I did not know I would have to hand over my purse, my keys, everything in my pockets, that the nurse would have to follow me into the bathroom, remove the hand soap, paper towels, and instruct me not to flush until she comes back in and checks the bowl herself. At least, she tells me, she is excused from having to stay with me the entire time. and I am reminded of Chris in rehab, how counselors were required to stand watch for each weekly check-in, observe her pee into a cup like the cup I’m handed this morning. I appreciate that I’m treated like a trustworthy, responsible individual to the extent the clinic is allowed. After all, this test is just a formality, a last minute pre-employment requirement, and a formality is all it should be, except I smoked a roach two weeks earlier I found ceaning Chris’s bedroom and I can count the number of times I have smoked weed in the last ten years and stay in the single digits. I consider calling my daughter to ask “Is two weeks enough time?” and “if is isn’t, what can I do to influence the test in my favor?,” or “does a roach really matter?” but I don’t because then she’ll know and it isn’t that she doesn’t already know most of it, the men, the drugs, the overdose when I was younger than she is now, and then there’s that interrogation at the Canadian border when Joey and I, in our late teens, intoxicated, stoned, stupidly arguing while driving around at two in the morning crossed over from Vermont on some nondescript country road and now had to find our way back into the U.S.A., only we were too fucked up to backtrack and found ourselves at a checkpoint. Somehow, miraculously, we were ushered back into the states and it isn’t that they didn’t question us, we barely able to string two words together let alone converse with customs officers. It isn’t that they didn’t search the car, under the seats, Page 2 in the glove compartment, under the chassis, in tire housings, but they passed over Joey’s boots in the back seat on the floor where we’d stashed baggies of crosses, beauties. It isn’t that they didn’t open the trunk, shine flashlights on Joey’s 6-packs, my guitar case, but they didn’t open the case where we’d packed a pound plus of pot. What we were doing in Northern Vermont with all that merchandise is, altogether, another story. It was 1971, before dogs, before stiffer laws, more rigorous inspections. We felt terribly lucky, but what did we know. Perhaps the border patrol had a good laugh on our account, told the story to their day shift buddies over morning coffee while Joey and I would keep it to ourselves. Now, thirty-something years later, reminded of how many things in my life could have, should have gone so dreadfully wrong and didn’t, I fill the specimen jar somewhat fretful over choices I’ve made at inopportune times. The phrase “It’s the little things that’ll get you,” carries a little too much weight today.