In 2020 hindsight, it’s easy to see how my grandfather fooled so many people, and why the FBI showed up at his funeral, asking about how he planned to kill the president, and where Hoffa’s body was.

This is work in progress – literally – because I’m working on this for a few days. Please check back.

1955-1972

In the 1950’s, my grandmother was a young woman, living a comfortable life in Richmond Hill Canada, a neighborhood of Toronto. She was petite, barely 5 feet 1 inches tall. Or, as Canadians say, she was a’boot 1.5 meters tall, ‘eh. Her wrists were so thin that her watch would barely fit around the wrist of an average eight year old girl, but her hands were big enough to hold a cocktail glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She enjoyed life.

I began writing a memoir, and I wrote the first true sentence I remembered as a child: Stevie Nicks was fine.

I’m not sure who’s responsible for me being a casualty of the War on Drugs. It could have been the new president, Ronald Reagan. In 1980 he promised the Evangelical Christian groups that financed his presidential campaign that he’d fight, and end, America’s drug problem. Or, it could have been my dad, who had earned enough money growing marijuana to buy remote land in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, where he grew even more marijuana. Either way, I at a lot ketchup in the early 80’s.