On Saturday morning I went down to the foodbank to line up again. This time I was determined not to be assaulted by second-hand smoke.
I had sent an email the night before to Benjamin Trister, the chairman of the board of directors of the Parkdale Foodbank, to voice my concerns about the second hand smoke hazard in the waiting area outside the back of the building.
I got in line behind a woman who was there with her fifteen-year-old son. He was never more than five meters from her but he was riding his RipStik around her vicinity. They also had a little Chihuahua-terrier on a leash and wearing a pink jacket.
A slim man in his seventies, wearing a dapper fedora and travelling with a help of a seated walker, took the spot in line behind me. A minute or so later he was about to light a cigarette and I asked him if he could step out of the line while smoking. He said, “Okay” and, marking his place with the walker, walked away to smoke the fag.
Joe, the guy who appears to be the manager of the Parkdale Foodbank, walked up to the woman in front of me to show her a picture on his phone. It was of his brand new grandchild.
The guy behind me came back to his spot for a while and then politely walked out of the line again to smoke another cigarette.
The woman in front of me wanted to get a croissant for her son from the pastries available inside the foodbank, but was worried about getting one that had been touching other pastries. She has to be extra careful because her boy has a peanut allergy. Joe went in and brought her a croissant to give him that had been separate from the rest.
Someone had moved in behind me, ahead of the man with the walker. I asked him to give the spot back to the old man.
Some of us were asking the kid about his RipStik. He said that they are new. He told us that he had a boogieboard last year, but “boogie boards are fake”. I asked if there are Ripstik competitions but he said there aren’t. I argued that there must be.
Later, I looked these boards up. RipStik is apparently a brandname of the caster board. What distinguishes them is that, unlike a skateboard, it’s a two wheeled board, with caster that allow one to accelerate without touching one’s foot to the ground. What the boy called a boogieboard is officially referred to as a flowboard. It has strings of several wheels at the back and front, and each wheel has up and down give to allow it to flow over solid surfaces more like a surfboard over waves.
After the line started moving and we were closer to the door, the elderly man asked if I was writing a novel. So I told him about my journal. He inquired as to whether I was writing about the foodbank and I answered that I wasn’t at the moment but I would later. I told him about the letter I wrote to the chairman about the city bylaw that prohibits smoking within nine meters of a doorway. I added that I really think people should also not be smoking anywhere near a line-up either, and I looked at the guy two places behind him when I said it. The guy asked if I wanted him to put out his cigarette. I answered that I just think he should step out of line when he smokes. I assured him that I wasn’t trying to tell him not to smoke. He stepped out of line.
Joe came out of the foodbank, lit up and stood there less than three meters from the door, which was also close to the line-up. There were two kids in the line-up nearby. Finally I said to him that he should be smoking within nine meters of the door. He just looked at the door and said, without looking at me, “Do you see any No Smoking signs?” “I answered, “No, but there should be!” At one point he was standing inside the threshold of the door with his burning cigarette. The woman in front of me turned to me to say, in a low voice, “He might as well just smoke inside!” I nodded. Her son said, “What mom?” She told him, “Never mind!” I think there are foodbank clients that don’t like the second hand smoke but just feel that they have no right to complain about it.
I got number twenty-five and went home for a few minutes.
When I came back at 11:30, I stood against the sundrenched stucco of the building opposite the back of the foodbank. There’s an elderly woman who waits while sitting on her rollator walker. She always has a ticket with the number 1 on it. Someone asked what time she comes to get that number. She answered that she comes at 7:00. An indigenous Canadian woman in her early middle-age heard that and commented, “I might as well relax! I got 43, so …” she went and sat down at the hexagonal picnic table. She went inside and brought a coffee and a pastry for an elderly woman who was sitting outside. She was asked why she didn’t get herself one and she said she hasn’t eaten sugar in three days because when she starts to see white spots, she knows that her sugar is too high.
Inside, in addition to the usual stuff, there were two cans of evaporated milk, which are good in a milk emergency, a couple of cans of baked beans. For some reason my volunteer dumped a shit-load of Nibs and Twizzlers into my bag. I’ll save them to see if my daughter and her fiancé want them for their busride back to Montreal after they visit at the end of November. In the cold section there was a bag of milk, three frozen chicken burgers and a whole medium cheese pizza from Pizza Pizza. In the bread section I was offered a big bag of white buns, but I was more attracted to some individual, darker buns on the lower shelf. The volunteer said I could take as many of those as I wanted because they were going in the garbage that night. Well doesn’t that make you feel like you’ve made the dandy choice?
That night I watched part of a documentary that showed clips from Caesar’s Hour and Your Show of Shows, along with interviews with some of the living performers and writers. Woody Allen wrote a parody of “A Streetcar Named Desire” for Caesar’s Hour, among other skits.
That night I had the stupid idea to download an add-on that would allow me to put a “dislike” option on my Facebook page. This immediately caused a security window to open on my Timeline, whenever I went to Facebook. The add-on hadn’t even been activated. I started an anti-virus scan before going to bed.
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