No Kissing!

            

            
            I had thought last Wednesday that it was going to be my last chance to get help from the food bank because I was under the impression that my Children’s Literature course would be running on Wednesdays. I guess I was still in summer mode because I hadn’t looked in my calendar to see that my classes would be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So I went down to the food bank on Wednesday after all, but this time without intending to take notes. I brought the first few pages of  “The Story of the Treasure Seekers” to read while I was in line, but the line moved fairly fast and so I didn’t get very much read before getting number thirty-one.

            When I came back, I sat in my usual spot behind the bins, but the ground there is now all littered with empty cans and food packages. It looks like maybe homeless people are living behind the food bank.

            Once I was inside and was called, I lingered at the tea because there was a selection in a baggie and I couldn’t tell what kind it was. My volunteer opened it up and I could see that it was decaffeinated black tea, so I took some red tea instead.

            I got cereal (sort of like Shreddies, but organic) , pasta sauce, some yogourt bars, sardines and chicken broth. They actually had some canned pop for the first time. I’ve decided to not buy it anymore but I took a couple of cans of Coke. In Sue’s section there was a choice between milk and yogourt but she slipped some yogourt into my bag anyway. The high point of the haul was a frozen pork roast. As I was walking away from Sue, the guy behind me tried to kiss her, though probably not in an overtly sexual way, but more of a European style greeting. She good naturedly but firmly told him, “No kissing! You can look at this body, but don’t touch it!” There wasn’t much for bread this time around, except for a few buns. For vegetables there were a couple of corncobs, some gnarly carrots and a few Granny Smith apples. After I’d walked out onto King Street, Sue came running out with four eggs in a plastic bag, saying she’d forgotten to give them to me. One of the eggs broke on the way home, so I poured the white from the bag where it had spilled and dropped the broken yoke from the cracked shell into a pan to cook it right away.

            It was a bright, hot, cloudless evening as I rode east on St Clair, in fairly heavy traffic. At Russell Hill Road all the eastbound traffic turned left for some reason, as if there were a detour up ahead. I guess it was just a coincidence, because, as I continued on the traffic got busy again. I went up to Soudan and Yonge, just south of Eglinton and then across to Mt Pleasant. Mt Pleasant, in that part of town seems to be a hub of a trendy little middle class community. There are a couple of live theatres within blocks of each other; each showing three plays a night. It was almost dark by the time I got home. I roasted the pork, but only ate some of it before putting it away, as I’d also made some spaghetti and sauce and that was plenty.