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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregano |
Kids from Rockland County don't know shit about real drugs growing up, because our hardcore city parents wanted to give us a taste of the "good life" in the country, where the air is cleaner. We live a wholesome lifestyle that's hard for some transplants to adjust to, accustomed as they are to the networks of "Gotham City". It can be harder to survive if you're, say, a hardcore racist redneck "Welfare Queen" (no one cares about your insane ideas about some "confederacy": http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/07/confederacy-of-dunces.html), or a pampered Nuyorican playing the fake minority card you think you have as darker southern European looking to game a bunch of crazy white women from the dykey "Social Do-Gooder" class of condescending pseudo-intellectuals. Uh uh. Not here.
And that was part of the charm for us, too. We were such quick New Yorkers that our one childhood foray into the hinterlands of the Northeast known as "Pennsylvania" (it borders New York State), saw us immediately bumped up a grade or two, just for being able to read things like "maps", which are crucial for a successful urban childhood. The rural teachers in that small mountain town were both charmed and in frightened awe of us, because we could speak as children, too. How....odd. Yes, that's it. That's what our educated genetics were to their brand of "townies": strange! We considered it flattering to be their opposites, because even a toddler knows that the flip side of "bad" is "good", like turning over cards in a playful card-matching game, or sorting shapes and sizes to fit inside a colorful plastic ball, one of my all-time favorite pastimes as a very little girl.
It was a good variation early on in habitation among different types of communities: the big city life, rural mountain towns, and then the rather bucolic country charms of a newly settled Rockland County suburb, still ripe with farmland all around us. We grew strong and outdoorsy and independent, though the farm kids left us bored, and then that congealed into an excruciating pace that felt like an eternity, even with the advanced classes in a very good public school system, with our Regents exams and college credits received before our senior years. Waiting to move on while stuck in someone else's bad head is torture for the gifted class, like putting a "Special Needs" child in a foreign language class, just to watch them surely explode in a frustrated rage. It felt like that for me and my friends.
So, we did what every smart kid does while waiting for older humans to figure it out, get you out, or give you help that never comes until it's too late in its cruelly unnatural suppression. We naturally turned to experimenting with fruity wine coolers (kiddie taste buds=marketing genius!) and cigarettes, in the lull that's intellectually like one long hot summer with the constant drone of cicadas in the background, as a white noise we couldn't tolerate anymore. I took my PSAT's and I think one SAT test at the high school either drunk and/or high, just for the thrill of it. I had a nearly perfect score on the English side of it, without even trying hard or studying beforehand (surprise surprise), and I still didn't need any classes or credits to graduate as a senior. What would you do, if you were me and still a child in someone's disordered household? We all had the same problems.
Because my friends at school were also older by at least a year or two (in deference to my "Irish Twin" brother, because my parents forbade me from moving up another grade as was natural for me to do, so as to not offend him with his Dyslexia, nor compete with my mom's early graduation that she was coached through by her gifted parents, huge artificial advantages for them both), they got into a lot more trouble way ahead of me. They had already dated and lost their virginity, were on birth control and/or having very early-term inductions so as to go through college uninterrupted or, conversely, plotting marriages through intentionally manipulative early pregnancies with a big fat Catholic wedding, in lieu of college.
They were shipped off to rehab and/or their grandparents' homes, both here and back in the "Old World" (because it moves in both directions in the Colonies: America for the Euros living overseas, and Europe for the Americans established here), or upstate to "juvie" and mental institutions, all before I had my first date, first kiss, and/or first real teenage rebellion experiences. Of course, instead of teaching me anything with their knowledge, they sought to one-up the house genius, but I digress. That was anything I wasn't already used to.
Kids began sorting out addictive preferences according to their genetics. The obviously bad kids hung out at "The Wall", smoking and listening to po' white trash heavy metal. The Irish kids hid their homosexuality from their uptight parents with dubious hetero links to suburban normality. Smart kids hid behind their grades and their ingrained roles as "teacher's pet", loudly bragging about test scores that were largely determined by the test designers' conceits as a scholar (publishing is like that, too). The rich Jewish kids already had Ivy League lawyer/doctor/dentist/chiropractor fathers who "made it". They just had to not screw up badly enough to wind up in jail. And then there was me and my friends, cooler than any one particular strata, and adept enough to straddle as many roles as we had to adapt to, taming stresses long held in our families as best as we could.
We developed habits and coping skills as we needed them, as we watched our parents' lives fell apart. We became parents, mentors, elders, and counselors before our time, inadvertently pole-vaulting ourselves far above the heads of the generation immediately before and after us, the good results of which you are reading about now, as the "X" that marks the spot for you to find treasure, on the road-map we laid as our joint beneficial futures. We became law enforcement, clergy, teachers, social workers, activist, artists, writers, and philanthropists, without the corrupted money inherited from other people's labors, because there was none to be had. We would have donated what we didn't need, anyway.
And so, when me and my friend Molly were bored in homes empty of mothers, we fiddled with grown-up stuff, like any teenager running a household would: we played with the stuff that was around us, and available for us to use. She delved deeper into drugs, alcohol, and sex, to a level that scared me, but I was interested in any experimentation that made time go by faster. We giggled as we recollected the smell of "pot" (marijuana). It kinda smelled like burning oregano! Kids that we were (and already experienced cooks, which girls were expected to know how to do, in our large traditional households), we found the spice on the shelf and dived right in. Here it is!
We had cigarette rolling papers, but no real drugs, because none of us liked the time it took to go into the cities worst neighbors for something as silly as dried-out weeds. Not worth the risk. We didn't have the money or the cars that'd make the drive into town either, scant as our working class resources were (are), because every single one of us had to have after-school job(s). We took our badly-wrapped pseudo "joint" (a rolled marijuana cigarette) into my mom's bathroom, because her small powder-room had a window we could crack open to dispel the strong smell, only to be promptly discovered by my "Irish Twin" brother now home from school, too. He banged on the door to scare us, and we laughed even harder as we tried to put out the burning paper in my mom's tiny bathroom sink. Oh, well!
What did we learn from this banal experiment in recreational party tricks? Well, since we'd already taken lab classes with dissections in junior high school, not much. Unlike other pantry items (<cough> meth monkeys <cough>) that the much harder and more ingrained addicts around us must have known could give you a "buzz", we simply found out what we already knew at the outset of our funny little time-waster: oregano is made for better things, like spicing up a Sunday dinner spaghetti sauce, but I'm sure you kids today are much hipper at this kind of stuff than we were back then, what with the decriminalization of cannabis as your "Medical Marijuana" today, because of its mildly narcotic medicinal effects, and all. GenX did that, too.
