on September 4, 2013
After a couple of days went by I quizzed my roommate about his pot use. Dyno Den (his college nickname) explained to me that smoking grass in the big cities, he was from New York, was something that was done on a regular basis among the young people who were hip to the scene. Older folks, the authorities, and ‘hicks’ like me, however, held the opposite view, which was why he and his friends ‘toweled’ the windows and door to avoid detection.
If pot didn’t readily lead to heroin addiction, why was it treated with such disdain I asked him? He couldn’t answer that question except to say that it just was. It would be several decades before I would be able to discern the answer to that question and discover the truth.
I should point out here that I wasn’t a goody two-shoes. My mother smoked cigarettes as did both my grandparents. I remember Granny hanging laundry out on the clothesline with a cigarette dangling from her lips. I picked up the habit myself during the last year of high school. It was something that made the girls in high school look at you a bit different, something that made you seem ‘cool’. It set you apart from being a ‘choirboy’ but didn’t put you into the ‘thug’ category either. Years later it was romantic, like in the movies, to light two cigarettes and pass one to your lover, as the two of you caught your breath after ‘getting busy.’
Alcohol was also something normal in my family’s routine. My mother would have a ‘highball’ when she came home from teaching every day to relax. My father would have a martini or two before dinner. On Friday nights when my mother’s brother and his wife would bring over my year younger male cousin for a visit, my mother always got complimented for the drinks she would make for them. At Christmas dinner the booze would flow and we kids got to sip homemade eggnog flavored with Kentucky bourbon and nutmeg. I even remember sitting in the back seat of the car mixing drinks for my Uncle Bill as he drove my cousin and I up to a Cincinnati Reds baseball game once. Par for the course in those days was the absence of both alcohol and tobacco when drugs were talked about in my health class. – end part 3
If pot didn’t readily lead to heroin addiction, why was it treated with such disdain I asked him? He couldn’t answer that question except to say that it just was. It would be several decades before I would be able to discern the answer to that question and discover the truth.
I should point out here that I wasn’t a goody two-shoes. My mother smoked cigarettes as did both my grandparents. I remember Granny hanging laundry out on the clothesline with a cigarette dangling from her lips. I picked up the habit myself during the last year of high school. It was something that made the girls in high school look at you a bit different, something that made you seem ‘cool’. It set you apart from being a ‘choirboy’ but didn’t put you into the ‘thug’ category either. Years later it was romantic, like in the movies, to light two cigarettes and pass one to your lover, as the two of you caught your breath after ‘getting busy.’
Alcohol was also something normal in my family’s routine. My mother would have a ‘highball’ when she came home from teaching every day to relax. My father would have a martini or two before dinner. On Friday nights when my mother’s brother and his wife would bring over my year younger male cousin for a visit, my mother always got complimented for the drinks she would make for them. At Christmas dinner the booze would flow and we kids got to sip homemade eggnog flavored with Kentucky bourbon and nutmeg. I even remember sitting in the back seat of the car mixing drinks for my Uncle Bill as he drove my cousin and I up to a Cincinnati Reds baseball game once. Par for the course in those days was the absence of both alcohol and tobacco when drugs were talked about in my health class. – end part 3
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