Small children and Ambient PM
I was doing my laundry one afternoon in my apartment building. It was a hot summer afternoon and I could here the jingling of bells signaling that the shaved ice vendor was passing. As I quickly stuffed a last load of laundry into one of the industrial sized dryers, a small girl with straight hair and thick glasses approached me to seemingly study my haphazard laundering technique. Her neck was craned forward; her brown eyes fixed on the machine. “Hi, what’s your name?” I asked her. “Ruby. Yours?” “I’m Brooke… Ruby, why don’t you help me out and put in the quarters for me.” I handed her a few quarters and she eagerly popped them into the slot and proudly surveyed the waterfall of soapy water falling onto the clump of clothes.
“Ruby, what are you up to today?” A precocious child, Ruby proceeded to give me a dissertation on how life at home had changed following the birth of her baby sister. “My mom is up a lot with my sister. She is pretty tired because she isn’t sleeping that well. She is cranky too. My sister cries a lot. My mom is tired but that’s okay.” A social worker in training, I responded: “Sounds like your mom is tired.” Having not watched TV with commercials on a TV screen in over a decade, I wasn’t prepared for her response. In a matter-of-fact, robotic tone Ruby replied, “Yes, she is tired. But it’s okay. When you are tired, you can take Ambient PM to sleep soundly. It is commonly prescribed by doctors and my mom can get a prescription from her doctor. I think she should get a prescription from her doctor.”
My mouth hung open as I pieced it together that drug companies were running drug commercials and Ruby, presumably sitting in front of the screen in the afternoons, had become one of their audience members. I responded, “That’s nice Ruby. You know, I hear camomile tea works well too.”
-Brooke Conley, Brooklyn
