Coulda.
Recently, I found myself driving to Burnaby to buy garden supplies with my landlady. (As an aside, I love my landlord and landlady. I told them, “I’m going to make a lawn in the backyard and get rid of the buttercups and weeds and those yellow things we don’t know what they are”, and they said, “Awesome! How can we help?” Even though they never go back there and it is my private spider-infested domain.)
So we were heading to a discount garden center on Byrne Road, and I was giving the landlady directions.
“You seem to know the area well,” she observed.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I used to have a boyfriend out here. We’d drive down to an old playground at the end of Byrne, and blow up pumpkins with firecrackers.” Which is totally true. My ex loved blowing things up. It was a hobby for him. Very relaxing.
Aside from the periodic heroin addiction, I thought, and the fact that he couldn’t get over the fact that he’d have to live the rest of his life NOT a celebrity drug dealer, we could have had a wonderful life together.
I was quiet for a while. “Yeah. But for the grace of God, I could have been a divorced mother of two in Burnaby.”
“Wow,” said my landlady. “You just never know what’s going to happen.”
Some Stuff | Liz April 20, 2009
By Arwen, April 21, 2009 @ 9:24 am
Divorced mother of TWO?
In my alternate reality Lizzaverse, you have four children. Betsy, Bootsy, Bongo, and Steve.
word verification: East crab
ie: what you’d be as a divorced mother of four in Burnaby.
By Liz, April 21, 2009 @ 2:41 pm
Those are my gnomes’ names!
(not really)
Probably one of my children would have been named Melvin, but called by his second name.
Word verification: house sediment
ie, also what I would be as a divorced mother of any number in Burnaby.
By cheesefairy, April 21, 2009 @ 3:19 pm
BUT - assuming you mean the fraser river-side park – that is a great park at the end of Byrne Road. It has a big boat structure and a hayuuuuge sandbox. So you could drop the kids there, go to work and pick them up on the way home.
Hell, now that there’s a Big Box Extravaganza just up from there (we call it “Little Calgary”) you could go to work at the London Drugs, pick up dinner at Nando’s and the kids would STILL be playing with sand when you went back to get them.
OTOH one time there was a dead seal washed up on the shore at that park.
Not the point you’re going for, SURE but still. There are worse parks to be a divorced parent at, I think.
My word verification is Vacant 9.0 which is what I am calling the next blogospheric twitterific revolution. Revolution Number 9.0. hee.
By Liz, April 21, 2009 @ 10:06 pm
That’s the very one, Cheesefairy. But who would provide childcare? The discount garden centre employees? The dead seal? The deadbeat dad?