My big sister, Miriam used to live with me when I was a baby. She was 18, 19 or so (She’s my half-sister from my dad’s first marriage). Well that’s not exactly true…

Miriam would live with us when it SUITED her. When she was in New York. From the ages of 16 to 21 she’d move from New York to LA, depending on which of her parents she was mad at at the time. She did this 17 times. Getting to be on first-name basis with the Greyhound Bus drivers. Once, when she was mad at BOTH of them she moved in with our oldest sister.

For 2 days.

Until she got a clump of her hair pulled out for some bullshit.

After that she moved in with a gay man. So she could hag off of him.

Anyway, I do remember her being around when I was a little baby, or maybe I was told that she was around so much that I imagined the memories like what happens when I play Beautiful Katamari while drunk and I can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is a video game….

This isn’t a story about her living with us though. It’s a story about her moving out. Well, about why she moved out one time.

My dad was cleaning out the kitchen, getting it ready for a remodeling (a 100+ year old house who’s previous owners didn’t take care of it or modernize much of anything) when he came across a teapot. He felt that there was something in it so he looked in and found….

Marijuana. Pot. Weed. Grass. Whatever you wanna call it….

He ran up to the attic where Miriam was staying. I vividly remember her room being the unfinished attic with a Blondie poster on the wall and her bed being a sleeping bag on a sheet of plywood on 6 cinder blocks. She had a book case and one of those fancy overstuffed Victorian lounge chairs and an awesome New Art Glass floor lamp, with an ashtray that was perpetually overflowing with her cigarette butts and ashes. There was also an overwhelming smell of Patchouli and Cigarettes but I thought that was just her perfume.

Her car (a baby blue 1970’s Volkswagon Beetle with one black door) always smelled of that too.

Well, dad ran over and started screaming about “How could you DO this?!!” “I have a BABY in here!” etc etc… THROWS the teapot at her, missing by an inch where it shatters on the wall getting chunks of porcelain in her hair…

All the time she’s crying “It’s not mine! I don’t know who’s it is… waaahhhh”.

Then my mom comes running upstairs.

Tells them both to shut up.

Because the pot…. is my dad’s.

You see, he was going to sell it (it was a full teapot’s worth of pot) five years before this all started but the guy that was going to buy it got arrested. For pot. So he couldn’t buy it.

My dad put it in the teapot for safe keeping until he could find another buyer.

Which didn’t happen.

Then he retired from teaching and didn’t need to smoke pot anymore and lost touch with all his old pothead friends (isn’t that just how it goes?). He forgot that he had stuffed half a pound or so of pot into a teapot because he was higher than a Willie Nelson contact high when he put it in there.

No wonder this was the last time Miriam lived with us…