Religious Pizza

            On Saturday morning during song practice my high E string broke. In changing it I figured I’d better also change the G string, since it was getting frayed and would probably break at any time. After they were changed and my guitar was tuned and retuned I more than made up for lost time by only playing one verse and one chorus of most of my songs.

            I’ve memorized two-fifths of “Je suis snob” by Boris Vian. In the lyrics that I found online “j'suis snob" is repeated twice at the beginning of the first, third and fifth stanzas, but on the recording it sounds like he’s singing, “J’suis snob, c’est basse” at the start of the third verse. I found from another source that he’s actually saying, “C’est bath”. “Bath” is a French slang word that started in the 19^th Century and means “super” but its origin is not clear. It may derive from another slang word, “batif”, which means “pretty” but it might also come from the English resort town of Bath, which was a very popular vacation spot for wealthy people from all over Europe in the 19^th Century. So to say "C'est bath" would be like saying, "It's so great it's like a holiday in Bath".

            I worked out half the chords to “Di doo dah” by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I spent about half an hour trying to revise my poem “Mooning the (P)(M)atriarchs". The first two lines go: "Man and woman are the challenge / the counterweight and balance" but I want to make them less clichéd and so what I've come up with so far is, "If we’d rattle rod and chalice / drape the hardware with a valance".

            When I was getting ready to leave for the food bank I decided to leave my money on the dresser and to get it later before going to the supermarket.

            When I got there the line-up had already extended past the steps of 1501 Queen West. The woman that I’d spoken with last week, who always sits on her rollator and sometimes knits, turned to ask why I was late. I told her that I was there at my usual time and so she was probably early. She admitted that was probably true.

            I asked her if she knew anything about the history of her rollator and she said she’d love to hear about it. I’d forgotten some of the details that I’d researched last week but I told her that it was invented in 1978 by a Swedish woman named Aine who had polio. She'd chosen not to patent it because she wanted everyone that needed one to have one. My friend suggested that Aine must not have made any money from it if she didn’t patent it. Aine Wifalk got state funding to start a company that made and sold the original prototypes but I haven’t found the name of that company or anything about how much she made. She didn't depend entirely on her inventions for money as she had a career as a social scientist. She must have led a fairly comfortable life as she had money enough to donate in her will to the Nordic Church Association in Costa Del Sol. Spain where there is a Scandinavian community.

            A lot of people in line had medium size pizzas that someone said were being given out down the street. I assumed it was at the First International Baptist Church at 1479 Queen West. When someone asked me that was where I directed him but he came back and said the place was locked. I asked someone and was told that it had been the people from that church giving out pizzas but they’d done so from a car on the corner. Looking at their website later I saw that the church closed down at the end of the winter so maybe they ministering nomadically now.

            I used to be the only one speaking out against smoking in the food bank line-up, but the rule that smokers have to step out of line has emboldened the other non-smokers. The woman in the rollator was quite loud in her protests but behind her was a short woman in her seventies who was going up and down the line to sternly remind people of the prohibition and she wasn't making any friends. The guy in front of me took his cigarette to the edge of the sidewalk but protested that she sounded like a cop. The regular circle of smoking friends that come early and is always the first to be served crossed the street to smoke and talk in peace. She went downstairs to complained to the food bank and at one point the manager, Valdene came out and went down the line reminding people not to smoke. At one point the spunky protester was looking on her phone and saw that someone had reported on a Parkdale Community Food Bank social media page that she was harassing people. I didn’t think to ask her on which site this message was posted. I've found that the Parkdale Community Food Bank has Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages but I couldn't find any complaints on any of them.            

            I started reading the five-page story “Minuet” by Guy de Maupassant but only got through two pages because of all the conversations. The narrator begins by talking about his indifference to human suffering and how much he enjoyed walking in the botanical gardens. The descriptions are long and the language is much more complicated with more obscure words than a lot of French authors I’ve been reading.

            While I was reading a man and two women from the

            The anti-smoking woman asked me what I was reading and when I showed her she said, “I like poetry”. She told me that she was part of the weekly writing workshop that meets at PARC. She said that they’d published a book of poems called "Let's Face It" but it took them ten years. I told her that I have a copy of the book, as I received it as a gift when I was teaching a yoga class at PARC. She said, “That’s where I recognize you from!” I don't think she ever came to my class but I used to loudly promote it to the people in the drop-in on my way upstairs every Friday. I’m familiar with the writing workshop led by Hume Cronyn, the nephew of the Tony Award winning and Academy Award winning actor of the same name.

            After a few minutes the anti-smoking woman stepped out of line and said she was leaving. The woman in the rollator asked, “Don’t you want any food?” but she just shook her head and walked down Queen.

            The woman with the rollator also asked what I was reading. I showed it to her and told her that I’ve been minoring in French as a Second Language at U of T but I’m hoping to drop it, along with Philosophy because both courses are dragging my grade point average down. I said I’m in the English Major program but now that I’m in fourth year I want to switch to being an English Specialist. She wondered why I care about my GPA and I answered that I want to go for the Masters degree in Creative Writing. She inquired as to what someone with a degree in English can actually do in terms of careers, besides teaching. I’d never thought about it very much but I suggested that one could write newsletters for corporations. Looking it up later I saw that one could be a copywriter, an editor, a lexicographer, a journalist, a proofreader or a web content manager.

            She said she’s thought about going for post secondary education but doesn’t feel she has the confidence or the memory capacity. I told her she'd be surprised what she could accomplish. She seemed shocked to hear that I'm in university even though I didn't finish high school. I told her that the Academic Bridging course I took for a year taught me how to write academic essays and prepared me for university. She said that she would have trouble deciding what to study and I explained that was why they make students take a little bit of everything in first year. I had originally considered going into Physiotherapy but when I saw that my strengths are in English I went with that. She said that she didn’t think she could study English because she takes everything literally and isn’t able to understand metaphor. I suggested that Social Science might be better for her. She said that I’d given her food for thought

            A man and two women all dressed up for church and smiling came along and stopped to give out pamphlets to some people in line. I assume these people were the missionaries that had given out the pizzas earlier. Thankfully the fact that I was engaged in a book seemed to deter them from bothering me.

            Somehow five large chocolate chip muffins had recently ended in the street just off the curb and four of them were top down. One guy picked one up and started eating it, saying he hated to see food go to waste. A woman picked the rest up and placed them paper down on top of the city garbage and recycling bin. Within minutes three people from the line had each taken a muffin and one man came back for seconds. If I had nothing else to eat other than muffins lying top down where people spit, where pigeons and police horses shit and where all kinds of bacteria might get deposited, I might eat it anyway. But as far as I could tell everybody that took a muffin was from the line-up and that meant they’d all have clean food to eat within half an hour.

            Some scientists say that in general a city street is less contaminated than a kitchen floor and so it's safer to eat food off the street. But that would depend on if the street has been cleaned. What makes Toronto's streets iffy is that only 28 of the city’s 43 street sweepers are out and about on any given day. How contaminated food can get also depends on how sticky it is, as a muffin would soak up a lot more bacteria than an apple, a cracker or a yet to be sliced bagel.

            I got number 27.

            Downstairs I didn’t take as much from the shelves as usual. One is allowed two items from the top of the first set of shelves. There were lots of different kinds of crackers and I took some that were flavoured with parmesan and garlic. I didn’t take anything else from that shelf because frankly my shelves have so many boxes of crackers, chips and cereal that there’s little room for any more and it’ll take me until Thanksgiving to go through it all.

            On the middle shelf were single serve containers of honey and others of mayonnaise and fat free french dressing. I took three units of the dressing. There were maple pecan protein bars and boxes of four Special K cashew caramel pretzel protein bars. I took the box of bars and moved on.

            I didn’t take any canned beans as I had two tins of chickpeas at home. I didn’t bother with any soup either. I grabbed a can of sardines and Larissa gave me a litre carton of cranberry cocktail. I skipped the pasta and rice as usual.

            Angie wasn't there to mind the refrigerated food section and so Valdene was taking her place. She asked if I wanted eggs and I said I had some. She asked if I wanted yogourt and I said “No thanks”. She asked if I wanted the frozen generic ground chicken or hot dogs and I also turned those down. She asked if I wanted strawberry shortcake and I said okay. Valdene exclaimed, “He said yes!” The strawberry shortcake consisted of a pack of a dozen little vanilla cupcakes each topped with a swirl of whipped cream and strawberry syrup. I also got two half-kilo bags of frozen young soybeans.

            There was lots of bread but none of it looked intriguing and besides I have plenty.

            Sylvia’s section had more interesting fare. I skipped the potatoes because I have lots. I picked a couple of onions. She gave me a 907 gram pack of blueberries, most of which seemed to not be overripe. I saw packs of greens behind her and asked about them. She handed me one and it was a 100-gram pack of a pre-washed blend of lettuces, other greens as well as sunflower and broccoli sprouts.

            From the “take what you want" section near the door I grabbed a bag of four avocadoes. Of those I found only two halves were salvageable.

            The biggest scores were the blueberries and the salad but in general this was a slightly below average food bank haul. Unless of course one likes eating muffins off the asphalt or scored some evangelical pizza.

            I took my food home, put it away, made sure I hadn’t forgotten my bike lock this time and headed down to No Frills. When I got to the same bike post ring where I’d realized I’d forgotten my bike lock last week, it suddenly occurred to me that I'd forgotten my money, and so I had to ride home and get it.

            The grapes and cherries were cheap, but the cherries especially and so I got four bags of those. I bought an apple pie, some yogourt and a bottle of mouthwash. They haven’t had the alcohol free mouthwash for a couple of weeks and so I’ve been buying the regular. When I use my Waterpik before bedtime I use a cop of water and top up the measuring cup with mouthwash. I’ve noticed that the non-alcohol version foams to an annoying degree.

            From the supermarket I road west along King to Roncesvalles and then went back east to home via Queen.

            I some of the salad for lunch and also a toasted cheese, tomato and cucumber sandwich.

            I worked on my journal.

            In the afternoon I did some hip and leg exercises.

            For dinner I had a fried egg with a piece of toast and a beer while watching an episode of The Untouchables.

            This story takes place in St Louis where two old style mob bosses, Joe Courtney and Tim Harrington are fighting it out for territory. Dink Conway, a new style of mob boss with the front of legitimate business calls a meeting and tries to draw the other two into partnership. Tim is not interested and so Dink has him killed after he leaves. Later when Joe acts independently and robs $1 million in bonds, Dink punishes him and takes possession of the bonds. He also has Joe’s girlfriend Rita killed. It's when he tries to cash in the bonds that Dink is caught.

            Rita Rocco was played by Rita Duncan, who acted, sang and danced on the stage and screen for many years. She was married to prizefighter Nick Canzoneri and later to novelist David Chandler. She ran her own talent agency until 1988.