HUMOUR AND PAIN
Memoir of a childhood
Why have I always been so fascinated with ... biblical stories without them (registering as) faith or belief ? This is my life’s big question mark.
When you’re a single mom with four children, you might run into a Laundromat that’s on fire to save your tea towels.
That’s what David Loblaw’s mother Irene did when he was maybe four years old.
He remembers this moment, some 54 years ago: Being left with a stranger holding his hand while his mother raced into Pinky’s Laundromat on Victoria Avenue, where her other children had dropped off the wash on their way to St. Augustine School.
“Our blankets, our sheets, all our clothes, our socks. We’re talking 1964 probably,” Loblaw said. “We joked about that — away from my mother — our entire lives.”
But for her, there was no question. Irene defended herself years later: “We had no money to buy anything! We would have had nothing!”
Loblaw shares stories like these in David G Grade 3, his new book about his childhood and family — mother Irene, eldest brother Louis, nine-year-older sister Yvette, and the bully brother known as “Ape,” who was four years David’s senior.
At a book launch on Sunday, Loblaw will read from his “tragicomic memoir of a reluctant atheist.”
He likens his story to “Angela’s Ashes in Saskatchewan” — a pretty accurate description, as his story mixes humour with tragedy.
Rejected by her French Catholic family for getting pregnant out of wedlock, Irene married the “violent lunatic” and alcoholic Maurice G. (Loblaw explicitly never mentions their whole surname in his book.)
The couple legally separated eight years after their marriage, although all members of the family kept the G last name — even David, until he changed it at age 22 to something quite arbitrary.
“My brother’s name was Louis and I always loved Ls, and I think I just happened to find Loblaw and, ‘Wow, there’s two Ls, I like that name.’”
Loblaw tells his family’s story in little vignettes. The book has 53 chapters in all, most awash in dark humour and some in outright sadness.
In the process, he brings a bygone city to life. One where Jim’s Lucky Dollar store sold Mojo candies for half a cent. One where you could get a free bottle of Cocacola every Sunday from the Park Street factory, near his home in the brand-new Greer Court “projects.”
This was a bygone era, in which teachers hit their students with metal rulers and in which cruel dentists sent children groggily away, alone, from surgery.
Young David loved Janis Joplin and science.
He was enamoured by space travel, believing he had “professional standing in the NASA space program.”
Unlike his three siblings, Maurice was not David’s father.
In his younger years, Loblaw believed his dad was part of a Vaudeville group called Freddie and the Dancing Bubbalingas, thanks to one of Yvette’s many “bizarre, fantastical” stories. In actuality, Alfred was a bachelor farmer from Dollard who would not defy his own mother and marry the woman he loved.
A self-described “klepto,” when Yvette died two decades after an aneurysm put her in a vegetative state, Loblaw tried to have her gravestone inscribed with “a liar and a thief.” (The salesman wouldn’t comply, so instead she’s memorialized as “a storyteller and a collector.”)
Loblaw believes his sister’s sense of humour was derived from their family’s situation.
“She created this fantasy world I think for all of us to make it more happy I guess,” said Loblaw.
After moving to Regina when David was a newborn, the family of five shared a tiny house on Arcola Avenue, with no hot water and no indoor toilet.
Irene was on welfare until, moving to the federal housing complex at Greer Court, she was able to resume her education.
David’s first day of Grade 1 was his mother’s first day of high school in two decades. In 1966, when she was 35, she started Grade 11 at a brand new Miller High School, where Yvette was in the grade below her.
Irene ultimately got an education degree from the University of Regina, becoming a teacher and buying her own house.
“I have no idea how she did that,” said Loblaw.
As much as his family relationships form Loblaw’s childhood story, so does his relationship with the church.
He warns that his memoir might offend Catholics, while dredging up repressed memories. At the book launch, which will have a cash bar, he jokes that “Catholics should have a drink before.”
On its cover and within its pages, his book features Sister Margaret, his Grade 1 teacher at St. Thomas School (located where Access Communications is now). The nun’s “accuracy when she bolts up and throws her oversize white chalk is astounding.”
He writes about his struggle with faith — specifically, his lack thereof: “Why have I always been so fascinated with the many biblical stories without them ever clicking in my head as being faith or belief? This is my life’s big question mark.”
Loblaw ’s book launch is Sunday, Oct. 14, 1 to 3 p.m. at the Artesian. He’ll read a few excerpts and host a Q&A. Books will be for sale for $20.
Loblaw has plans for two followup books to David G Grade 3. The next will be focused on his teenage and university years, while the third will focus on his adulthood.