On Saturday morning I memorized lines eight
to twelve of “L'homme à la tête de chou" (The Man with the Head of Cabbage)
by Serge Gainsbourg.
At
9:45 I went to stand in line at the food bank. It was quite a bit longer than
it had been the week before so I was two places past where the big hearts end
and around the corner on Beaty Avenue. The middle aged blonde woman ahead of me
is a food bank regular. She nodded and smiled as I took my place two metres
behind her.
A
few minutes later a young woman accompanied by a black labradoodle came to
stand behind me, but the woman ahead of me began to severely chastize her for
spitting on the sidewalk. She told her that people put their bags and backpacks
down to mark their places in line and they don’t want her saliva on their
things.
At
the same time the woman with the dog was smoking and so I put my backpack down
on my spot and took my book across Beaty to stand and read in the sun. But then
for reasons that were a mystery to me the woman with the dog followed me to the
west side of the street and stood behind me, with the wind continuing to blow
her smoke towards me. I moved back to my spot and she followed me again but by
this time she had finished her cigarette and so I stayed.
My
best guess to explain her strange behaviour is that she was confused about the
line and simply had followed me because she’d thought she was supposed to.
My
second guess is that she thought that I’d been offended by the woman ahead of
me that had criticized her and that I’d moved across the street in protest,
causing her to join me in solidarity.
I
read a couple of pages from my dual language book of French stories and I was
almost finished with The Death of Judas by Paul Claudel. The story is being
told by Judas after he has committed suicide. Claudel adds an interesting
element by having Judas hang himself from the same fig tree that Jesus had
illogically cursed because it did not bear fruit out of season.
Actually,
the Bible has two conflicting stories about the death of Judas. The most
popular one is the suicide as depicted in Matthew, but in Acts Judas uses the
blood money that he got for turning Jesus in to buy a piece of land. It is on
this property that Judas has an accidental fall resulting in his death. Some
people that are desperate for the Bible to be literally true in every instance
have used a clumsy creativity to combine the two stories so they will both be
true.
I
looked behind me and saw that the line was now stretching for about five houses
down Beaty. The woman two places behind me struck up a conversation with the
woman with the dog. She learned her name is Charlotte and that she and her dog
are homeless. She said she knows how hard it is to find a place when one has a
dog because she was on the street with a dog at one point. She said that her
dog had to be put down.
There
is nothing wrong with homeless people having dogs as long as they can take care
of them and feed them properly. Homeless people are really the ideal dog
caregivers because dogs are homeless by nature. Wild dogs tend to run in packs
and only females giving birth and nursing will stay in a single place until
their pups are ready to travel. Eighty-three percent of the dogs in the world
are feral. One in four homeless people have pets.
This
was my second week going to the food bank in the age of social distancing.
Before that there tended to be a ninety minute wait before we could go
downstairs in groups of five and choose our items. Last week I learned that in
the new system we no longer get to go downstairs but rather boxes of food are
brought upstairs and distributed. When I first heard this I thought it was a
rip off to take away our choices but I was so pleasantly surprised that I only
had to wait half an hour for my food that I didn’t care anymore about not being
able to choose. This time however the wait was as long as it had been before
and so it made me feel that we should have the power of selection again.
After
a little over an hour the people in the front started getting their boxes and
left. The line moved forward a bit until I was standing on one of the hearts
painted two metres apart. Marlena came around with a big bag of 170 gram bags
of Fresh Gourmet whole grain chips. I took the jalapeno flavoured kind and put
it in my bag. Charlotte opened hers immediately and shared some with her dog.
According to the Animal Rescue site it’s okay to share non spicy versions of
those kinds of snacks with a dog as long as they are not salted. Dogs cannot
eat salt because it causes excessive thirst, urination and can lead to sodium
ion poisoning. These chips are all corn based and corn is a common allergen for
dogs. They are also fried in oil., which is also bad for dogs and so for
Charlotte to allow her dog this snack was not good care giving.
After
ninety minutes I finally got a box of food with a big paper bag on top. Most of
the food items that I received this time were not what I would have chosen from
the shelves downstairs. The paper bag contained five large potatoes, two
bruised apples, a very soft grapefruit and a plastic bag of about fifteen
carrots. In the box was a can of whole tomatoes, two of tomato soup, one of
peas and one of cut wax beans. There was a 400 gram pack of Asian noodles, a
box of four apple-strawberry pressed fruit bars, a bottle of a
cucumber-lime-mint beverage, a 680 gram container of cherry tomatoes from
Mexico, a bag of four crusty buns, a bag of frozen sliced peaches, a one-litre
carton of lactose free 2% milk, two 100 gram containers of coconut Greek
yogourt and two peeled and packaged hard boiled eggs. I was raised on a farm
with chickens and I never imagined that someone would come along and sell
pre-boiled and peeled eggs. It seems totally decadent to my mind. There was
recently a listeria outbreak in the United States due to pre-boiled eggs but
these are free range and come from Conestoga Farms in Ontario. I can’t imagine
they will taste as good as freshly cooked eggs but they might be ideal for a
homeless person like Charlotte and for her dog.
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