Memoirs of a Marijuana Mom

the discovery

//chapter five: the hippies.//

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I remember one night, after my grandfather passed away, asking what my mom gave to her friend's husband. While my parents and I cleaned out my grandfathers house I recall hearing a gasp and some giggling from the room over and a, "Oh Dan's gonna like this," and I hadn't seen what exactly my parents were talking about.

Quickly after asking my mom stifled a laugh and let out a cheeky grin. "The bag had weed in it, it belonged to your grandfather and we knew Dan had smoked it."

What.

My eyes got wide and I stopped, mouth agape, "Grandpa smoked weed?".

Looking back now, it's not too surprising, he had my mom in '72 and had hair longer than my own. He grew up in a time of psychedelic discovery and it was the perfect escape from the not so fairy tale life he had made for himself. Or maybe he just wanted to get high off his ass, either one is a possibility.

That night, my mom told me stories about it. About how, my grandparents would lock themselves in their room and smoke and just laugh. And how that was probably one of the few times they truly wanted each other around before their inevitable divorce. About how, when they did smoke, sometimes when the family dog Butch would come in, they would blow the slightest amount of smoke into his face and cackle at his intoxicated trot, or his even droopier face for a boxer. She told me all the stories about how she herself hated the smell and never felt the need to smoke it unlike all the teenagers who were doing acid, or cocaine, or LSD. She even told me when my dad went with my grandpa to buy weed.

It was probably when I was a toddler, that my grandpa called my dad and asked him to drive him somewhere to buy weed. Somehow my dad agreed and let's just say it wasn't the picket fence side of town. A little after buying the stuff, a cop came up to my grandpa and asked, "Excuse me sir but, why're you in a place like this?". The Michigander white grandfather of mine simply lied his way out of what could have turned horrible and went back to smoke some more.

I had always been very neutral on the idea of marijuana before my mom told me this, before she tried it, before I was introduced to both arguments with full comprehension of what each side meant. But, hearing the way this little plant made my grandfather who he was flipped a switch that maybe, it wasn't as how the media portrays it, and that those of European descendant have it so much easier to slip under the radar with it.

My grandfather died in 2013 of lung cancer, and after my mother got her medical marijuana card she realized that, for years it had been legal to at the very least get a card. He died not knowing and who knows, that card could've saved him pain from his arthritis, his hips, his knees, it could've saved him from his body failing to give him rewards for working so hard to provide. And I wish he could see just how much it's changed because man, it'd be great to see him revert back to his hippie ways.