What Goes Around...

Summertime, 1982ish...

My dad was an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms...  he'd briefly served as a Secret Service agent for President Ford...  and, as a matter of fact, he'd been in law enforcement since I was a baby...

I'd been sent to live with my dad Christmas of '80 because my mother said she 'couldn't handle [me]'...  I was actually pretty normal, I think, in terms of teen experimentation - tried some alcohol and tobacco and had dabbled with pot smoking the few times I was around stoner friends...  I never really had a burning (pardon the pun) desire to really smoke it but I damned sure didn't want to be considered the huge dork I actually was...  that and I'm a total follower...  ;)  I also clearly wasn't normal in terms of thinking ahead...  but I'm gettin' a little ahead of myself...

I had neighborhood stoner friends who regularly 'burned one', but I'd never been brave enough to do much more than buy the ocassional joint...  soooo...  it was pretty big stuff for me to decide I would buy a 'nickel' bag of pot for my very own...  I got my five whole dollars (saved, ironically, from the lunch money my dad gave me each week) and went to my friend, Greg, and as calmly and coolly as a dumbass such as myself could, arranged 'the deal'...

Now honestly, I wasn't entirely sure what the hell I'd do when I actually got it - again, I'd only dabbled up to that point - but whooooaaaa, Nelly, did I feel WAY cool when the expected delivery date arrived!  Of course I had to ACT cool - no mean feat when you're nearly running in place from nerves and anticipation - because I did NOT, of course, want him to know what I giant dork I was when he put it in my hot little hands (as though that wasn't probably abundantly clear to him already...  we did, after all, 'hang out' daily!)!

Delivered...  ::heart palpitating::  now what...  ::hands sweaty::  shit...  ::eye roll::  I didn't EEEEEEVEN think of how to actually smoke it once I got it so all I had was a baggie full of pot and...  well...  nothing...  no bowl, no papers, no nothing...  and frankly, I was such a rube I really didn't know where to GET any of those things either!  ::sigh::

I couldn't tell you where I got whatever means I used to smoke my treasure...  I couldn't tell you whether I even smoked much OF it...  what I CAN tell you is that somewhere down the road, weeks later, I still had probably half of what I'd started with...  and I realized something...  after time spent in my purse and back pack, the clumps of pot had broken apart and there were tiiiiiiny little seeds in the corners of the baggie that looked much like the seeds in corned beef... 

Hmmmm...

Now, my gramma was an amazing woman and well rounded; read to the handicapped, president of her NOW chapter, golfed, etc...  and that woman could make anything grow...  ANYthing...  I, howesomeever, had a thumb equally brown to her green one...  buuuuut...  if I could just remember what she'd taught me and take those little seeeeeeds and make them groooow...  <eg>

::music swells to a crescendo::

::music peters out:: 

Actually, I didn't have a clue what I would do with them if I could make them grow...  it really just came down to wondering if I could...  a challenge, if you will...  =D

Soooo, I got my American Freedom Train coffee cup from the kitchen where it hung on a wooden peg rack over the sink...

And I'll digress here for a moment...  the American Freedom Train was a 26-car train pulled by three newly restored steam locomotives that toured the country in '75-'76 for the Bicentennial...  it came to our area and I toured it on a school field trip, buying my coffee mug (white with red/white/blue steam locomotive logo and - though I did not drink coffee at the ripe age of 11 - the only thing I could afford since my mom was notoriously cheap.  I mean thrifty.) in the tiny little train car gift shop...  it was one of the few things in my father's house that was 'MINE' and I was proud of it...

Anyway...  so I get my cup, I fill it with some soil from a bag in the utility room, I push half a dozen little pot seeds down into the soil and I water it lightly.  I don't know where my folks were but I was totally covert anyway and I took it to my room...  eyeballing my space, and decided that out of the two outer wall windows I had since I was on the corner of the house, the one overlooking the side/back yard was primo!  After all, since the driveway pulled up right under my front window, ANY Bozo could see it if I put it there...  ::huge eye roll here::

So I tucked my little cup neatly behind the bottom edge of the priscilla curtain hanging in my window and left it to incubate with the water and sun to germinate what I considered my status boosting seedlings...

Now I can't tell you how long I left that cup there...  I know I checked it daily and nearly fainted from shock and panic when the little green tipped plants actually began to poke their little heads from 'neath the soil...  "They're growing!!  Wait...  THEY'RE GROWING?!!"...  and I know that I made sure to remember ALL the pointers my grandmother'd given me about growing...

Poke your finger in the soil to make sure it doesn't get to dry...
Poke your finter in the soil to make sure it isn't too wet...
Make sure it gets enough sun to grow...
Make sure it doesn't get so much sun as to burn...

I cringe in my gramma's memory relating that part, I know she'd've been much more impressed with some lovely snap dragons or pansies...

Anyway, I was a very dedicated plant mama and my little seeds turned into little spikes, spikes into little two-leafed plants that turned into three-leafed ones...

And then it happened...

While my front window was directly overlooking the driveway and, therefore, a monumentally bonehead place to hide my contraban...  my side window overlooked...  are you ready for this...  the side yard...  where the pool was...  where the grass grew...  where my dad got on his riding mower and mowed...  my dad...  the ATF/Secret Service agent...

::sigh::

And now we're back to "And then it happened..."

I came home from school...  Pop's at work, step-mom & l'il bro' are either out or downstairs...  I go to my room...  I put my stuff down and kick off my shoes...  I putter for a few minutes...  laallaaaa laaaa...  I lift the edge of the priscilla curtain to check my little plant that I hadn't looked at the day before...  had I?  Had I checked it and moved it?  Had I forgotten and stuck it somewhere else for 'safekeeping'?  Shit!  Ok.  Now I was REALLY running in place.  It was utter disbelief for a few minutes...  I tore my room apart and went through every drawer, nook and cranny multiple times, SURE I'd just missed it and rolling a thousand scenarios over in my head hoping I'd just forgotten that I'd done something smart and purposeful with that damned little cup of trouble...

::sigh::

Nope.  I knew it.  It was gone.  And I knew who had it.

Pop.

But I hoped.  If there's one thing I've always been it's stupidly optimistic and the QUEEN of compartmentalization (read: ignoring)...  I hoped that maybe my step-mom'd taken it and tossed it thinking it was trash and wouldn't think to say anything...  I hoped I really HAD done something dorky with it and just didn't remember...  again, a thousand scenarios.

But I said nothing.  Noooo need calling attention to myself if it hadn't been found, right?  Oy.

I don't remember, again, how long aftewards it was that my dad called me downstairs...  I think it was a few days...  of twisting in the wind...  agonized...  sweating bullets...  and then "THE TALK"...  "WHAT were you DOING?!  You know I work for the United States Government, don't you?!!", "Alcohol.", "Tobacco.", "Firearms" he recited staccato, as though speaking to the biggest imbecile in the world (yes, yes, I know)...  "I knoooow, I don't knooooww what I was doing...  I really didn't think they would grow!"...  "Then why??"...  "I don't know, I just wanted to see if I could do it!". 

No, Pop never believed me.  It was true, but he never believed me...

Now the saaaa-WEET part...

Flash forward to about 2001...

My daughter's bedroom...

I'm cleaning and picking up dirty clothes for the laundry and I notice one of the drawers about halfway up her chest of drawers is sitting about half open...

I go to close it and realize it's nearly empty...  save a small container...  a small Wal-mart container...  like the ones they package potato salad in from the deli...  and it's got something in it...  "Hmmh...  looks like dirt...  wait...  and there's something gree... WHAT the HELL??!!"

Em's pot plant.

I took it out.  I took it to my room.  Eyeballed it.  Thought long and hard about it.  Emily came home from school.  I was still in my room.  On the floor, cleaning out on of my dresser drawers...  and I call her in. 

She comes to the door and sees me in the floor...  and I ask her...  "So, whatcha got in your dresser?"

She eyeballs me warily and says "Huh?"  (my favorite slack-jaw teenage response)

I ask again.  "I don't know, what're you talking about?", she says with the look that tells me my princess, my delicate flower, knows EXACTLY what I'm talking about...

So I take it out.  The container.  And Emily, who's always been FAR more brazen than I ever hoped to be just stands there looking me in the eye.  A little defiant, really.  And I was the one who couldn't stand it...  no twisting in the wind for her...  no agonizing...  sweating bullets...  and no real "TALK"... 

But...

I did ask her exactly what Pop had asked me all those years ago...  "WHAT were you DOING?!" "I don't knooooww...  I really didn't think they would grow!", she said...  "Then why??" I asked...  just the same as my Pop...

and as I sat in my floor, looking up at her and waiting for her answer, ready for the discipline I'd have to mete out, I heard it...

It was the most surreal moment of my parents-coming-back-to-haunt-me universe...  and the most amusing...  I truly felt my Pop's pain for the first time in my life and I couldn't do a damned thing but laugh...

"I don't know, I just wanted to see if I could do it!". 

Wait.  What?

And I knew it'd come back around...