Not Your Grandmother's Brownie Recipe

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

It looked like any other brownie, only smaller. It tasted good—better than either I or my husband expected. Mercifully I resisted the urge to pop a second one-inch square into my mouth. I am greedy when it comes to chocolate, but I’m also on a semi-permanent diet. Since my retirement almost a decade ago, I have managed to gain a kilo or so.

We settle down to watch the hockey game. Winnipeg versus Nashville. Who would have thought that Winnipeg would field the Canadian dream team? But I've never bought into that "Canadian team" mentality—I'm more of an Original Six fan. The hyper-nationalists from coast to coast to coast might gasp in shock, but what's the real difference?

Just as I don’t get my tights in a knot about European players, I don’t care about American players versus Canadian players or American cities versus Canadian cities. I especially do not care about the nationality of multi-billionaires. I shop at Walmart because, to me, the Weston family and the Walton family are the same.

My husband felt it first. He looked at me as he had some forty years ago in his university dorm room.… more dazed than affectionate.

“I am so stoned.” His speech was slurred, or maybe my hearing was slurred.

In our younger days, we smoked a lot of weed but were never pot-heads. Both of us were far too ambitious for that kind of thing. We smoked marijuana and went on the occasional trip—but never to the extent that it would interfere with our studies and our master plans to climb the vertical mosaic that was then Canadian society. And climb it we did.

I used to tell friends that I had two big retirement plans. One, let my hair go grey; and two, smoke a lot of marijuana. I have been very successful in my first goal. Unlike my former colleagues who had lofty retirement goals—finishing that Ph.D. abandoned thirty years ago, taking a trip around the world in a sailboat, or writing the definitive 21st-century novel, I have been successful in cultivating a full mop of charcoal-grey hair.

I have been too busy to pursue my second retirement goal because I need to be alert for most of my activities. I am a hip granny, but even I draw the line at tending young children while stoned. Furthermore, as I age, I am reluctant to engage in behaviour that results in a hangover or some bodily damage. There is not enough resilience left in my arthritic frame to withstand previous pursuits like long-distance running, kamikaze skiing, binge drinking or drugs. But that little brownie proved irresistible.

In the throes of what can only be described as a “bad trip” complete with raging paranoia, nausea, vomiting and bizarre hallucinations, I felt I should call someone for help, but I imagined how, as a senior citizen, I could explain our stupidity.

“Where did you get the brownie?”

“A friend of a friend of my son?”

No. I couldn’t do that because I didn’t want to incriminate my son or his friend or the friend of his friend. Maybe I would just say I found the brownie or plead ignorance or amnesia.

My husband appears to be catatonic. He is enjoying himself—finding the hockey game more interesting than usual and the TV remote (always glued to his hand) a thing of wonder. He tries to move out of his chair to find the bedroom and his bed but instead ends up sprawled on the living room floor unable to rise.

“I’m calling 911.”

He dissuades me—there is the humiliation factor of being two seniors picked up in an ambulance because we ate marijuana-laced brownies. How do you explain your wanton behaviour to a 20-something intern in the Emergency Department? Furthermore, we don’t want to give weed a bad name. There are those out there who still believe in reefer madness and that marijuana is a gateway drug. Adding insult to injury is the fact that my husband is a retired physician, and his last gig was prescribing medical marijuana.

“Let’s just sleep it off,” my husband suggests.

That sounds like a good idea if we could only make it to the safety of our beds. Also, I’m not the least bit tired. I check my pulse periodically, and it appears to be in the neighbourhood of 150 beats a minute. That feels fast.

I am faced with one of the biggest decisions of my life. Do I call 911 and risk embarrassment but possibly save our lives or just let the chips fall where they may? I choose the latter even though, in my advanced state of paranoia, I am convinced we will likely die during the night.

I decide I will just remain in my lazy boy chair for the night. Given that my husband can’t move, I fetch a blanket and pillow to make his slumber on the floor slightly more comfortable. I also get a small mirror.

My husband falls into a deep sleep immediately. I spend the night in paranoid wakefulness, convinced that he is not sleeping but dead. All through the night, I take his pulse hourly and stick the little purse mirror under his nose to verify that he is still breathing. My cell phone rests on the table beside me.

As the sun rises my husband becomes conscious. He did not die after all, nor did I.

“What a night,” he observes stretching. “Did you manage to catch the score?”