Contact

 This past weekend I was out for a run and at precisely the moment when a song by Boston came pouring through my earbuds, I passed through a cloud of pot smoke left by the young person who had been honking on a spleef in front of me just moments before. Suddenly, I was back at Folsom Field. The year was 1979. I was seventeen. A little scared. A little thrilled to be at a rock show. A little curious if I would get stoned by just hanging around amid all that grass that was most definitely not Astroturf. 

It wasn't the first time that I worried about a contact high. A few years before, my older brother had cajoled our parents into buying us all tickets to see a double bill that featured Leon Redbone and Tim Weisberg. This one wasn't outdoors on a football field, it was inside Macky Auditorium just a few hundred yards away, but when the lights went down, the experience was pretty much the same: Scared. Thrilled. Curious. 

This is pretty much how I spent the latter half of the nineteen-seventies. Living in Boulder, Colorado during this time was a continual process of reassessing one's priorities. It wasn't called "woke" back then, but it showed up along with the wave of free love and self-help that caused a generation to wonder if smoking dope was really that bad. Nowhere was this more apparent than the experience I had going across the street to meet the new neighbors: Mark Andes and his family. If that name doesn't ring a bell, I can understand, but Mark Andes was the bass player for Boulder-based rock and smooth rollers Firefall. In our neighborhood. A rock and roll star, or so, who invited the neighborhood girls to come over and babysit his toddler. The kids on our street looked for excuses to drop by, welcomed in by Mark and his family. His family who made no secret of the weed they were smoking in the living room. In front of anyone who might happen to pop in. Oh, and would you like a copy of our new album? 

Even with this level of pop laissez faire, I continued to have a cringe reaction to the scent of burning cannabis. This was similar to the flinch I would invariably experience whenever I saw more than three people riding motorcycles together: Motorcycle gang. Trouble will no doubt follow. I know that I mentioned that I grew up in Boulder in the seventies, but I was a very nerdy, uptight kid who grew up in Boulder in the seventies. 

It wasn't until I was in college, with the eighties taking off and cocaine taking over, that I first tried smoking pot. That vice never compared to the gallons of Miller Lite that I consumed over the next decade or so. Now I'm sixty-two and I have been substance free for more than half my life. But every so often I catch a whiff. Scared. Thrilled. Curious.