Grandma's Pot Party

She invited me, and my girlfriend, “Bryan don’t you be late,” and I said “Okay, Nana,” because I’m always five when we talk on the phone.

And there I was at the Community Room of Cedar Woods Retirement Home, standing in the middle of two dozen elderly in a haze of pot smoke. An old man named Frank passed the joint to Helene, who inhaled with a puff of Chanel No 5, and laughed out a cloud of scorched weed, a storm forming over the punch bowl and slowly dissolving, “Just The Two Of Us” playing on the super-strong sub-woofers.

And there we were out on the dance floor, my Grandmother and I, all of us, dancing, like it was 1990-something. The folks in the motorized carts took the steel drum solo, and we just stopped caring. Some old guy had his hand on my girlfriend’s thigh- but what do you expect with the tango? Sweet green smoke blew through the room, and the old people had forgotten their age. A bald man in a vest kissed his wife's bare shoulder. 

Everyone was moving... The lights were bright, then the lights went out and we were in black and white, spinning in a circle, moving as a plural. Some guy named Nicholas exhaled and everybody had it. I swear I could feel the room moving, grooving to the tilting of the ocean, feeling the sea water splash in my face from just over the rails.

Nana had the hula-hoop in full swing and her neighbors were cheering her on... my next partner was a brown-haired beauty in a one-piece swimsuit named Frances, and I knew she had done this before.

Choreography comes easy when you let it... we all looked like we’d been rehearsing for weeks. My grandmother caught me dipping my girlfriend, and I saw something magical in her eyes, and that perfume was so strong and why is it that every story has to have an ending?