The Line-Up

           

            On the Wednesday morning of July 20th I mounted the bike cam, started recording and rode down to the food bank. I locked my bike to a tree that leans out from the building next door and positioned my bike so it was pointing towards the line-up. I wasn’t sure how much it would capture because the garbage bins were in the way, but it has a wide-angle lens so I thought it would be worth a try.

            I got in line behind the friendly woman who knits, who I later heard someone call Margaret. The talkative young big woman arrived. Margaret told her that she’s moving to Barrie soon to get away from all the drugs in her building. She said she could get a job at the Loblaws there. Another woman told her that there are drugs everywhere. I guess the rent would be cheaper in Barrie. Margaret asked me the time. It was four minutes to. The woman with the white poodle said, “Only an hour to go!” I told her that they give out the numbers at 10:00. She’d thought it was 11:00, which is strange, because I’d seen her there since they changed the start time, so she should have known. Her dog, Chilo, jumped up and put his front paws on my knee, so I rubbed him behind the ears for a while. His caregiver said, “He does that to everybody!” thus making me feel less special, even though she’d meant it as a friendly comment.

            The smoking in the line wasn’t as difficult for me to deal with as usual. I think that maybe the wind was in my favour this time.

            Desmond came out with a water bottle, and as usual, he and the big talkative woman began horsing around. She said something and so he tossed a little water on her. She reminded him that she was holding coffee. He shook his head and told her, “Coffee’s too dark. It wouldn’t show up on me! You need something lighter!” At one point she came toward him and he backed away. Joe, the manager, observed this and asked, “Are you afraid of women, Desmond?” “No! I’m not afraid of women!” Joe walked up close to him and observed, “When I get close to you, you don’t move away. But when she comes toward you, you run. So you must be afraid of women.” Desmond protested, “That’s a whole different thing!”

            Once we were closer to the door, Desmond was telling her about a pain he had on the left side of his abdomen. He said that he knows it isn’t his appendix, because that’s on his right side. He confessed that he hasn’t been to a doctor for a couple of years, but he’s afraid to go and find out what’s wrong. I told him he should go every year and take advantage of the fact that he lives in Canada.

            I got number 16 and went home.

            My camera had been running the whole time and so I had a 35-minute video of the line-up, but when I tried to upload it to my computer I got an error message. I’ve encountered this message on a few occasions. The first time it happened I just needed to recharge the battery. The second time even that didn’t work, so I had to reformat the memory card and delete the video. This was the first video I’d made since reformatting but I still encountered the same problem. It’s getting frustrating. Either I’m doing something wrong or there is something wrong with the camera. I might need help from Nick Cushing to figure it out.

            Back at the food bank a couple of hours later, I had the nervous but helpful helper.

            From the top shelf I took a can of coconut milk.

On the next shelf down there was a bag of “wasabi ranch” pea crisps. I’ve been thinking of taking a holiday at a wasabi dude ranch, as long as they don’t want me to be dressing for dinner.

            At the bottom was a choice between some kind of candy and a small bag of cashews, so I took the cashews. Since I didn’t want any pasta, rice or sauce from the next set of shelves, she and said I could go back and take another bag of cashews.

            While looking at the canned vegetables, I asked if there was any canned fruit, and she pointed out some larger cans of mixed fruit in the back, so I took one of those. She said I could refrigerate the can and it would be nice on hot days. She’s always full of helpful suggestions. She added that I could also rinse the sugar off of the fruit.

            There were lots of cans of navy beans in tomato sauce, but I prefer molasses sauce, so I didn’t take any. I did grab a can of tuna though.

            Along with the artificially sweetened iced tea there were little cans of something called “brown rice smoothy”. Under one set of Korean letters were the words: “Kosher food”, so I assume the English was the translation of the Korean, but if that’s the case, I wonder how many Koreans would need to know that it’s kosher. Under another set of symbols it says, “Smooth like never before”. This suggests that they used to put out a sub-standard product called a “smoothy” that wasn’t very smooth.

            In the cereal section, it looks like they’ve run out of the Shreddies and now the only conventional cereals are chocolate flavoured. But they also had boxes of Dorset granola and meusli, and so to my helper’s enthusiastic approval, I took the meusli.

            There was no one minding the cool food section, so she crossed over to serve me there as well. She apologized that the only milk they had this time was chocolate, but I took it anyway. There was also a container of plain Greek yogourt. They also had plastic bags containing five eggs each. She wanted to make sure that I knew that the eggs were not cooked.

            From the bread section, I just took a loaf of focaccia al rosmarino that was actually fresh. It might have only been donated to the food bank because it had gotten broken up inside of its bag.

            Hazel was minding the vegetable section, though I asked her to confirm that her name was Hazel. I told her that my grandmother’s name was Hazel. She declared that it’s the best name.

            Hazel had a few small and not very fresh apples, an orange, some potatoes, some red onions and lots of fresh vegetables that she said came from the community garden in the park on Cowan, south of Queen. I remember that they converted a section of it into a garden shortly after my daughter was too old to take to the wading pool and playground that’s still there. From the garden, she gave me a bunch of Swiss chard, a bag of mixed greens and several elongated radishes.

            I told Hazel a variation on a joke by Brent Butt, about the name Hazel. Nobody gets named “Hazel” anymore. We know why no one gets called “Adolph”, but what did Hazel ever do to anybody? Hazel answered, “She brought a flood!”

            Then she told me, “That’s it!” But then she looked around and said, “Oh! I forgot something!” There was an un-opened box at the back, which she unpacked. It was full of bananas. She gave me a bunch and they were not overripe, as they usually are, but actually perfect, yellow and spotless.