After my parents were married, they lived in a small two-bedroom apartment on Lansdowne Avenue near my mother’s school. My father went to work for one of the larger firms in the city, Parr, Athole & Athole, which he referred to on bad days as Sub-Parr, Asshole and Bigger Asshole. My mother returned with a new last name to her grade nine class at Forest Hill Collegiate, where the male teachers had gone underground with their attraction to her.
By mid-February she was pregnant. Her doctor, Al Green, a very young-looking recent graduate who shared his name with a famous black gospel singer, and who always had a lit cigarette in his hand and at least two or three others burning in ashtrays in his office and the examination room, broke the news to my parents following my mother’s first check-u
