The Only Thing He Said That Wasn't Bullshit Was About Cow Piss

            I struggled with the internet again on Saturday morning, so for the third day in a row I wasn’t able to edit and publish one of my translation blog entries.

            I went to the food bank about five minutes earlier than usual on Saturday. As I was locking my bike in a front of the door, a volunteer was smoking a cigarette and chatting with some of the women in the front row. The volunteer, who when asked said her first name was Samantha, was complaining about people who are especially nice to her because of her family name. I think her surname must have been mentioned before I got there so I have no idea what’s so special about it.

            I went to the back of the line and, as usual, asked who the last person was. An elderly woman spoke up that it was she and I found out that the middle-aged man nearby was ahead of her. There were a few bags and carts lined up behind us and I wondered to whom they belonged. The man said that they’d been there when he’d arrived and as far as he was concerned their absent owners had forfeited their places in line. My Guyanese acquaintance arrived and suggested that we throw them in the garbage.

            At 10:00 we were surprised to see that the food bank had let in the first five clients. The official starting time is 10:30 and I haven’t seen them even start that early since they moved up to Queen Street at the beginning of April. My Guyanese friend suggested that they started early because it looks like rain or because it looked like it was going to be a hot day. I told him that I didn’t think either of those was the case. We’ve lined up in all kinds of weather and they didn’t care. He offered that it might be because they were understaffed. I accepted that as a possibility. He said that anyway we couldn’t complain one way or another, since they are volunteers. I disagreed, saying that the food bank has as much right to ask for quality work from volunteers as employers of their workers. I argued that we as food bank customers are quality control inspectors. He responded with, “You read too many books!”

            One of the busses went by that are replacing the Queen Streetcars until September and he offered the view that Queen Street is so much better with the busses because it’s faster. I told him that I disagreed that it’s an improvement. As a cyclist I find that the buses slow me down because they occupy my lane. He dismissed my complaint with, “Go around them!” I countered that it’s not always possible to go around them. He came back with, “Go on the sidewalk then!” I assured him that I was not going to ride my bike on the sidewalk.

            Another reason that I gave him as to why the busses are not good on Queen Street is the pollution. He declared, “There’s no pollution!” I asked why there’s no pollution and he explained that they are hybrid and that they run on a combination of hydrogen and electricity. I know that many of the busses are hybrid but I was very sceptical that hydrogen was part of the mix. He insisted that he knows about this stuff because he’s a mechanic. Then he asserted that hydrogen is a natural gas, but I responded that hydrogen is not a natural gas. His reaction was to shake his head in dismissal of my ignorance and then to look away. Finally he admitted that some of the TTC hybrid busses use diesel but contended that they still don’t cause any pollution because they use a converter that uses cow piss to help turn harmful pollutants into carbon dioxide and oxygen. He said that he bought a big bottle of the cow urine for a friend. I inquired as to why he hadn’t just eaten a whole bunch of grass and then peed in the bottle himself. He answered that human urine doesn’t work.

            Of course I did some research on my food bank companion’s claims. First of all, the hybrid buses only cut 30% to 50% of the pollution of the previous diesel buses. Secondly, the hybrid buses do not use hydrogen fuel cells. Thirdly, hydrogen is not a natural gas. Hydrogen sulphide (or rotten egg gas) is sometimes a component in natural gas but natural gas is mostly methane, a lot of which (appropriately in this discussion) comes from out of the butts of cows and bulls along with manure. Interestingly, it turns out that the only thing my companion said that wasn’t bullshit was about cow urine.

            The line began to move. Out doorkeeper, who normally works reception on a different food bank day, looking sleep deprived, let five more people in and said, “Good morning” to the rest. My Guyanese buddy asked her, “Is it good?” She grumbled, “I’m not even supposed to be here today!” and went back inside.

            Behind my Guyanese line-mate was an elderly man in an electric wheelchair. He had a full salt and pepper beard and longish hair that looked like he’d dyed it black. He was smoking a lot and in between puffs he let out deep and loud, liquid coughs. My know-it-all pal told him that he could get a bag of special tar filters that will remove most of the tar from his cigarettes. I don’t know if it removes “most” of the tar, but I guess every little bit helps.

            When I got inside and downstairs I could see that they were severely understaffed this time around. The woman who’d let the five of us in must have had the elevator all ready to take her downstairs ahead of us since she was sitting alone at the front desk when I walked into the shopping room. While she was looking up my information someone mentioned that the public pools were opening for the season on that day. She expressed the hope that her son wouldn’t find out or he’d be bugging her to take him every day.

            My Guyanese friend behind me had a conversation with the very short septuagenarian Filipino woman who volunteers there. He said he’d seen her out jogging earlier. She said she’d been swimming too and he asked if she wore a bikini. She declared, “That would be something!”

            The computer person didn’t bother with handing out numbers written on the little pieces of arborite that were sitting in a box on the desk. Instead she just wrote down “1A” for “one adult” on a little piece of paper and gave that to me. I approached the dairy counter but I didn’t see Angie this time, which was strange because I’d seen her from my window walking up Dunn Avenue with another food bank volunteer earlier that morning. Replacing her was the new person who’d managed the door on the previous Saturday.

            She gave me one half-litre carton of 2% milk, five eggs and a choice between a package of frozen chicken wieners and four honey garlic sausages. I took the sausages. She also gave me a tub of garlic margarine. How come no one calls it “Gargarine”? I can’t find the name anywhere online so I’m copyrighting it right here and now! Oh, and two tiny bottles of Danactive drinkable yogourt with 10 billion bacteria inside. Do we really need ten billion more bacteria in our bodies when it already outnumbers our cells? This is the only kind of immigration that I find questionable, but I took them anyway. I very carefully placed my eggs in a separate pocket in my backpack so they wouldn’t get crushed by other items.

            I moved on to Sylvia’s vegetable section. She gave me six yellow plum tomatoes, six potatoes and a seedless cucumber. I should have treated the tomatoes with the same consideration as the eggs, but I put them on the bottom and so I discovered when I got home that the skin had broken on a couple, causing tomato juice to bleed into the bottom of my pack.

            The shelf shopping was only being guided by two volunteers rather than the usual three and so my helper, the little Filipino woman kept going back and forth from assisting the person in front of me to helping me with my selections.

The cereal being offered, though diverse, was all kid’s cereal, so I skipped it. Another shelf had a variety of crackers and cookies. I took a box of Triscuits but next time I will probably pass on that stuff because I have more crackers at home than I can eat.

            I selected a box containing six packages of instant miso soup, a carton of chicken broth, a jar of raisin and onion couscous sauce, a can each of tomato paste, tuna and chickpeas. I selected a watermelon drink and she gave me another. She offered me some fruit roll-ups but I find them too sticky and sweet and told her I preferred the bars on the other side, which are usually healthier. She laughed and grabbed me a handful, which turned out to be a small Weightwatchers chocolate marshmallow crunch bar and three Star Wars themed chocolate cake flavoured granola bars. Don’t they make granola flavoured granola bars anymore?

            As usual, from the bread section we were allowed to take as much as we wanted. I waited for a few minutes behind the elderly woman in front of me while she was bent with a pair of tongs over a bin of Portuguese buns. She very carefully went through them and each bun that she fished out seemed to have finality to it but every time she put one in her bag she bent back down for another.

            When it was my turn I took a loaf of multigrain bread and another with raisins, nuts and cranberries. On my way to the stairs I saw the old lady with her big bag of buns waiting for the elevator. There must have been at least twenty. I thought it would be both funny and sad if she’d gotten all those buns just to feed the birds.

            As I was unlocking my bike there were only two people waiting outside to go in and the few carts and bags that some people had used to mark their places in line were still there alone on the sidewalk.

            I left the food bank at about 10:30, which was nice, because it was an hour and a quarter sooner than the week before.