Vaporous Drapery

           

            On Wednesday morning, my cat Daffodil wasn’t waiting outside in the hall when I opened the apartment door. I figured though that I wouldn’t let myself start worrying too much about her until she’d been gone for twenty-four hours.

            I headed down to the food bank on a day that was the closest to being rainy of any Wednesday since April. So far, I haven’t had to line up in the rain. When I got there and locked my bike to a tree beside the building next door there was no line-up at all. I got number twenty and went home.

            At some point around midday there was a garbage truck coming down O’Hara and turning on Queen. I don’t know what it picked up, but long after it passed the pukey smell of whatever it was carrying had infected the neighbourhood.

            My phone had been off on Tuesday, but I’d noticed too late to call back that there’d been a call from my doctor’s office. I called Dr Shechtman’s office back on Wednesday but the receptionist couldn’t find any record of me having been called, which was a relief because he wouldn’t have called unless there was a problem with the lab tests from my most recent check-up.

            The heat wave was definitely over but it wasn’t an unpleasant sunny, cloudy day as I rode back to the food bank. As I was locking my bike, a woman stopped, leaned down and asked me the time. I told her it was 13:28.

            Such a wide assortment of people go to the food bank. I think that pretty much every one of the major world ethnicities were represented there that day, as well as most of the reasons for being poor enough to have to go there, whether that be because of age, race, addiction, identity, various types of physical and mental disability, or even philosophical reasons. It’s interesting how poverty brings people together.

            There was a very skinny elderly woman staggering as she walked in jeans, a stylish gold painted straw hat and white slingback sandals. She was wearing a short-sleeved shirt that revealed a skin condition so extreme that it could be mistaken for a fabric pattern.

            Another elderly but larger woman with the sunburn-like alcohol flush reaction that some drinkers get was smoking and laughing over by the fire escape.

            There was a middle-aged guy with a shaved head wearing spandex bicycle shorts. Actually, for his age, he wore them pretty well.

            The woman who likes to dance to her smart phone was talking to a couple of people. One of them talked about cooling off with a snowball fight and her response was that there aren’t enough testicles to go around.

            The woman at the door called out number sixteen. A guy asked, “You’re not sixteen are you?” She answered, “Yup, and my kids are twenty-seven and twenty-eight!”

            Once I was inside, number nineteen had been called and I knew I was next, but my volunteer started talking about someone who had been bragging about how long he could have sex. He said he didn’t need to hear about it. Then he called my number and apologized for the risqué subject matter. I told him, “I’m a poet. Nothing’s too risqué for me.”

Of the shelf items, what stood out for me was a big box of Heritage Ancient Grains cereal. The greatest chance for something out of the ordinary will come from Sue in the refrigerated section. There was a tub of Activia lemon yogourt. Sue said she was sceptical at first but found it to be pretty good. I’d had it before, back when it first came out and they had it on sale. The flavour is not that of lemon juice but of lemon zest, which makes it very uniquely flavourful. When Sue put the tub into my canvas bag, it didn’t fit as the cereal and the other items had been hurriedly packed because of the rushed format of shopping at the food bank. As she helped me rearrange my items she said, “You’re just like my man! You just shove everything in without thinking about it!” I got a sealed bag of chicken salad, which is something I’ve never seen in a supermarket, so I assume it’s more the type of thing one gets from a restaurant supplier.  The big scores of the day were two large, frozen rainbow trout fillets. On the way out, the vegetable lady gave me a head of leaf lettuce that, for a change, wasn’t wilted.

On the way up Dunn Avenue, I met the same pukey smelling garbage truck that had gone by my place earlier. A block past it, even though I was upwind of it, the rank smell was a stain on the air.

With the chicken salad mix, the lettuce and the multigrain bread loaf I’d gotten from the food bank, I was able to later on make a pretty good chicken salad sandwich. Because of the way it was pre-mixed though, unlike in the movie “Five Easy Pieces”, it would have been impossible to hold the chicken.

That afternoon I got a call back from my doctor’s office, telling me that I needed to come in, so I made an appointment for Thursday. I was a little worried, but I assumed it was probably either high cholesterol or high sugar, which would be something I could correct with my diet. 

That evening as I was riding east on Bloor Street, ash grey clouds floated against a background of dishwater grey. They seemed at home there, but complacent and unadventurous without blue skies to defy. I headed north on Dufferin and, as usual, the view to the west along Dupont was spectacular, with bright clouds at various angles and depths, criss-crossing the horizon.

I rode up to Davisville and Yonge and then crossed over to Mount Pleasant. Davisville is not very interesting in that stretch. There were just high-rises the whole way. I went down Mount Pleasant to St Clair and headed back to the west. Suspended under furrows of white clouds were a few vertical columns of vaporous drapery.

When I got home, there was still no trace of Daffodil. I went out back to call for her and I just happened to catch the outline of a cat that looked like her, two properties west, along the roof. I walked further out on our roof to get a better look, and sure enough, it was Daffodil, just sitting there looking at me from under another neighbour’s deck. She refused to come when I called, so I just left her to figure out what she wanted to do.

A couple of hours later, Daffodil came home, looking a little crazy for a while till she settled back in.

That night I watched another interesting and complicated episode of Bonanza. While Ben is away on business, a beautiful and classy woman shows up at the Ponderosa, introducing herself to Adam, Hoss and Little Joe as Ben’s new wife. She said they’d had a whirlwind romance and gotten married, and he sent her ahead while he finished his business. Hoss and Little Joe thought it was great, but Adam, the smart one, was sceptical. The woman though, produced a marriage licence that seemed to prove that she was Mrs. Ben Cartwright.  When Ben returned home he had no idea who the woman was and she in turn was surprised to see that the Ben Cartwright that she had married was not the same one who was standing before her. She said that the man had borrowed $50,000 from her. The whole family went with her to the town where she had married her Ben Cartwright to help her clear up the mess and get her money back. This turned out to be an elaborate con perpetrated by a dapper grifter, turned murderer, played by Adam West, and of course, the woman was in on it.

It’s always fun to see young Adam West, the future Batman, perform because he’s an even bigger over-actor than William Shatner, and he was so strangely pretty back then as well.

West’s character shot a miner in the back and then planted evidence pointing towards Ben being the murderer. Ben was jailed. The town was building towards lynching him, while Ben’s sons tried to find a way to prove him innocent. After an altercation with the townsfolk in a saloon though, the boys are also arrested. Adam escapes and proceeds to track down Adam West’s character, eventually killing him and convincing the woman to confess. It turned out though that the sheriff was also in on the plot, so when he tried to shoot the woman, Adam had to kill him. Complicated, eh?