Perpetual Motion

            On Saturday morning there was a much larger group at the food bank than there had been the two weeks before. There were also a lot more people smoking than my previous experience. I found out who was in front of me in line, but since she and the person in front of her were smoking, I went across Cowan to stand in the sun and read a poem by Dionne Brand, called Ossuary I, in which she uses the absence of verbs to symbolize something I hadn’t figured out yet.

            The woman in front of me is a food bank regular but I’ve tended to see her during the week rather than on Saturdays. She is someone who can neither sit still nor be quiet. She moves all through the different groups gathered in the driveway and interacts with them loudly. When she does stand still she rocks from side to side as if she’s boxing without fists or arms.

            After half an hour, the line started to form, but I stayed away because so many were smoking. The line curved north, crossed the width of the driveway and ventured a little bit further north.

The woman that was in front of me left her cart in her place and went to talk to a guy near the back of the line about a dog they both knew of as a puppy but that she’d seen regularly since then. She told him, “His balls aint dropped yet! He looks like he’s been neutered!” She went on to say that the dog acts maternally towards the other dogs but since it was purchased for breeding it’s useless without testicles.

Once the line started moving. I took my position behind the talkative woman, who was holding onto her cart, but suddenly wondered why, since she was only going inside to get a number. She moved her cart to the side and then shouted at a woman she knew at the front of the line that was going inside with her cart, asking her why she was doing that. “Force of habit!” the woman called back.

There was a guy standing directly to my left in line and continued to do so each time the line edged forward. Finally he complained that he should be further ahead. The loud woman told him that he could step ahead of her if he wanted, but he didn’t. He eventually stepped in front of me though, after I told him he could.

The loud woman was discussing with the man with yellowish brown teeth in front of her how neither of them drink much during the winter but let go at Christmas and New Years. She declared, “Spiced rum and eggnog! Ya gotta kiss that!” The bearded, brown-toothed man agreed. He told her that he was from Newfoundland and though his parents drank eggnog at Christmastime, he never got into it until he came up to Ontario and had it with rum. He thought it was amazing.

The loud woman told a story of how when she was seven she went to Mexico with her mother. She saw a t-shirt with the caption, “Certified Muff Diver”, which she asked her mother to buy for her. Her mother had to take her aside and explain to her what a muff diver was.

Once I was inside, the one receptionist who’s memorized both my name and birth date gave me number 38. That’s one of the latest numbers I’ve gotten at the food bank. It was already almost 11:00 as I was unlocking my bike.

I rode to the No Frills at King and Jameson, where I bought margarine and real peanut butter. Then I went up Jameson to Queen and went into the Vina Pharmacy to fill a prescription. They were playing a Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” and if I’d let myself I probably would have teared up like I did the day before. I’d thought that Social Services had changed things so I didn’t need a monthly drug card anymore, but my health card didn’t register with their system, so I had to walk home to see if there was a drug card in my latest cheque stub.

In front of me on Queen, man who looked African and wearing a leather cap came out of a store and untied three large dogs. They all barked loudly and excitedly. They all looked fairly old and two of them were overweight. The German shepherd was of normal body mass, but the two ones that looked like they might have been St Bernards were fat. The largest though was grossly obese. As soon as they were untied it jumped on the shepherd and playfully bit its neck. They were all happily wagging their tails as they walked along Queen with their caregiver. The combination of wagging and walking caused the fat on the big one’s body to shake and ripple as it went along.

Since I get my cheque by direct deposit I tend not to open the envelopes they send me. Sure enough, there was a drug card there and in another envelope I found a notice that I would stop receiving a drug card in December. I’d jumped the gun by one month. I walked back to the drug store and gave them the card, they filled my prescription and then I headed back to the food bank. It was already 11:30, but there was plenty of time for me, since I had such a high number.

There was a pile of women’s and children’s clothes on a table in front of the door. An old man with a walker picked up a bra from the top of the pile and asked the woman rummaging on the other side, “Do they have this in a different colour?” Then he added, “They do have brassieres for men at some stores!” The woman, who hadn’t really been listening, asked, “What’s that dear?” He said, “Never mind!”

The loud woman helped a woman in a hijab and her two young children select some items from the pile, but she urged them to wash everything before wearing it.

A man walked to the back of the driveway and a around the corner. When he was walking back, the loud woman called out to him, “Did you just water that tree?” He answered, “I watered three actually!” She said, “Gotta get back to nature!”

Even though she had been just ahead of me, she picked up her cart and went in far ahead of me. I was wondering if I’d been given the number 38 by mistake. Had it gotten mixed up in a pile with some lower numbers? Did the receptionist misread the number? It seemed so much higher than 27, which I’d had the week before, but maybe it was just a trick of the mind. Then when Desmond called numbers 21 through 26, no one responded. Either there was a coincidence of five people in a row being late or else those numbers hadn’t been given out.

The woman that called my number was new to me. She listed several items that were available on the top of the first set of shelves except for the hummus with roasted red pepper. When I grabbed it she said, “Oh!”

I asked for a bag of chocolate chips from the next shelf down but she told me I was only allowed one item from the top two shelves.

On the bottom were small bags of little gluten-free cookies and small bags of Air Canada pretzels. I took a handful of the pretzels.

She seemed surprised I didn’t want pasta, rice or sauce.

I took a large can of chickpeas and a can of tuna. She gave me several small containers of pancake syrup and some of those little chocolates in the shape of hockey pucks. It’s not quality chocolate but it can be used for a quick wakeup, though it’s amazing how ineffectual sugar really is at keeping me awake.

The only cereal they had was a few individual servings of Fibre-1 cereal, of which she gave me three.

In the cold section Angie offered a choice between a large bottle of a red fruit punchy looking concoction, a carton of rice milk or a half liter of cow milk. I took the real stuff. There were six small fruit bottom yogourts and two yogourts of the same size with Snickers topping. Angie was wearing a red Santa’s helper hat that had white pigtails coming down from inside. I asked her if her white hair was the result of her having experienced a trauma. She laughed and declared, “This place’d do it to ya!” I remember overhearing her tell someone that she only smokes when she’s working at the food bank.

Next to Angie, a volunteer with a British accent was handing out what he said was ground beef. The packaging looked exactly the same as the ground chicken they usually have but he assured me that he’d just thrown away a box that said “ground beef” on it, so I took it. I guess I would have taken it anyway if it was ground chicken. He also gave me a couple of bags of frozen egg patties.

In the bread section things were sparse, so I as only allowed a choice between an upper loaf or a lower bag of buns. I took a whole grain loaf.

The pleasant Saturday vegetable lady gave me four potatoes, two carrots, an onion and a red pepper. She also gave me several spears of asparagus that looked like they needed to be cooked as soon as possible. I stuck the stalks in water as soon as I got home. In the front, on the floor was a box of avocadoes. She said I could take three. None of them were in great shape, but I managed to select three that were relatively firm. When I got them home though, one of them was brown inside, another was grey and only one of them was mostly okay.