Groundhog’s Day 2023
Once upon a time Groundhog’s Day was a quaint little blip on the dreary calendar of winter. No one ever seems to query the silliness of the legend: if he sees his shadow there are six more weeks of winter, if he doesn’t it is six weeks until Spring? Well, something like that…
For my late husband Robert Randall, Groundhog’s Day became a ritual of silly, handmade cards that were sent to an ever-widening circle of friends in the 1980s and 1990s. Here’s a few of them, collected by a cousin. That’s a very young Alice peeking out from among the cards.
Some of you might wonder how Groundhog’s Day came to be Robert’s favorite holiday. He explained why in our 1998 book, Marijuana Rx: The Patient’s Fight for Medicinal Pot. Here is the excerpt:
“February 2, 1978
Washington, D.C.
I stared at the cookies on the counter. I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t eat another chocolate chip, marijuana-laced cookie.
In late January some friends had come to dinner bringing with them more than half a pound of very green, uncured marijuana. The couple, who lived in posh Chevy Chase, Maryland, had grown the plants as a lark. During the previous summer I had posed for pictures amidst the bright green foliage. “We’re not sure about the quality,” Jack said, “but we thought it might help.”
The Chevy Chase chartreuse—as I dubbed it—smelled moldy, smoked rough, and produced less high than headache. So I put some of the marijuana in a vat of boiling water and butter, reclaimed the butter, then made some excellent, albeit slightly green, cookies. Not perfect, the cookies produced a better high than smoking the low potency weed and helped lower my eye pressures. After a few days of trial and error I had settled on an appropriate cookie dose and had been swallowing cookies on a regular basis. Now they stared up at me and I couldn’t bring myself to lift one more to my mouth.
Reasoning that someone at NORML would have a joint, I traveled downtown to smoke and generally hang out. Towards evening Keith stopped by Alice’s office. “Some people downstairs to see you, Bobby.”
Keith introduced Alice and me to a young backwoods couple with thick Ozark accents. They were dressed in ragged hand-me-down clothes and looked like impoverished sharecroppers. And, in a way, they were.
“It’s a real honor to meet you, Mr. Randall, sir,” the young man said displaying southern manners and an uneven hillbilly grin. “Our friend Frank said you was having trouble with the govr’mint.” Frank, an extremely talented Arkansas farmer, had presented me with a sample of his product during the NORML conference in December.
The young man nudged his girlfriend who pulled a large mason jar from her burlap purse. He handed the jar, packed with buds, to me. “Bet you won’t get anything this good from Uncle Sam,” he said with unalloyed pride. “That’s Ozark grass, right out of the hills of Arkansas. That there jar is from Frank, with compliments. We — me ’n my girlfriend — we grew this stuff ourselves.” With that the young man pulled out another jar, slightly smaller, and opened the lid. The pungent perfume of really fine pot instantly filled the room.
The young couple, having cared, cured and manicured their crop were making their annual post-harvest sales trip to the Northeast, returning home through Washington. “Do you think you could put us up a day or two?” the girlfriend asked. “We’d like to see Washington.”
They were much welcomed guests who stayed two days. In addition to the mason jar packed with primo buds from Frank, the couple, on leaving, gave me a large cardboard box filled with less well-manicured buds, lots of shake and a mass of fragrant leaves. “This stuffs not fit to sell—not up to our clients’ standards,” the young man explained, “but we’d be plenty pleased to give it to you. It might help get you through a dry spell. And,” he added, “it’ll be better than your cookies.”
Salvation! Ark grass with an Ozark accent. It was one of my first encounters with a highly secretive guild of premium pot growers who serviced wealthy tokers willing to pay top prices. The Ark grass would save me from blindness. And, from that day on, Groundhog Day would be my favorite holiday.”
