I think we must take a moment to speak “Hallelujah!,” or at least “hallelujah” for a small act of humanity, not to mention common sense, on the part of Vermont’s esteemed legislators: medical marijuana is legal at last.

It couldn’t have come in a more appropriate month, as far as I am concerned.  June means Father’s Day, and my father was a glaucoma sufferer, way back in the 1960’s.

My parents had met on a train in the middle of America at the end of the Second World War.  Mother, an Army nurse, and Dad, a lowly private were already a little longer-of-tooth than most young sweethearts of the day.

From what I’ve been told, it was love at first sight.

By the time they were  mustered-out and could finally marry, having us kids became job one, as women approaching 40 and gentlemen older than that were not thought to be prime parent material.  So my sister and I arrived, just twenty-one months apart, and proceeded to keep their lives interesting through the fifties, ratcheting-things up somewhat in the turbulent sixties.  

Both bore it like troopers; but most surprising was the adaptability of my Dad, who had been raised a staunch Roman Catholic on a farm in central Illinois. Whether it was his disappointment at being unable to utilize a scholarship to teacher’s college, witnessing his family lose their farm, or surviving the Great Depression by working odd jobs for food; something set a decidedly progressive engine rumbling beneath his conservative roots.  

When I was seventeen, he began pressure drops for previously undetected glaucoma.  Despite the fact that both my Dad and my mother were working, we didn’t have a lot of money, so we went to the neighborhood dentist, the neighborhood GP, and the neighborhood eye doctor…whom we learned too late was just a trained optician with delusions of grandeur.   Once detected by a legitimate ophthalmologist,  Dad’s glaucoma didn’t respond well to drops, so surgery was required.

While he was still struggling on the drops, however, my bold big sister ventured to tell him about new evidence suggesting that marijuana could provide some relief!  Now keep in mind that this was around 1968, by which time the whole nation had taken to hyperventilating about the evils of “grass.”  Nevertheless, my straight-arrow blue-collar Dad simply thanked her for the suggestion and joked, “I think I have enough bad habits.”  

So here’s to all the glaucoma sufferers and cancer patients in Vermont who will soon be able to step up to a local dispensary in broad daylight, and legally get the simple relief that has so long been denied to them…and here’s to my darling Dad.