Kohlrabi

            Although my cats are gone, they have left behind a legacy, so Thursday morning on October 13^th I remembered the flea and tick spray that I’d bought a couple of years ago, dug it out from under the sink and sprayed it around the area where I sit on the couch and on my computer chair. It’s technically supposed to be sprayed on a pet, but I figure it must also affect fleas that land on the surfaces on which it is sprayed. The only problem was, and then I sat down. I’d forgotten that by staying where I sprayed I was poisoning myself. The smell was pretty strong.

            I think that because of our particularly hot summer this fall is probably a mega flea season. Hopefully the fact that I don’t have cats anymore will keep them from being a major problem. They don’t seem to have gotten into my bedroom in a big way.

            I went to the food bank for the long, Thursday morning wait to get a number. I found out that I was behind the man in the baseball cap and the grey hoody. The sun, most of the time was casting a strip of light on the northwest edge of the driveway, so that’s where I stayed. This position kept me out of the way when the food delivery truck arrived. The only problem with that was that the truck displaced several smokers to the same area. I moved further north onto the next property to do the required reading for my next Aesthetics class, which was horribly written essay by Richard Wollheim called “Criticism as Retrieval” that was so dry it sucked all of the moisture out of my brain.

            The truck was there for longer than usual, it seemed. When it finally pulled out I moved a little closer to the door.

An alarmingly skinny woman who was smoking by the door was talking about the problems of dating. The wrestler responded that one can always just get a hooker here in Parkdale for 40 dollars, or even 5. In my memory from the late 1980s, the price of full service from a street prostitute was determined by the price of an eightball of crack, which at the time was 60 dollars. That would put the current price of a lay from a sex trade worker at a minimum of 200 dollars. Of course it’s possible to get anything for less if one tries hard enough, but trying that hard takes time and time is money, so one would end up effectively spending more in order to spend less.

I moved back into the sun.

The line took shape at around 10:45. Usually people don’t light up if they expect the line to be moving soon, but it didn’t, so they did. Joe, the manager told us, as he took out a small pair of scissors and clipped the end off his cigarette, that he had wanted to have processed us all by 10:30 but then the truck came. I looked back and saw at least thirty people in line behind me.

A group at the front of the line were discussing Kim Kardashian’s latest adventure. I didn’t join in because it was too far away, but she lives in a $13 million home in Calabasas and she’s just had a ring stolen that was worth a quarter the price of her house. 6.6% of the population of Calabasas is poor. Her $4 million ring could have helped out a lot of people. I’m not entirely convinced that the theft of her ring wasn’t a staged event on her part.

They were ten minutes late in giving out the numbers. I got number 18 and went home. Even though it was not extremely cold out, my index finger was white for several minutes. I guess it must have been from the way I had been holding my book.

Before I left my place, two hours later, to go back to the food bank, I made sure I gave my living room a generous spraying of anti-flea poison, with hopes that the toxic particles would not be floating in the air when I got back.

On my way out, the little dishevelled middle-aged panhandler with curly hair, who I’ve seen around the neighbourhood for quite a while, asked me for the time and when I gave it to her she asked me for a dollar. “Sorry” I said.

The table was set up outside the food bank again, with people smoking there.

Once inside, the woman I’ve been calling “the nervous helper” called my number. But she actually doesn’t seem all that nervous to me anymore. She’s the one that likes to promote certain food items because she thinks they are either tasty or healthy, but that’s a lot to say. I should just ask her what her name is.

I took a can of coconut milk; three small packages of saltine crackers; three Fibre 1 chewy dipped bars; no canned tomatoes; no pasta and no rice.

She gave me a roll of toilet paper.

There were lots of canned beans, but no chickpeas, so I took the navy beans.

She sold me again on the kimchi noodle soup. I still haven’t tried it, but she obviously loves it.

She also put a hard sell on the specialty Cheerios, even though there was a variety of cereal this time. I took what she wanted me to take because I agreed with her that it was probably better.

From the cold section there was a choice between a half litre of milk and one and a half litres of a cranberry-grape fruit infusion drink. I took the juice, but when I got it home and read the ingredients I saw that it was sweetened with stevia. I left it unopened and put it aside to return to the food bank next time.

I got two small strawberry yogourts.

There was a choice between a frozen container of almost liquid ground chicken and a ham steak. The chicken is annoying because if one thaws it in the package so much of the meat sticks to the inside and it’s a mess trying to turn it inside out and scraping it off. I’ve found though that if I open it up while it’s still frozen then the meat comes off clean. I took the ham steak though.

From the bread section, without the looming bread supervisor this time, I took two half loaves of organic spelt bread.

The vegetable lady gave me about twenty small potatoes, two unattractive carrots, an onion, a small head of leaf lettuce, a bag of coleslaw, four apples, and a pear that was on its way to the pear graveyard. She asked, “Are we good?” but I pointed to a bin that had some of those strange vegetables whose roots look like alien water pumps or mechanical hearts. She said, “As the vegetable lady I should know what they are, but I don’t!” I thought that I was the only one that referred to her as “the vegetable lady”. I didn’t know she called herself that. I commented, “And you just don’t want to look it up!” She looked at me like I’d just said something that she’d never considered. She hesitated and then said, “You got me there! I got nothing to say to that!” It was kohlrabi, by the way.

That night I watched the episode from the sixth season of I Love Lucy in which Desi Arnaz Jr made his debut as a drummer at the age of about five. That kid could play! I guess his sister Lucy Arnaz was already born when the first season premiered. I wonder if it was weird for her to see her little brother in the spotlight every week when she wasn’t. He was on the show from birth, so it makes me wonder if it had an influence on whoever wrote the screenplay years later for the Truman Show.

            That night when I was doing my dinner dishes, I heard a loud, repeated thumping sound outside. I looked out my east window and saw what looked at first like someone banging with his fist on one of the plastic garbage bins that had been put out for pickup. It was soon obvious though that the action was just on the other side of the bin and that someone was down on the street and getting repeatedly punched by someone else. I opened my window as a few people were running towards them and one of them shouted, “Break it up!” As the guys stood up, I saw that there had been actually two guys on the concrete and two younger guys on top. It looked like everyone was drunk, but it seemed the winners were particularly hammered. The young guys were much fitter than the guys they’d beaten and one of them was dancing with his arms in the air and his fists clenched as he howled in triumph. One of the guys that had lost was walking up O’Hara, but turned to the shouting guy and challenged him again, but one could tell he was beaten and the younger guy knew it. Both of the young guys were dancing like apes and the quieter one even ran toward the other to briefly hug him. As they walked away, still expelling whoops of victory, they mimed for each other their prowess, while bending over and pretending to pummel someone that was down.