Too Many Lawyers in the Guacamole and Other Recipes

           

            On Wednesday I went down to the foodbank at around 11:00. Again, so many people in line were smoking that I just stepped back, and since I was the last person in line when it started moving, there was no danger of conflicts over who was where. The red faced woman who sits there every Wednesday on the fire escape, jabbering amicably, had just gotten her ticket and then stood at the door as if it were a line-up to get food. She was told it wouldn’t open for more than two hours, which she, of course should have known because she’s there every week. It never occurred to me before then that she might have dementia.

            I got number 28 and went home. Two hours later, as I was getting ready to go back down, my next-door neighbour popped his head out of his door and told me that a guy had already moved into the superintendent’s old room. I sighed and commented that we never get any women in this building. In the eighteen years that I’ve lived here there have been only two female tenants. One of them stayed for a month or two and the other, a friendly former prostitute and perhaps occasionally relapsing crackhead, was there for about a year.

            Our building stands in direct gender contrast, it seems to the building that houses the A-plus Sushi and Bibim place that sits exactly across the street. I have hardly every seen anyone but women living in the apartments above. I wonder if a building of men and a building of women exactly across from one another keeps some sort of balance in Parkdale that would go askew if it changed.

            At the foodbank, I went over to stand in the only patch of sunlight against the wall of the building across the driveway. It’s also the only part of the wall where dead vines still cling even without a connection to the ground below.

            A very talkative woman in her sixties was holding court and waxing philosophical at the broken hexagonal picnic table. She was telling a small group that the brain is the root of addiction and that drugs, gambling and other things are merely triggers. A guy with a backpack to chat with her. He was drinking beer out of a can and he told her that he borrows ten dollars every day from his buddy at the computer store so he can buy beer. She advised him of a deal at the Beer Store of “Two tall boys for four dollars and you can’t go wrong with that.” She helped him get another beer out of his backpack.

            A nervous young man asked her what’s so special about Justin Trudeau. She answered that he’s Pierre Eliot Trudeau’s son. He said that he hadn’t known that and had thought that them having the same last name was a coincidence. She told him that Pierre Trudeau had been a Socialist who crossed over to the Liberals from the NDP.

            At one point she quoted Gloria Steinem’s famous statement that “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”. The thing is, that can pretty much be said about anything. Houses don’t need basements or even windows, people don’t need haircuts, cars don’t need radios, dining rooms don’t need tables, buses don’t need seats and the world doesn’t even really need music, so the same comparison can be drawn with all of those things and more. It’s actually more of a Buddhistic statement than it is Feminist.

            She said, “I’ve had three husbands and two wives!”

            She said she still gets dressed at 4:00 just to go out and find a cigarette but she used to stay out all night to find drugs. The young nervous guy said that, from the point of view of an athlete, since pot interferes with performance. She argued that anything that grows on the earth is natural to the human body. That’s an odd statement, considering all the natural poisons from both plants and animals that can kill people within minutes.

            It seemed to take a long time for them to call the numbers. Once I was inside though, I didn’t have long to wait. My friend with the wool cap was my volunteer for the first shelves. They had some jars of gourmet condiments from Stonewall Kitchens, so I took the fig and walnut spread. I took a small bag of flour, a bag of vanilla flavoured coffee beans, some granola bars and several little packages of instant oatmeal. I finally asked the volunteer for his name, and he told me it was Bruce. I shook his hand and told him mine. In Sue’s section, there was only a bag of pre-cooked, frozen egg whites and a PC Blue Menu frozen dinner of “Quinoa Southwest Chicken”. I asked in the bread section if they had raisin bread but the lady said they didn’t, so I didn’t take any bread. My daughter had bought me some fresh bread when she visited from Montreal a few days before. There wasn’t much in the vegetable section. Just three potatoes, two apples and a package of white corn tortillas.

            I watched the fifth episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. It was explained in the first episode how Cody got his name. He had been a commando during the war. The United States does not have commandoes. That’s a British army unit. The U.S. loves to imitate the U.K. military. This episode was called “Battle of the Space Giants” but there were no giants of any sort in the story. It’s reprehensible to give a title that has nothing to do with the content. In this episode the aliens were shooting germ bombs at the Earth’s cities. Cody stopped them and captured the enemy ship to find that the weapons on board were far in advance of Earth’s. Their power source was an element known as Saturnium that can only be found on one of Saturn’s moons. So they flew there to shoot a missile that would explode the saturnium and set off a chain reaction to destroy all of the Saturnium. They never explain just how fast Cody’s ship can go with it’s atomic fuel, but it seems that getting Saturn is like going out for a short drive across town.