Smoking in Line-ups Should Be Against the Law

          

           

            On Saturday morning I went to a store called “The Pass”, the sign for which had the two “s” letters reversed, as in a mirror. It was a store that sold or distributed Aboriginal North American arts and crafts. The receptionist was a Native woman, and the owner was a big First Nations guy with long hair and blue coloured skin. I couldn’t tell if that was his natural skin colour or if he was wearing some kind of skin paint. He was also very friendly. I reminded them that I’d spoken to them on the phone about a job and I was supposed to come down and start working there. But I had arrived a day late. The owner was very apologetic and told me that the company wasn’t doing very well because their car had broken down.
            I went to another company nearby to apply for a job. It was some kind of tech business. I told them that I’d been working down at The Pass and they reacted positively to that. They wanted to hire me right away, but the job would require me to be there every day and I couldn’t do that because of school.

            I was sitting on the street on top of a newspaper box, reading a book that was open to a page containing a print of a photograph of a primitive African sculpture of a Black woman. There was a caption next to the photo that included the words “Don’t hate”. I read those words out loud. There was an Aboriginal woman sitting next to me with glasses and a long ponytail. She had heard what I’d read and commented, “I wish that I wasn’t hated!” I was reluctant to speak to her for a second because people are boring but I introduced myself and said that I’d be her friend. She was visibly happy about that and said, “You’ll be my friend?” I asked her name and she asked if I liked different spellings because she was going to change the spelling of her first name right then and there by exchanging the “i” for a “y”. She told me that her name was like “Ohio” with and “Sh” in front of it and a “wa” on the end and so now it was now “Shohyowa”. Then I woke up. The name doesn’t mean anything in the real world, but Ohio means “great river” in Iroquois, Iowa means “asleep” in Dakotan and there doesn’t seem to be a meaning for just the sound of “sh”.

            Since work prevented me from going to the foodbank on Wednesday, I was getting ready to go there on Saturday when I discovered that I had a flat tire on my bike. The Parkdale foodbank gives out tickets a little earlier and gives out food a lot earlier than it does during the week, so I walked down at around 10:00. The line-up when I arrived consisted mostly of unattended carts that people had placed to mark their spots and then gathered near the door to socialize. I got in line behind a friendly middle-aged guy with an eastern European accent. There were a handful of people who were speaking in the same language, including a hot young woman who filled out a pair of black lowrise pants and a black sweater quite nicely. I was glad that the guy in front of me wasn’t a smoker, but then an older man of his same ethnicity, wearing a leather jacket and leather pants came up to talk to him. He asked my permission to stand in line to talk to his friend, then he thanked me and shook my hand. Almost immediately after that he lit up a cigarette. He didn’t puff on it constantly, but held it a lot as he conversed in his native tongue. I’d actually never noticed a cigarette lasting that long. He smoked it to the butt and then I checked my watch when he threw it away. It took six minutes before he lit up another one. Meanwhile a man with a walker-seat took the place in line behind me and left his walker there to mark his spot. Someone enquired about his cancer treatment and he said it was being attended to, and then he went back to his walker to ignite a fag. I looked at him and moaned softly, and then he went to smoke it near the gathered group. He came and sat on his walker for he second cigarette.

            I started thinking that something really has to be done about this smoking in line-ups. There are so many smokers at the foodbank that it’s almost impossible to avoid breathing fumes sometimes for half an hour at a time. Maybe they should have a non-smokers foodbank day once a week. Or perhaps they should eliminate the line-up for tickets and just distribute a preliminary round of tickets and then call out those numbers when it’s time to give out the actual food tickets. I know that last one sounds awkward but something really has to be done. Even as I write this a day later I can still feel the toxins in my lungs. I’ve read that some cities in the States now have bylaws against smoking in some line-ups. As no one should be smoking anywhere near someone who is forced to stay in one place, smoking in line-ups should be banned entirely in Toronto.

            The manager of the foodbank was dressed in what he had to keep telling people was a Ratman costume because everyone thought he was playing Batman. There is a Ratman comic book but the images don’t really match the costume that he was wearing. He had a long black cape and an over the head mask with goggles.

            On Saturdays at the Parkdale foodbank there is less than a one hour wait before food is given, compared to a more than two hour wait during the week, but I walked home anyway.

            When I came back, since there is no line-up in the second round of waiting, it is easier to move out of the way, but people are still smoking within nine meters of the doorway.

            A woman was complaining about someone having used a proxy to get an early ticket. The manager said that he wouldn’t let it happen again.

            The elderly woman just ahead of me must have been shopping for an entire family, as her car was buckling under the weight of all the stuff she was taking.

            Other than management, there seems to be an entirely different group of volunteers on Saturdays.

            I took a couple of jumbo Hershey bars, there was canned pork and beans, a bottle of pancake syrup, I was disappointed that they had Apple Jacks cereal instead of granola this time, but I took it anyway. There was a packaged couscous salad, a litre of milk and half a dozen eggs. In the bread section I took what looked like a whole grain raisin bread, but it turned out to be black olive bread. I got lots of bread this time anyway and the woman from the Caribbean running that section gave me a couple of buns to “have with your tea today”.

            I walked home to put the food away and then immediately headed for Bike Pirates to get my flat tire fixed.

            I was surprised that Bike Pirates was nearly empty. What a difference a few months makes. Back in the summer, showing up there fifteen minutes after opening time on a Saturday would mean at least an hour of waiting for an open stand.

            My back tire was shot so I got another one from their basement. I did all the work myself, except to get a volunteer to double check it. After changing the tire and oiling my chain I was all finished in a little over an hour, compared to the three hours or more that I’ve spent all the other times I went to Bike Pirates.

            I needed to ride to the bank to get some money to give them. I went up to the Bank of Montreal at Lansdowne and Bloor and was standing in line, looking for my wallet, and it wasn’t there. I rode home and looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find it. Not only my bankcard was in it, but my Social Insurance Card, my birth certificate, my health card and my student card. The work of replacing all of those pieces of id would be tremendous. I was beginning to panic. The last time I’d used my bankcard had been on Thursday evening at the Bank of Montreal on Queen Street between Spadina and Bathurst. I was pretty sure I had put my open backpack in front of me with my wallet sitting just inside of it while I used the ATM. I decided that my only chance would be if I’d left it there and one of the bank employees found it. As I was getting ready to leave though I looked on the shelf just below where I hang my bike and found my wallet there. What a relief. I think I had pulled it out on Thursday night when I was pulling out my camera to upload some pictures to my computer. I rode down to the Bank of Montreal at King and Dufferin to take out my rent money, my phone service money and a little extra, then I went back to Bike Pirates. The volunteer wouldn’t tell me a price on anything, including the new tube and the used tire. He told me that it’s pay what you can for everything. I gave them $25.00, which is probably more than I needed to, but I had gotten some work done for free back in the spring, when I had no money at all. The volunteer said to me, “Best wishes for your bike!” like it was its birthday or something.

            That night I watched a silent film starring Buster Keaton, called “College”. Buster was just graduating high school with top honours and he gave a speech condemning sports, which offended the girl he liked. She was going on to an expensive college that Buster’s mother couldn’t afford to send him to, but he wanted to be near her and so he tried to work his way through. To impress the girl, he tried out for every sport and failed miserably at every one. Finally though he found success as the coxswain for the rowing team and when the girl he liked was being held hostage, in order to save her, he suddenly excelled in many of the activities he’d failed at before, such as running, jumping and pole vaulting. The funniest part of the movie though was when he tried to work as a “coloured” waiter in a restaurant. He was in blackface, working beside several other Black people and they couldn’t tell. He was even trying to walk like an African American. The cook was flirting with him too. Then he got knocked into a backward summersault by the swinging door to the kitchen and he landed on his face, not realizing that his face was now half white. The cook chased him out with her cleaver.