Port Moody...

    I spent the first twelve years of my life growing up in North Burnaby. My parents, sister and I lived in three bedroom one bathroom house that my Dad had built a couple of blocks off of Hastings St. We came upon some financial hard times when I was about twelve and Dad had to sell the house. It was quite traumatic at the time for a few reasons. All I had known was this neighbourhood with it's friends, alley ways,vegetable gardens(people actually had gardens in the olden days) fruit trees, soccer and little league. It was my last year of elementary school so I was preparing to go from king of the castle to dog poo. Actually lower than dog poo... a grade eight (but that's another story).    

    As stressful as all this was, the real death blow came when Dad told us we were moving to..... Port Moody. I was horrified. I basically had thought the world ended where Hastings St. met the Barnet Highway. I pictured a tangle of bramble bushes, thorns, ogres, trolls and huge piles of sulphur lining the treacherous journey east. I had been to Port Moody only once before when Dad took me there to get a brick of firecrackers. They were illegal in Burnaby and Vancouver and I thought,"What kind of place sells firecrackers when you can't buy them anywhere else?"   

    We moved, I made new friends, Port Moody worked out fine and my parents still live there today. Like Dad always said," Life is a series of over- reaction and anti- climax." But Dad... Port Moody...?