It's Only Okay to be a Betty White Supremacist

            The food bank line up was strikingly short on Saturday, perhaps because people still had money from recent social assistance deposits or maybe because of the extreme cold. I was pretty well bundled up and I had on the tall Kodiaks that I’d bought for $20 on Boxing Day. The boots aren’t all that thermal around the feet because the lower part is only rubber, but I was wearing two pairs of cotton socks with a super thick pair of woollen socks on top of those, so I wasn’t doing too bad at first. The cold started to seep in later though.

            Since there were no more than ten people there at first, everyone was packed into the little entryway beside the elevators and I was the only person in line for several minutes. That meant that I was second-hand-smoke-free in the line up for longest time ever.

            I noticed that there was a non-poverty based line up for breakfast across the street in front of a fancy little restaurant called Confiture and so it seemed like an ironic parallel.

            There was an elderly Ukrainian woman two places ahead of me. She spent most of her waiting time walking continuously around the block. She didn’t speak much English, but she did stop to ask me the time. She was unpleasantly surprised to hear me tell her that it was 10:01. I think she’d been there already for about three hours, though some others had gotten there at 6:00. She tried to tell me something about her pants but I didn’t understand. At first I thought she meant she needed to use the washroom but I think she was saying her pants weren’t warm enough and that was why she had to keep on walking.

            A nervous young guy walked up and went inside with the others for a few minutes. When he came out and walked past me he asked me the same way people usually ask for cigarettes, if I had any video games. Maybe that’s the drug of the future and some people might get so addicted that other video games will have to be invented just to wean people off the stronger games.

            The tall, grey traffic signal box near the crossing to the north east corner of Macdonell and Queen has for a long time been scrawled with the words, “It’s okay be white”. This is such a stupid thing to say. It’s like saying, “It’s okay to live indoors” or “It’s okay to have a job”. I’ve never met anyone in my life that ever told me it wasn’t okay for me to be white, so why do some white people think they are being cornered?

            A few months ago a couple of people vandalized the graffiti but I don’t know which was added first. Someone added “not”, “a” and “supremacist” but they put the “a” in the wrong place so it read, “It’s not okay to a be white supremacist” but someone also added “Betty”, so the intention, depending on which alteration came first, was either to change it to “It’s okay to be Betty White” or “It’s not okay to be a Betty White supremacist”.

            I notice that there are a lot of people that try to make it through the winter wearing only running shoes for footwear.

            While waiting I engaged in the poetic art form of creating band names and came up with: “Break-up Sex”.

            The line started moving fifteen minutes late, which is pretty early. It was quite a while before they let in the next group of five. I was in the third group.

            The nervous young guy that had asked me for video games was downstairs, though I never saw him standing in line. He started grabbing things and eating them and so Lana was trying to tell him that he had to wait until he’d been processed. When it came time for him to get his food he didn’t have a bag, so they had to find one for him.

            At the meat and dairy counter Angie gave me two half litres of milk, four cups with four flavours of Activia yogourt and a small tub of a vegan spread. When I took the latter, I was thinking it was some kind of dip rather than a vegan attempt at simulating margarine. On opening it up later though I saw that it was definitely a dairy free attempt at faking fake butter. It was the same colour as tofu and it tasted even worse. The thing is one can buy fully dairy free margarines that actually taste good, though they do have a few more chemicals in them.  This one, called Veggie Go wasn’t totally free of chemicals either though. Angie slipped a small, frozen Black Forest Ham into my backpack and offered me some frozen hot dogs, but I already had some of those at home so I turned them down. I also skipped the eggs, since I had enough. Besides, the last time I got five eggs from the food bank every single yoke broke as soon as it hit the frying pan.

            From Sylvia’s vegetable section I got a cabbage, a rutabaga (which she called a turnip and which I would have called a turnip if I hadn’t learned otherwise last week), a 2.7 kg bag of organic red P.E.I. potatoes (but she also had white, though I don’t know if they were organic or where they were from). She gave me a yam, a few onions and three fat carrots, one of which was close to the size and shape of a hand grenade and so in a Dr. Seussian sense it would go well with the frozen ham I’d just gotten, as in “I do not like grenades and ham!” except that I’ll probably like them. There was a box of small zucchini behind Sylvia and I think she forgot to offer me some, but the zucchini had been rotten last time so I didn’t mention it.

            My helper at the shelves was the old Ukrainian lady whom I’d told off a couple of months before for telling me to “Hurry up!” She behaved herself this time. There were quite a variety of cereals but I chose the large bag of Bran Flakes that had lost its box and was lying on its side at the back underneath some other items. I think a lot of people eat bran flakes or other bran cereals because it’s supposed to promote regularity. I’ve liked them since I was a kid for their dark flavour, long before I knew about any of that.

            This particular helper thinks it’s against the rules for shoppers to pick their own items, and it may be some official policy that she’s obeying, though most volunteers don’t care. I don’t care either and so I tend to reach in and grab things before she can so it became a bit of a competition. She scored one point by snagging me a can of tuna.

From the pasta section I took from the back of the sauce shelf a jar of original Ragu. The top of the soup shelves had a carton of chicken broth. Below that, among the canned soups I selected a misplaced can of meatball and sausage rigatoni. Among the crackers and cookies was a box of Breton cranberry and ancient grains crackers. Below that I selected a can of pure sugar cane juice with ginger. At the bottom of that set of shelves were lunch box sized, chocolate chip granola bars. Beside them were packages of Jello, but I have some at home and never get around to making it. On the last shelf, which tends to contain all the one-off products that don’t fit the categories of the other shelves, I grabbed a little bottle of “Dat’l Do It” Jalapeno sauce.

            I was going to skip the bread but Lana started giving a hard sell on a bag of two pizza crusts, so I took it. She also pushed two bags of the organic spelt buns that I’d gotten last time, suggesting that I could freeze them. I never think to freeze bread and so I gave in to her advice.

            It seems the food bank is still overflowing with the abundance of pre-Christmas donations. I suspect though that the cornucopia will start dwindling next week until there are bare shelves again in the mid-winter.

            I’m glad that I submitted to Lana in taking the pizza crusts because the leftover turkey I’ve been trying to finish has gotten very boring. The crusts though inspired me to make a turkey pizza that day for lunch and that was a nice way to change things up and get rid of some of the leftovers at the same time.

            After the food bank I immediately rode to the No Frills at Jameson and King to buy fruit. This is kind of a sad season for fruit though, because the grapes that have been so cheap for these last few months have gotten much more expensive.  I bought some blueberries and a bunch of bananas and a few other things. The woman ahead of me at the checkout counter had also bought the blueberries but she’d placed her package in a plastic bag, explaining to the cashier that she’d gotten tired of blueberries falling throughout the bag. That night I opened up the fridge, and while trying find something I knocked the pack of blueberries down and they scattered all over the floor.

            When I got home from No Frills, I popped out to the liquor store to buy one can of Creemore Lager. I already had two and I figured the one extra would get me through New Years Eve.