Getting high enriched and enlivened these walks. Random images (patterns of sunlight and shade, the roots of a granddaddy oak) could be uncommonly gripping. Because the walks were more eventful, they felt longer. What a godsend it was for the incidental shut-in to be able to conjure these illusions of unlimited space.

Often I took Anne on road trips, to stimulate our aging brains. In the mornings, while she meditated in our motel room, I hiked around the neighborhood, through the parking lots of strip-mall America. The terrain was always shockingly disabused of its natural character. But I took those walks stoned. So one setting was just as compelling as the next: marching through the shadows of the KFC bucket and the Arby’s hat, then back into sunshine again, through the Toyota dealer’s lot — the Camrys posing with their doors flung open like a chorus line — past a payday-loan shop, a Cracker Barrel, an abandoned Kmart, a pawnshop, a Petco, their parking spaces separated by paltry no-man’s-lands of spoiled grass.

Before Anne got sick, I was a travel writer who got sent away on expeditions to New Guinea and Madagascar. Now, working the seams between one mall and the next, I didn’t have to go to the ends of the earth to have experiences that would open my eyes. Marijuana excels at helping the wanderer see beauty in the ordinary.

At home, I had a dinnertime ritual. Anne used to be a superb cook, but we had a new division of labor now — every job mine. So first I helped her to get settled on the couch upstairs. Then, down in the kitchen, the recipe was simple: one big suck on the bong. After that, how easy it was to get absorbed (chop, chop, sizzle, sizzle) in the satisfactions of completing each chore and the free-range adventures of an untethered mind.

Potheads come in a wide variety of disguises. We have stoner athletes and doctors and cops and welders and famous astronomers (we miss you, Carl!). I am charting my own course, as a stoner helpmate: chronically chipper, resilient on demand, fully rechargeable and unmatched at keeping myself amused for long stretches of downtime.