Cherokee Purple!

           

            When I got to the food bank on August 24th, the garbage truck was blocking the driveway, so I went under the anti-car chain and across the yellow lawn of the abandoned building next door.

            The line-up was almost fully formed this time, perhaps squeezed into place by the presence of the food bank van in the driveway.

            I didn’t have to breathe a lot of second hand smoke this time around because Julie and her friend with the fat, pug-nosed dog were off to the side, and other smokers were not nearby. The old man behind me had a lit cigarette that was about half done, but he put it out and slipped it into his breast pocket for later.

            Two places ahead of me, Margaret had gotten a hair cut, though it looked like she’d done it herself.

            An intake worker, who hadn’t been there in a few weeks, remembered my name and birth date, but not the year. I got number 18.

            When I got back at 12:30 I went to see how the bush that’s growing out of the brick wall was doing. It was still alive, though a little less green than before. There was a guy sitting nearby on the fire escape and I said to him, “It’s amazing that a bush can grow out of a brick wall!” He looked at the bush for a second and commented, “It just shows what god can do.” It sounded like a dismissal. Like a quick way of explaining something away so it didn’t have to be thought about. Don’t wonder about anything. Just accept that god did it and then go back to sleep. And people wonder why I’m anti social!

            My helper for the shelves was Bruce.

            The only things on the top of the first set of shelves were cake and pancake mixes, which I didn’t want.

            Below that was a choice of barbecue flavoured bread crisps or prawn chips. I kind of like those evil little prawn chips, so I took that, but Bruce gave me a couple of bags of bread crisps anyway, since I hadn’t taken anything from the top.

            From the bottom he gave me a handful of fruit juice gum candies and the same of Bel-Vita cranberry-orange cookies.

            The next set of shelves usually had the pasta, rice and sauce, but they were out of sauce. I took a little bag of rice because I like to use it as cereal when I run out.

            The next shelves were nearly empty, except for some macaroni and cheese dinner and some packages of things that need things I don’t have to become a meal, but I skipped all that.

            There were no beans, but I got a 418-gram can of keta salmon, which is not the best salmon, but it was the first time I’d seen any salmon at the food bank.

            The cereal section had three choices: Shreddies, Dorset Muesli or strawberry-chocolate Batman cereal (just like Batman eats). I took the Shreddies.

            Across the aisle, one of the intake people was handling the cold section. Margaret was ahead of me, turning down a three-flavoured six-pack of Astro yogourt, when Bruce asked her, “Will we be forwarding your food to Barrie from now on?” in reference to her moving to Barrie, which she was supposed to have done two weeks ago. She didn’t hear the question at all, as she was focused on what she could get from the cold foods guy.

            After she’d gotten all the guy gave her she lingered beside a bin full of 907-gram tubs of margarine and asked, “Butter?” He said, “What?” She coaxed, “I don’t have any butter!” He responded with, “We don’t have any butter!” but I think he was being coy and that he knew she was talking about the margarine. Finally she said, “Margarine!” but he told her that the ones in the bin were family sized and were for families only. I had been coveting the spread myself, since I’d just run out.

            He offered me a choice between a liter of almond milk and a slightly larger sized bottle of Sunny D. I picked the almond milk and he said, Good choice!” which seemed a little patronizing to me, as if the fruit drink would have been the wrong choice.

            Unlike Margaret, I took the six-pack of yogourt.

            There was finally some meat in the form of what was probably a one and a half kilogram tube of ground chicken. The package was unlabeled but it had the surround image of ground meat on the outside, as those containers do, and so it was hard to tell what kind of ground meat it was from looking at it. When I opened it that night, the meat inside looked nothing like the picture on the outside. It had been so finely ground that it was like a paste, so it was impossible to form into patties without mixing it with breadcrumbs.

            There was not much variety in the bread section, which was weird because I saw the St Francis Table van in the driveway that morning. Either they didn’t deliver much or they hadn’t had time to stock what they did deliver. I took a couple of loaves of non-sliced white bread.

            Hazel was working the vegetable section. Margaret was ahead of me and didn’t want any vegetables. She just asked for some fruit and Hazel gave her a couple of pieces. Then Margaret said, “Strawberries!” and Hazel asked, perhaps coyly, “Where do you see strawberries?” just before she got up to get a bag of strawberries out of the cooler to give to Margaret, and since I was standing there, one for me too. At the food bank, at least with certain people, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, it seems.

            Unlike Margaret, I wanted the veggies, so Hazel gave me a bag of baby potatoes, a very firm bunch of kale (which always looks to me like something that came from the bottom of the sea), and a questionable bag of dandelion greens (which turned out to be off) and two cobs of corn. I noticed bags of bean sprouts, so I asked for one (and they turned out to be good). Then she offered me a choice between mini tomatoes and larger ones, so I asked if the larger ones were firm. She gave me two from the Cowan garden plot, one was the normal red, but one was a colour I’d never seen before.             That night I ate the Cherokee Purple tomato with my breaded chicken burger, and it was a little sweeter and more pungent than your average tomato, but really quite unique and delicious.