I was living up in the Oakland hills back in the late seventies when I got a phone call. It was my step dad Paul and he asked me to come over to their place and get my mom stoned.

They were living in an apartment downtown, and I said sure. I had never done anything like that with either of them before, in fact they were drug free their whole lives.

Paul was on a portable breathing device that he carried around with him, after years as a cigarette smoking trucker, while mom suffered from terrible migraines.

I remember that early evening visit as if it was yesterday. We sat around their kitchen table while I put some bud into a bong and fired it up. Paul injected some vodka into his breathing rig, and I got us all stoned. I know Paul was sucking that smoke up through his nose...

My step dad and I were never close, but that night he was smiling and I genuinely felt connected to him. He was the bread winner for all those years, while mom played the dutiful child raising housewife, and was a great cook.

This was a once in a lifetime event and I was dying to see where it ended up!

They started talking about how they first met. It was a few years after the end of WW2 and mom was divorced with two young boys, living in Southern California. She left my brother and I with her parents one night and went to a bar. I had never heard this story before.

That's where she met Paul. They talked through the evening about that encounter and I got the sense that they hooked up that night. A couple years later they were married and my sister was born.

How may of you have ever gotten stoned with your parents?