I am 86 years old. You already know that. But I make a point of it here, though, since, as I think the subscription department of the Bethlehem Press will attest, that I am older than every one of you, my readers, every one. I speak to you from another age. I speak to you from another era. I will call it BM. Before Marijuana.

Bless me Father, I have sinned. I was not a model child. I drank Ballantine beer in the dark crevasses of the Highland Avenue School playground in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, at age 14 in 1954, when “the” classic coming of age novel “Catcher in the Rye” had just hit the paperback rack at the Crossroads Pharmacy, in which I and the world saw the word f*** in print (p. 154) for the very first time. But we BM guys had to work for our highs, gnawing bottle caps off the quart bottles of brew with our teeth.

This was before marijuana. There was no marijuana. We were so innocent. Betty has often remarked that she left with me before the wall-to-wall hundreds of jam-packed homes in the misnamed working-class Philadelphia suburb of Stonehurst Hills a year before monster marijuana turned Long Lane into Drug Boulevard and dealt her sister and brother the ravage they would die of. We missed the tsunami by a year.

So I know nothing of marijuana. Nothing good.

Fast forward a lifetime. I have a spine, as I have written in these pages, shaped like Center St. as it winds up hill along Nisky Hill Cemetery from the Police Memorial at the north edge of the New Street Bridge to Church St. You know where I mean, you can imagine how that feels. I have a sacroiliac pumped full of hopefully healing joy juice. I who was once 6’1” am now 5’10.” People hold the door for me at Wawa. I do on all fours the agonizing “spider crawl” the three flights from living room to study where I write this to you.

So I sought marijuana. Medical marijuana.

Today as I write, a virgin, I visited the medical marijuana emporium on Stefko Blvd. And made a buy. I bought a topical cream, which I applied just like it was Vaseline to my main pain point with some success, with some relief.

But it was also recommended that I buy a Vape Pen, which came in a sealed paper bag. When I opened it, I found a completely smooth pencil-like cylinder without instructions. I was clueless, I felt like a befuddled ape facing the monolith in Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Past meets future. I will have to return to the emporium tomorrow and humbly ask for a tutorial on how to access the magic potion therein.

I felt duty-bound to alert my sons of their dad’s adventuresome foray into the future. One pondered a full fifteen minutes to reply, simply, “Buckle up.” Another recommended that I be sure to ask chair-bound Betty if she needed anything before I took a trip into Never-Never Land Good practical advice.

Memorably, though, a third conjured the image of Traffic’s (The Band) apparently classic “Dear Mr. Fantasy.” How often the culture’s artists, often derided, nail it, well before the mainstream: “Dear Mister Fantasy, play us a tune, Something to make us all happy, Do anything, take us out of this gloom, Sing a song, play guitar, make it snappy, You are the one who can make us all laugh, But doing that you break out in tears, Please don’t be sad, If it was a straight mind you had, We wouldn’t have known you all these years.”

Dear Mr. Fantasy, play me a tune. Something to make me all happy. With the help of marijuana, I hope to live till a hundred,