Did You Drop Something?

In my twenties I worked at a food co-op bakery in Minneapolis.    This was back during the peak of the hippy days.  I had long curly hair and a beard.   We were areal odd mixture of people.  There were draft dodgers, people wanted by the IRS for tax evasion, people on the lam from creditors, young men and women newly divorced, people getting stoned every day on pot or hashish, ex-cons,political activists, anti-war protestors, young hippy women looking for a man,young hippy men looking for a woman, and a few who were mentally ill.
We made all the decisions in the bakery in a group meeting.  Each of the twenty five workers got a vote.  Every decision had to be made unanimous.   Before the meeting started we would sit in a large circle and pass around some joints.     The odd mixture of people plus the heady Panamanian pot made for interesting discussions.   By the time the third joint got passed around we could not remember what we were talking about.  By the fifth joint we no longer cared.

An elderly woman filed a complaint
Claimed someone dropped LSD in her bread
We all checked our pockets

Stephen W. Leslie is an award winning haiku poet and has published 33 essays and poems.  His haibun, Elevator Music, was selected as one of the best haibun poems of 2011.  He is a retired hospice chaplain and lives in upstate New York with his pet rock Fifi.