Sarah Crosbie sucks, source says

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh, especially when times are trying: Economies are tanking, people are being laid off, and your shovel is calling you from the garage, taunting you that soon, it will be time to hit the driveway.

Late one night, a couple of weeks ago, a man was unloading his goalie equipment out of his car when another man approached him in the parking lot of a local hockey rink.

Now, this goalie does not usually play for this team. He was filling in for an acquaintance who was injured.

As the goalie unloaded his equipment, the other man started talking about how he knows the goalie works at The Whig-Standard and he had some thoughts to share about the paper's magazine, The Ticket.

The man told the goalie about how he'd heard that a former Ticket editor had left Kingston and gone on to a big paper in Toronto.

The man really missed the former editor, he said.

Really, really missed her. Really, really, really missed her. He told the goalie that he understood that the editor he liked so much had been filling in for the current editor (that would be me) while she was on maternity leave and The Whig was forced to give the current editor (me, again) her job back once she returned after a one-year maternity leave. (Isn't that nuts that women are allowed to have babies and return to their jobs?)

He said the fact that the paper had lost the former editor and had to welcome back the current editor was a stain on The Whig since the former editor was a genius, who was funny and smart and articulate and much better than the new editor (still me).

The goalie asked the man whether he knew the former editor, since it was odd to hear a reader heap such praise on an editor, especially one who'd left the paper. Was she his sister? His cousin? His friend?

No, no, no, the man said. He just loved her work.

The goalie happily chatted with this man and listened to him - like any good journalist would do. You never know where you're going to hear a good story.

The goalie wondered what he should tell this unhappy reader ... and decided to think about it.

(This tale reminds me of a great riddle my father told me once when I was a girl: "A boy is riding in a car with his father when they get in a car crash. The father dies. The boy is rushed to hospital. When he arrives at the ER, the surgeon refuses to do the surgery. 'I can not operate on this child. He's my son.' How can this be?" Now, back in the 1980s, in the days when no one could have foreseen a black man and a woman being two of the top choices to run the White House, it wasn't easy to come up with an answer.)

"The surgeon is a ghost who came back from the dead!" I shouted.

"No! The boy was a twin separated at birth and the surgeon is looking at the wrong twin!"

The answer, of course, is that the surgeon is the boy's mother. But, back in the 1980s, my little brain heard "surgeon" and I thought "man."

Now, in 2008, there's still an interesting gender stereotype that remains. People assume that women take their husbands' last names when they get married. But some do not. Like me.

As the goalie walked into the rink with the man, he wondered what he should say to him.

"Have a good game," the goalie said as they hit the change room.

"Wait until I tell my wife this one," he thought to himself.

(Have I ever mentioned that my husband is a goalie?)

And here is the rest of it.