I Was a Travelling Door to Door Encyclopedia Salesman

Disclaimer:  As I've mentioned before, not everything on this blog is exactly child-friendly.  Be warned.  Furthermore, I am in no way condoning and certainly not encouraging anybody to smoke pot.  That being said, I was a 21 year old university dropout at the time and . . . oh, what the heck, there are gonna be some pot stories on this blog, and here's the first one: I'd venture a guess that if I were to ask a hundred people how much pot they think gets smoked on the road by travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen, as many would be shocked that it happens at all as would be shocked that it's not ubiquitous.  I'd say that of the dozen or so road trips I went on in my six months, there was weed on about half of them.  It mostly depended on the crew members of a given trip.  Some would be opposed, in which case nobody did any, some were cool with it, and then there were the potheads. Like Andy Bailey. Bet let's talk about Andy and h...

One time, back in the days when I was a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman, I went to St. Walburg, a town of about 650 people in northern Saskatchewan. Now, let me preface this by saying that I'm Jewish, but 16 years ago, when I was selling encyclopedias, I wasn't that  Jewish, if you know what I mean.  I might have gone to synagogue once or twice a year, did something or other Jewish on some of the major holidays, but not much more than that.  But I certainly felt  Jewish, and one Jewish thing I did every single day was to wear a silver Star of David necklace, and had been doing so for years. But I'm no idiot.  When out in the rural areas of BC, Alberta, and Saskatchewan (not a lot of Jews out there), I kept the Star of David under my shirt.  Until, that is, I walked up to a door in St. Walburg and saw a mezuzah . I must have stood there staring at it for a whole minute.  I hadn't seen the slightest hint of a Jewish presence in my 5 m...