Marijuana's Third Third

You know you are deep, deep into your Third Third when you are listening to a conversation about marijuana and the women are discussing cannabis and hot flashes, night sweats, and menopause.

Pause. I need to recover from that sentence.

It gets worse. They went on a personally-organized field trip to local marijuana dispensaries. Another woman is upset she wasn’t included.

You look at them. They are wearing fashionable clothes – with accessories! Their hair is nicely coifed, gray is either stylish or colored.

Another pause for brain readjustment. Sometimes I think I should not be writing blog posts; I should be writing a pilot for a sitcom.

The women decide I have to disguise them so no one reading this will guess who they are. “Angela” has always wanted to be an Angela so she is very excited at giving herself this new identity. She assigns aliases to the others. “Jolene” and I stare at the group; who are these people, and what did they do to our friends?

The women had a general idea of where a dispensary was located so they drove up and down the street till they were sure one building might be it. Once, while traveling out of town, they’d come upon a long line of people on the sidewalk. It was either a soup kitchen or an iPhone giveaway, but when they Googled the address, it turned out to be a dispensary. So I guess that gave them experience in dispensary identification.

The proprietors were very helpful. The women learned about CBD oil, which is supposed to be curative but doesn’t make you high. (But one of the women already knew about CBD oil from her son.) They learned about vaporizers. “Is that a bong? Like a perfume atomizer?” No. They got free, hand-made, terra cotta pipes as a little gift. They bought a small caramel/chocolate star.

Angela learned why her first foray into cannabis was not a success. Apparently, she learned, you have to toast something to work with it. I think she was making salve. (Not being on the field trip, my understanding of all this is a little sketchy. I took notes for the sitcom pilot, but they’re a little sparse, and there were no visual aids.) So Angela wanted to borrow someone’s toaster oven to do this in her garage. The concern: the neighbors would smell it. The solution: smoke some salmon at the same time. So maybe she’ll apply fish-scented salve to her body or eat marijuana-laced smoked salmon.

Angela tried her little star. Just a point. I’m not sure if that’s the experience that left her singing through housecleaning or if that was something else.

“Jolene” has been quiet throughout the adventure travel recap. She spent her youthful rebellion moving in the other direction from a counter-culture mother. While every now and then we all feel like we’re turning into our mothers, I imagine Jolene is watching her circle of friends turn into her mother. The field-trippers turn to her.

“Jolene, do you think your mother has some other source for marijuana?”

Jolene must recover enough because a few minutes later, she shares a text from her mother: “OMG.” Is this shock speaking or mother-daughter bonding?

Meanwhile, another friend of mine has organized Ellementa, a start-up for women to learn about cannabis wellness. And a Seattle-area assisted living community is organizing Pot 101 field trips. My Jewish newsletter just sent out a recipe for pot-laced matzoh brei for Passover: Potzoh Brei. What is the world coming to?

Unfortunately, the women have learned that cannabis doesn’t do anything for wrinkles.

But that’s because they’re not lying around on waterbeds listening to Pink Floyd. It has nothing to do with not being 20 anymore either.