I’ll never forget the first few times I saw marijuana when I was a kid.

Usually, it was hidden somewhere I shouldn’t have been looking or wasn’t expected to look. At least once, I remember experimentally opening the glovebox of my dad’s truck and being face to face with a stinking bag of weed. He simply reached over and closed the glovebox. I don’t think he even said anything. I don’t think I asked any questions. It was understood that this was something taboo.

Nevertheless, my dad was always exceedingly responsible about pot and never smoked in front of me or gave any kind of hint—besides not being very good at hiding his stash—that he smoked weed. By the time I reached adolescence, I knew what it was and what it smelled like, I knew what I’d learned in D.A.R.E. classes and the likes—namely, that it was illegal—but that was all I knew. Well, I knew one more thing: my dad was breaking the law.

I always wondered about that.

If marijuana was so bad and my dad was so good, why would he smoke weed? Life was full of such riddles. I steered clear of them when I could. But this one kept coming back. Before long, my friends and I were old enough to drive. The scary truth is that when this time comes, dog will hunt. Boys will be boys. That said, I never tried smoking weed until I was seventeen, I think.

I still wouldn’t smoke regularly for another couple years, but from the start I knew I liked it. Here, I found peace where I wasn’t supposed to be looking. Riddle me that. Certainly, I hadn’t expected to find it; but here it was. Here it is. And I understand now why my dad may or may not have smoked it. We are who we are, who we aren’t supposed to be.

Flashforward a dozen or so years, and now Missouri has become the 21^st state to legalize recreational marijuana. Not only that, nonviolent offenses are to be expunged and persons incarcerated for such crimes to be released. It’s kind of a 180° from locking people up for possession. It kind of makes a person wonder if it’s not all about money—since clearly, it’s not about Ideals. Actually, it is all about money. That’s no secret. Like most things, it always has been and always will be all about money. Here’s an example:

About three weeks before the vote for recreational marijuana, three friends and myself—each of us with spotless records, believe it or not; apparently, it was more than the state trooper could fathom—were pulled over on our way to Kansas City to see a rock concert. Long story short, I received a misdemeanor possession charge over a centimeter-long roach from a joint that wasn’t even mine because it was under my seat. Again, this was weeks before the vote which basically everybody knew was going to pass, and did pass—which made the ticket more annoying than anything, plus lawyer fees I shouldn’t have had to pay. Thanks, guy. Like, why? You know? Just to be a dick. Serve and protect. *Salutes, but with middle finger. I digress.

It is a new and weird time, ladies and gentlemen. The gap between the present and the future is ever narrowing, but some of us will always live in the past. Knowing that, perhaps it’s necessary to forgive them and move on, not to look back and accidentally fall under the spell yourself. The spell of comfort through familiarity, a clinging to what you know because it seems like all you know sometimes, that anything else is alien and wrong—because what we believe we become as fully as possible.

Even that state trooper I wanted so badly to hate: surely, he hates it too on some level. But being hard like that is required of him. It’s required of him other times. Other times can be anytime, he knows too well—perhaps remembering an altercation he had the one time he let his guard down. And so, I do. I do look back. And I’m thinking to myself what surely Orpheus was thinking: Well, that was easy.