Tree Climbing Fish and other Conversations

            On Saturday morning at around 9:45 I went to the food bank. The line-up was back to its usual length now that the social assistance cheques had been spent. At the back of the line was my chatty Guyanese pal. As many conversations begin, ours started with the weather. He commented that it looked like it would be a nice day. I suggested that it might rain and proceeded to tell him about getting caught on my bike in the downpour the day before that. He declared that at least the rain cleans the city but I told him that didn’t know if that was entirely true. He pointed out to that because of yesterday’s rain the air was fresher and cooler. I argued that sometimes it’s very hot right after a downpour.

            I don’t remember exactly where one subject flowed into another, but we started talking about Omar Khadr. We both agreed that he should be compensated, but I added that by all rights the United States should also be giving Khadr $10 million or more, since that’s the country that tortured him when he was a child. We were in accord on the fact that Khadr has probably been damaged for life from what he went through and I doubted that he would have gone through it even if he’d known that he’d get a bunch of money in the end.

            Getting tired of referring to him as simply the Guyanese guy, I finally asked his name, and he told me it was Muhammed Ali. He said that he’d served in the Canadian Armed Forces and had done two tours in Afghanistan. I asked him how the Canadian military compares to that of the US and he informed me that Canadian soldiers tend to be much better trained than US of American soldiers. Canadian soldiers are more skilled and better with technology. He declared that US soldiers are just “scatter shooters”.

            Muhammed asked me how long I’ve lived in my place and I told him twenty years. He stated that he wouldn’t want to live anywhere for twenty years. I pointed out that it’s why my rent is still under $600.

We talked about our apartments. I told Muhammed that I face south but also have a window to the east and can open the door to get air from the deck on the north side of the building. He claimed that he has windows in all directions and that there’s a big tree outside of one of them. He shared that he puts his tropical fish tank near the window so that his tropical fish can look at it. I inquired as to whether the fish climb the tree too.

He mentioned again how much quieter it is without streetcars on Queen Street. I reminded him that we’d had that conversation before. I related that even when I used to ride the TTC I preferred streetcars to buses. Streetcars are much more of a pleasant ride. He admitted that the main reason he doesn’t like streetcars is because he got hit by a car that was trying pass a streetcar before its doors opened. I stressed that wasn’t the streetcar’s fault. I offered also that bus drivers hit people more than streetcars. He dismissed that by stating that things like that only happen in the east end.

He pointed while smiling at a bus that was passing and told me that busses are really just backward trucks. “How does that work?” I asked. He answered that they take new trucks and turn them around then build busses over them with the engine in the back so that the motor is pushing rather than pulling. He pointed out that military vehicles are the same, but that’s to avoid having the engine shot from the front. I can’t find any evidence that buses are made from trucks backward or forward. That seems to me a silly idea of manufacturing to think that they would build a truck and then not use it as a truck but rather a bus. The only relationship I can find is that early bus chassis were built by truck companies.

A dishevelled man with two elderly black mastiffs, one male and one female, walked by. Some people in the line-up knew the man by name. The dogs walked on either side of the man and the male dog was walking a little slower. Muhammad laughed and observed that the male looked embarrassed to be seen with the female.

At one point there was a lull in our conversation and Muhammad moved away to the edge of the sidewalk. There were people smoking on the steps, and so I moved down the street, but there were people smoking all the way to the back of the line, so I went straight to the corner. Across Beatty Street on the corner beside the Our Lady of Lebanon Church is a tree with moss all over its trunk that made the entire tree appear a strikingly luminous green in the sunlight.

I walked back to the line-up and Muhammad came back as well. I commented that I was surprised that no one has complained about the food bank customers that sit on the steps blocking the way in and out of the apartment building at 1501 Queen West. He said he moved away because of the women chattering. It does seem to be that it’s mostly women that sit on the steps but it was ironic that Muhammad’s gripe was their talking, since he pretty much gabs non-stop himself.

Behind us in line was a tall young man who looked Somalian to me but another man had somehow gotten in front of them and they were arguing about whom had been there first. Muhammad put his hand on the man’s shoulder to inform him that the Somalian guy had indeed been first but the man reacted angrily and spat back at Muhammad in what might have been a Guyanese accent, “Don’t assault me you breath mouth! You bad breath! Why you talking to me you kaka hole?”

I saw a man in a City of Toronto bylaw inspector’s uniform shirt standing and looking down at where my bike was locked. He was talking to some other others from the line-up while kicking at a tire. Worried that he was considering taking my bicycle away, I went over there. I put my hand on my left steering grip and told him, “This is my bike!” He responded with, “And it’s a beautiful bike! I was looking at the other one.” He indicated the rustier red one on the other side of the post ring. I informed him that I didn’t think that bike had been there last time I’d locked mine, so it couldn’t be abandoned.

He let me know that this was his first Saturday doing this job and that he was just getting the lay of the land. There seems to be a drive right now to get rid of derelict bikes. Over at the Freshco they finally removed about 20 or 25 velos from their bike racks that have been there for perhaps as long as a year.

A van pulled up in front of the same door that we were waiting to enter and a bunch of guys came out with drum set components. I assumed they were coming from the tool library but I was slightly surprised. I didn’t know they lent musical instruments. I looked it up later and found that it’s a new thing they are trying. I think one can also borrow instruments from the Toronto Public Library.

Muhammad started sneezing and blamed it on dust from the things they were loading. He claimed that 90% of dust is from human skin. From behind us the e-cigarette guy came forward to say that that is only true inside of homes but not on the street. He said he knows a lot about dust from having worked in the film industry. I’d overheard him saying that he’d worked for movie crews but I didn’t know in what capacity. He mentioned being a technician but that he had crushed his spine and was now on a disability paid by his union, which he claimed is the oldest union in the world. That is not possible since the oldest trade unions predate the film industry. He seemed very proud of his union and told Muhammad that it pays a larger disability than ODSP. And yet, there he was at the food bank.

The line started to move about fifteen minutes late. Downstairs there were lots of volunteers working. The very short and always cheerful elderly Filipino volunteer was there, wearing a cowboy hat and a Blue Jays jersey with the number 13 on it. Muhammad called out, “Hey Number 13!” She turned, saw him, smiled and pointed. He told her “You’re fired! I’m trading you!”

I got number 26. Angie was back at the dairy counter with the usual half litre of milk, five eggs (which I carefully placed in the top pocket of my backpack) and three small yogourts. In addition there was a half litre tub of fat free sour cream. I wondered about how they could actually make sour cream “fat free” and so I looked it up later. They have to add a shit-load of thickeners and then artificial colour to keep it white after all that. The meat choices were the usual tube of frozen ground chicken, a pack of halal chicken wieners or something called “ground beef with soy”. Angie stressed that she’d been told that the soy was just “soy mustard” but that it was supposed to make good burgers. Out of curiosity I took the beef. It consisted of two flat rectangles of frozen something about the length and width and a third the thickness of a building brick. Its claylike red colour was not the hue of beef. There was a choice of a small bottle of Tropicana orange juice or another of lemonade but Angie handed me both.

In Sylvia’s vegetable section there were bags of frozen peas, the bottom halves of bunches of celery, green peppers that had witnessed better days, handfuls of potatoes, a few carrots and some fat yams.

My helper for the shelves was Samantha, a big Black woman who always wears what looks like a higher variation of the Lenin cap. There was a bit of a traffic jam with three volunteers helping three clients in the same section, so Samantha and I had to wait till the people ahead moved on.

I didn’t take much of anything from the shelves this time because my own shelves are full of starchy foods that I go through very slowly. I turned down cereal, pasta, rice, crackers, cookies and bread. I also eschewed the canned beans since there were none of chickpeas. I let Samantha give me a handful of Fibre-1 chocolate oatmeal chewy bars; I took a can of Pam cooking spray, a carton of Thai tomato coconut soup, a can of tuna and a bag of teabags. That was it.

I think it was the least from the shelves that I’ve ever taken. It would be nice if they had more from the refrigerated food and vegetable sections. I ended up with a little bit less than I took away because for a couple of hours I forgot the eggs in my backpack and all the bumping around that I did caused one egg to break entirely and another one to crack.

After the food bank I went home to put my groceries away and then I headed out to the bank because the Trillium benefit had been deposited in my account. I took out $60 and then went straight to the hardware store to find a replacement for the padlock I’d recently lost. I wanted another Fortress lock but they didn’t have one the same size as my old lock. What they did have though was a smaller one with a higher shackle, which I saw would lock even better over the thick loops at each end of my bike cable. It cost me $13.55, which hurts during this lean time of year but that’s what I get for being absent minded. I took the lock home and attached it to the cable, put the combo in my backpack and headed out to No Frills to see if they had for sale.

I needed soap and they had six-packs of Irish Spring for $2.97. They were all out of the original though and so I had to settle for Icy Blast. In my experience the brands of Irish Spring with extra stuff thrown in tend to dissolve faster.

I got a jar of dry-roasted peanuts for $1.97 and I couldn’t pass up a 925-gram tin of Maxwell House dark roast coffee for $5.88. Their yogourt wasn’t quite as cheap as the same at Freshco but the 48-cent difference wouldn’t have been worth the extra trip. There were packs of strawberries for $1.99, I got a bunch of bananas, but the main score was that they had cherries for $3.68 a kilogram. They were in zip-lock bags and I took two, but there was a woman standing over them with a clear plastic bag, slowly and meticulously picking the very best cherries out of the pre-packed bags.