I Smoked

I smoked pot... joints and good food, and an open fire. How better to spend a Sunday night, I ask you?

It was a wintry night outside.

The whole gang was over.

The green green grass of home. Do you know that song? It’s a Tom Jones song. 

That’s how I feel about pot, it is the green green grass of home. My dad gave me my first joint. He and I used to sit out on the back deck and smoke some pot. Then we’d laugh and joke and talk shit. I loved those hours with him. They were funny. We thought we were the funniest people on earth. And we were, quite possibly. We never had it tested, but we reckoned we were.

Mum would sometimes come out and just gaze across the deck at the two of us. I could tell she was pleased, secretly chuffed, to use one of her favourite words, seeing the two of us being mates, being buds, being friends. Mum didn’t smoke pot herself, but some days I could see the admiration as clear as day when she’d come out and say dinner was ready, or that she’d made a cake, or some other desert for us.

“You two clowns can come in now and have some,” she’d say. She said it with genuine love for the two of us, rejoicing in her own way in dad and my bond.

I really miss him now a days.

I miss mum too.

I can’t really get my head around the fact that the two of them have left me now. I can’t get my head around it completely, but then, I’m not really sure that I want to. Because the more time I spend not really getting it completely, the more time they spend not really leaving entirely.

And when I smoke pot now a days and then I get immersed in writing something, I feel like they are all with me, mum, dad, all of those wonderful people who I had growing up who are no longer here.

Mum, dad, nana, doodoo, grandad, my army of unties and uncles, and great unties and great uncles, all of them… I can hear all of their voices.