Still Bad on the Street but now Good for the Lawn

            On Saturday I recorded another song practice and I didn’t make a mistake until the last verse of the first song when I hit a wrong chord. After the camera went back to sleep I turned to close the voice recorder and discovered that my computer had shut down during the session. There must have been a brief power outage while I wasn’t looking. I assumed then that the voice recorder file would have failed entirely but when I checked it had been auto saved. That puzzled me because two days before that the computer was saving my file but the whole thing got lost when I shut the file in mid-save. How is it that the recorder can save a file that’s suddenly shut down but not one that I clicked to close? Why didn’t the voice recorder program warn me that day about possible information loss like other programs do? The video was well positioned in the frame this time so now all I have to do now is get through a song without making major errors.

            At 9:45 on Saturday I went to the food bank. It started sprinkling as I rode my bike the short distance to 1499 Queen West. In the shelter of the overhang above the entrance and to the left of the door was a woman sitting on a red sleeping bag and drinking a tall can of beer. Her face showed that she was an indigenous person but she was extremely dark, which I assumed was a tan. Her features were quite striking and I really wanted to take her picture but I didn’t feel comfortable just pulling out my camera and shooting her. I was hoping we would talk first and once a rapport was established I could ask if I could take a photo, but it didn’t happen. She was exuberantly and loudly talking with the Caribbean women that had also come out of the rain.

            I stood in line behind the cart belonging to a large, pleasant woman with a vein of silver going through her dark, curly hair. Near where I was standing, two regulars, an older man and a large woman, who were quite a bit in front of me in line, were sitting together on the steps of the apartment building at 1501 Queen. Since they were so close I found myself sometimes getting drawn into their conversations.

            The woman mentioned people that panhandle but have lots of money and the example of a woman begging on Yonge Street who turned out to drive away in a Mercedes. I think she was talking about the “shaky lady” who apparently would stop shaking when her begging shift on Yonge Street was done and then would get into the passenger seat of a Chevy Lumina and get chauffeured elsewhere. I said that her case is very rare and that most panhandlers are very poor. Everyone nodded in agreement. I mentioned though that there are professional panhandlers, like the guy I knew of in Vancouver who would put on a suit every day and then approach people on the street to tell them of his fictional tragic circumstance that had suddenly left his wife, children and himself suddenly but temporarily destitute.

            A pair of mounted police officers were heading west across the street and the woman called out to them, “Where’s your pooper scooper?” Then she commented, “It’s true! People have to clean up after their dogs but cops don’t have to clean up after their horses!” I’ve often wondered about the same thing and so I looked up a few articles on the subject. The main reason why dog owners should clean up after their pets is because dog feces is full of toxic bacteria that horse manure does not contain. Dog droppings on a lawn would burn the grass while horse hockey would fertilize it. That being said though, the steeds that pull carriages in cities are usually required to wear a horse diaper, from which cop horses are exempt. The main offence of horse poop on the streets is that it is messy and at first smelly. Mounted officers don’t always know if their animals are relieving themselves since they are facing in the other direction when it happens. Although I have yet to see this happen, according to spokespeople for the mounted force, if the officer’s notice that their means of transportation has dropped a batch of brownies near or on someone’s residential property or a sidewalk café, they will arrange for the turds to be removed. Otherwise they will ignore it and let it dry by itself. If however someone complains, someone is sent with a pickup truck and a shovel to clean up the mess. Supposedly all anyone has to do is to call 311, say it’s about horse crap in a certain location and someone from the force will come to stoop, scoop and haul it away.

            Speaking of dogs, the tattooed Ethiopian guy arrived with his pup. Someone he knew was passing by and he asked him if he wanted a dog. The woman asked if he was getting rid of his pet but he answered that the woman from whom he bought his dog was selling its brother. She asked what the price tag was and he told her $550. She inquired as to the breed of his dog, and when he told her that the little pooch is half Chihuahua and half Pomeranian (a Pom-Chi), she commented that usually mixed breeds are given away and not sold for hundreds of dollars. According to my research, Pom-Chi’s are a popular hybrid because they are considered ideal apartment pets and if breeders continue the line for seven generations the Pom-Chi will officially be considered a pure breed.
            Why don’t they cross a horse with a dog and make a pet that one doesn’t have to stoop and scoop after?

            He told us that the dog is eight months old, the same age as his child, so they will be able to grow up together. A guy named Jake, who was also sitting on the steps, wanted to know if the dog had reached it’s full size. The tattooed guy confirmed that was the case. Jake liked that and shared that he has a Chihuahua at home and loves it.

            Jake had not planned on going to the food bank that day. He was supposed to work that day but his new boss did not pick him up as he’d promised. Jake waited an hour but his employer had not answered his phone, so he went to the food bank instead. He says he has a daughter to support and finds the situation very frustrating.

            The doorkeeper this time was the woman that I’ve been calling the “the bread lady”. I finally got around to asking her name and she told me that it’s Lana. On several occasions, Lana was chastising the woman on the sleeping bag for drinking in front of the food bank. The woman kept on responding though that she had no place else to go but that she would leave when it stopped raining.

            When I was at the front of the line Lana engaged me in conversation. There was a man further back in line with his two small boys, but he was having a chat with an older woman in another tongue. Lana asked me what language they were speaking. I listened and told her that it sounded like Arabic to me. The man and his sons looked like they were Arabs but the woman he was speaking with could have passed for Portuguese. Lana commented that the war in Syria and Iraq has been going on for a long time. I told her there’s been more than one war. She wondered what I thought of Donald Trump. I found it difficult to answer at first because there are so many things to say about the guy. The words “asshole” and “idiot” came to mind but they seemed a little too easy. I finally just responded with, “We are living in very strange times!” meaning only in such times could someone like Trump be elected.

            Lana asked me why I don’t volunteer at the food bank. She said, “We need more males!” I told her that I have things to do. She admitted that one needs to be thick skinned sometimes to work there. I asserted that I would want to run things if I were volunteering at the food bank. She nodded.

            When Lana let the next five people in I heard her behind me insisting to the tattooed guy that he couldn’t bring a dog into the food bank and reminding him that she’d told him that before. I walked downstairs and saw a woman who’d been at least five places behind me getting into the elevator with a cart full of food. She’d managed to slither herself up by about ten places.

            In Angie’s cold section there was no milk for the first time in a long time. She gave me the usual five eggs, two small containers of fruit bottom yogourt and then two 114 ml containers of not very tasty orange juice from concentrate. There was no meat being distributed but maybe Angie slipped me something and told me not to tell anyone because she would deny that she’d done it. She might not have done that. I might just be making it up, but if she did pass me something on the sly it might have been made with pork, cheddar and beer.

            Sylvia’s vegetable section, besides the usual potatoes, carrots and onions, had half cabbages, bunches of celery, two not quite firm but still edible tomatoes and two halves of pineapple. The only thing I didn’t take was the celery, since I still had some at home and I don’t go through it very quickly.

            Samantha was my guide through the shelves. After several weeks of not taking any cereal I finally took a box of multigrain Cheerios. I didn’t want any pasta or rice but one of the other volunteers who’s been there since I started coming was really pushing some kind of special pasta in a bag with powdery stuff that he said makes a sauce when you’re cooking it. It looked natural but I knew I wasn’t going to make any pasta anytime soon. Samantha gave me the last can of tuna. I took a carton of tomato basil bisque. I asked for some granola bars and so she put three Nature Valley sweet and salty peanut bars in my bag. I turned down all the crackers, wafers and cookies that she offered me. On top of the last shelf, among the miscellaneous cake and muffin mixes, I found in the back a bottle of yogourt-based salad dressing. Samantha cautioned me to think twice about that selection. She told me that she’d already checked the best before date but advised me to do so as well. It was August 2016, which she reminded me was almost to a year ago. I was convinced and so I put the stuff back on the shelf.

            All that was left was the bread, but before I had a chance to look at what they had the other volunteer came running up again, this time to push the loaf of sliced, gluten free millet chia ancient grain bread. It looked better than the rest of what they had so I took it. He wanted to know if I also wanted a whole-wheat baguette, but I told him I had enough. He assured me I wouldn’t be disappointed with what I’d chosen. He kept on selling it to me even as I was walking out the door and telling me about all the omega 3, adding, and “It’s good for our joints!” I got the impression though that he meant his and mine rather than everybody’s joints.

            I noticed on the way out that the homeless woman on the sleeping bag was puppy sitting for the tattooed guy.

The food bank pickings this time were even slimmer before. It was nice that there was pineapple because I was pretty much out of fruit and wouldn’t have money to buy any for a week. It was a bummer that there had been no milk because I had really counted on it so that I could spend the $3.05 that I had in my pocket on one can of Creemore to have with dinner that night. But I needed milk for coffee and cereal and so early that afternoon I took eleven beer cans to the Beer Store for the refund, combined it with what I already had and then I had $4.25, which was exactly enough to buy three bags of 2% milk at Freshco.

The sky was grey in the late afternoon and it had rained a bit so I decided not to take a bike ride.
            That night I cooked the three frozen beer and cheddar sausages that I had somehow acquired and ate one of them with bread, mustard, scotch bonnet sauce and a tomato.