My mother hasn’t been able to sleep for a week. The situation was so dire in her eyes that this weekend she asked to be taken to the ER. “Mom, the ER is for emergencies. Not sleeping is annoying, not an emergency,” I lectured before declining to play ambulance.
She continued to complain about feeling stressed, about how her acupuncturist had retired, and about how she was scared she wasn’t sleeping. Then she asked, “tienes acupuncturista?”
I don’t have one, but I told her I thought there was one near my house. So, we went to the Eastern Center for Complementary Medicine, which is amusingly west of the doughnut shop and laundromat in this particular mini mall.
From the outside, the office looked neat, clean, professional, and not too busy. The description of the place in the window promised acupuncture, nutrition, bioenergetic testing, and herbal medicine. For half a second as we walked in I wondered what kind of herbs they used.
It didn’t take long to find out. The place reeked of marijuana.
My mother, a woman who honestly believes everything we do is kept in a permanent record held by the government, gave me the horrified look I’d seen exactly once before–when she and I were held up almost 20 years ago. “There’s going to be a record now that I was in the presence of marijuana,” I heard her thinking. No longer would a jaywalking ticket be the worst thing in the permanent record of her life.
I, wanting to be cool and disaffected, tried hard to remember the state of medical marijuana court battles in California, as I asked my mother to sit down while I talked to the receptionist about a rate schedule.
While the Alanis Morissette look-alike sitting behind the desk recited prices, a mysterious force pushed closed the door from which the smoke emanated. It was then that I turned to ask my mother if she wanted to set up an appointment, but she had already stood up and gotten herself half way out the door. However, since the permanent record keeper also seems to keep track of being rude, she politely turned to the receptionist and said, in eerily perfect English, “Thank you for your time, let me think about it.”
We got outside and she concluded that we’d be better off with a recommendation for a good acupuncturist. She also informed me, in her “take note of this voice” that she did not like walking in on pot smoking.
“Uh, ok,” I uttered a little unclear of what she wanted from me or meant by that statement. “Maybe if you’d stayed you would have mellowed out,” I joked.
She did not laugh.
Although we ended our little adventure with a discussion of medical marijuana use in the state, I couldn’t help but wonder why I’m always the daughter who gets to share these kinds of experiences with her mom. Don’t other people just cook or shop or travel or something?
© Laura Genao 2007
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