saying that more than the usual percentage of our citizens are on medication — that’s the American way. And I don’t mind admitting myself that I take a special formula to reduce a pesky little werewolf side of my personality; just one little tab a day and I no longer need to spend nights of the full moon locked in my bedroom with the shades drawn, a smear of Nair over my nose to keep the unibrow at bay, and old episodes of 30 Rock played loud so the laugh track drowns out the noise of delicious-sounding passersby outside my window.

Anyway, most of us know that the Oak Bluffs branch of the West Tisbury Conroy’s Apothecary opened last July 1 at Circuit and Pennacook, in the part of the former library that once housed most of the stacks, some tables, some chairs, and the all-around good vibes in which libraries specialize. After the institution moved to its grander quarters at the top of School street and facing the town cemetery (you can’t do any better than that for quiet neighbors), the old building sat empty, then derelict, until finally it resembled one of the deserted tenements outside the Baghdad Green Zone, cleared of life to mark the DMZ.

It was the brainchild of the Oak Bluffs selectmen and town administrator Michael Dutton to rehab this town property for fun and profit. Why not provide a retail outlet below and surround it with three affordable housing apartments? Tami and Stan Hersh of West Tisbury’s Conroy’s put in a bid to rent the store. For some reason, resistance to this plan arose — maybe the naysayers thought if the building rotted away enough we could claim Edgar Allen Poe lived there and we could turn it into a museum with wax ravens and all.

Actually, the objection was about parking — or not enough of it — and I remember writing in the paper at the time that the old library, just like new libraries, invites the clientele to hop on the computer for an hour, spend another hour browsing the new mystery section, sprawl in an armchair reading Psychology Today from cover to cover, before finally returning in late afternoon twilight to look for their car. In a pharmacy, you can have someone wait for you at the curb with the engine still running while you sprint in to get your script and maybe — if you’re not pushed for time — pick up a bottle of aspirin and a box of Airborne while you’re at it: total minutes seven.

The new store is beautiful and light-filled. Perhaps its only flaw is an uncommonly wide and heavy front door that requires a huge tug to pull it open. A sign on the door indicates that if you have difficulty opening it, to please knock for assistance. Two strapping ex-wrestlers, one named Guido, the other Vic the Viking, appear from around the back and, if pulling on the door has exhausted you, they’ll carry you over the threshold to the counter.

A sign on the east side of the building dates the Pennacook address to circa 1895. We all assume the place had always served as a library, but owner Tami told me a customer recently showed her a vintage photograph of the store as an 1890s butcher’s with, get this, a deer carcass hanging over the door! Now that I know this, as a professional ghost hunter, I lie awake at night hearing the screams of all the dying deer crashing into the leaves of nearby woods.

Paula Caron is the chief pharmacist in the new Conroy’s, and she keeps the front of the shop stocked with magazines, cards, sunglasses and holiday paraphernalia for kids running in afternoons from the school bus stop. Tami continues to oversee the West Tisbury store while Stan can be counted on to make runs between the apothecaries when, for instance, they’re running low on werewolf meds for this part of the Island (there are, as we all know, many more mythological beasts running around free in the wilder, western reaches of the Island).

A couple of last quick pieces of data: Tami is a seventh-generation Islander, a Norton on her mom’s side, a Conroy on her dad’s. She grew up on Hine’s Point, attended school here, then enrolled at Northeastern where she studied pharmacology. She met Stan in a Boston Italian restaurant where he worked as a chef. Of course you don’t fall for a seventh-generation Islander without moving back to her special home with her. They opened the first Conroy’s in 1989. They have two kids, a daughter, Stevie, a college student at Centenary in New Jersey and a son, Stewart, a sophomore at the regional high school.

Now all we need to round out our village life is a year-round movie theatre, a fish store, an Indian restaurant (I think we’re all set now for Thai), and a thrift store as cool as the ones in Vineyard Haven and Edgartown. Oh, and a bookstore.