My one serious attempt at memoir takes the reader back, as memoirs often do, to my adolescence and coming of age, in the late 60s and early 70s. When the manuscript went through copy-editing, a long query appeared at the point where I had written, “The next time, he brought a lid over to my dorm room.” What was this lid? the copy editor wanted to know. She had checked dictionaries and manuals of usage; she had thought of Tupperware lids, garbage-can lids, baseball caps. None of them made any sense to her.
I began buttonholing friends and acquaintances. “Picture,” I told them, “a friend who is generally stoned. I say that he’s brought a lid over to my dorm room. What has he brought?”
Men and women born between 1950 and 1958, I found in this completely anecdotal survey, knew immediately that I was talking about four fingers’ worth of marijuana in a plastic bag. Those …