There is a shaved-headed middle aged woman that I see hobbling up
Dunn Avenue every morning on her way to get a coffee at the Coffee Time,
beneath me. She always waits for her “walk” signal before crossing, but even
then she holds up her hand to the cars to make sure they understand she doesn’t
want them to run her over. I also see her walking back across Queen with her
coffee, and when she gets to the other side, she pushes the button again. I don’t
know if she is doing it to give the next person crossing a quicker “walk”
signal, or if she thinks she’s turning it off.
Wednesday was a cool day and so I wrapped
a scarf around my neck when I went down to the foodbank to get a number. I also
took with me the copy of “Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story” that I’d
borrowed the day before from the Faculty of Information Library. It was a good
thing I did, because I had to wait in line for more than half an hour because
there was a food delivery after they’d admitted the first five people, so the
rest of us had to wait. There were even several minutes during which the line
didn’t move, even after the truck left. So I read the picture book a couple of
times, trying to focus on any symbolism that might be in the artwork, though my
concentration was hampered from feeling sick as a result of inhaling
second-hand smoke from the cigarette of the guy behind me. The friendly
volunteer from Jamaica who often serves me at the first three shelves, was
interested in looking at the title of the book I was reading. He was glad to
hear that it told the Columbus story from an indigenous perspective.
Coyote is the one
who made all the stuff that’s in the world, including people. What she liked to
do more than anything though was to play ball, but she got tired of playing by
herself, so she danced and sang and thought really hard and caused some beavers
to come along. But the beavers wanted to make a pond and not to play ball. So
she did it again and caused some moose to come along, but they just wanted to
enjoy wading in the pond. The same thing happened with the turtles she brought.
Finally she caused some human beings to come along and they agreed to play ball
with her. But she kept changing the rules so she’d win every time and so they
got tired of playing with her. Then she tried it again but really screwed up
because she caused Columbus and his men to come and they stole a bunch of
people they thought were Indians and took them back to Europe. The rest of the
human beings were very pissed off at coyote but she promised she’d fix the
problem. She did her dance and sang and thought real hard and then Jacques
Cartier and his men showed up. All the human beings, the beavers, the moose and
the turtles caught the next train to Penticton.
I went home with
number seventeen and came back two hours later. While dodging cigarette smoke,
I made some notes on my essay comparing Peter Pan and Where the Wild Things
Are, that’s due next week. When Theresa called my number, she and Sue were
marvelling over a jar of fruit ketchup from Quebec that was available on the
shelf, so I took that. It turns out that it’s really just a kind of sweet
tomato relish similar to what someone might make Down East, where I come from.
It’s good, but it’s not ketchup.
There was hardly
anything besides packages of sliced ham at Sue’s section. She said, “I’m
empty!”
The only fresh
bread was a kind of non-sliced white bread that I didn’t want. I took some of
the not so fresh blueberry bagels that stay edible a little longer than the
white bread.
There were only
some gnarly carrots and a quarter of a cantaloupe in the section by the door.
I spent most of the
day working on my essay. The topic I’ve settled on is a comparison of how
children play at being grown up in J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” and in Maurice
Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”.
I watched the
Buster Keaton short silent film, “Daydreams”. Buster asks his girlfriend’s
father for her hand and he challenges him on how he will be able to support
her. He says he’ll go to the city to make his fortune and if he fails he’ll
come back and shoot himself. He keeps sending back glowing accounts of the jobs
he’s doing while his girlfriend daydreams romantic pictures of his success. The
reality though is that he fails miserably at everything and of course gets
chased by the cops a lot while making wild and acrobatic escapes. He returns to
his girlfriend’s father in a pathetic state. He hands him his revolver, but he
misses. He failed at killing himself too.
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