Rain Killed the Garden

            Saturday was the beginning of the fifth year of this journal.

I didn’t shoot a video of my song practice on Saturday morning because I only had about 8 gigs of room on my hard drive and I still hadn’t uploaded the last video I’d recorded, which would have used up 3 gigs. I don’t want to have less than 7 gigs free at any given time. I needed to finish my review of Shab-e She’r and my upcoming food bank report in order to have the time to prepare for more videos.

            At 9:45 on Saturday I went to the food bank. The line-up was a little shorter than last time because the social assistance cheques had been deposited. I was behind the spot in line marked by the gym bag belonging to a skinny, nervous young man with a fluorescent orange baseball cap that had the peak turned to the right about twenty degrees. He looked like he could be nothing but an aspiring white rapper.

            Two of the earlier regulars, an elderly man and a big woman, were sitting on newspapers on the steps of the apartment building at 1501 Queen Street when someone came out of the building. I don’t know if he was associated with the management of the property or if he was simply a resident, but he proceeded to bend down and try to grab the newspapers out from under the woman. She got up and apologized for having been in his way but he just complained about garbage being left on the steps. As he walked to the nearby garbage can with the papers he declared, “The only thing wrong with sitting on bare concrete is you get piles!” I told him, “That’s not true!” He said, “Yes it is!” I informed him that I’d spoken with a proctologist and it’s a myth. Just before turning and walking away he spewed, “Well, I like to spread it around!”

            Apparently they don’t even call the specialists who deal with haemorrhoids and such “proctologists” anymore. They are now gastroenterologists. I guess because that way they can have a bigger sign. The guy that removed my haemorrhoids a few years ago assured me that one can’t get them from sitting on cold, wet concrete or ground as the fable has perpetuated. What causes haemorrhoids mostly is pushing during bowel movements.

            I spent a lot of time away from the line-up, reading my book because there were so many people smoking, including the big woman on the steps. At one point she got up and went across the street Pete’s Corner Grill for a couple of minutes and then came out again. Shortly after that the waitress came out with a broom and a big dustpan to sweep up some broken glass that was on the corner beside the restaurant. When the big woman came back she told her friend that she’d offered to sweep it herself but they thanked her and said they’d do it.

            A man in a fedora was walking by and started reaching out to shake hands with several people in the line-up. Almost everyone that he approached shook his hand except for the elderly woman who was standing off to the side, perhaps to avoid the smoke like I was doing. When he reached out his hand to her she shook her head.

            Phil Anderson came walking by with his son and said hi. I’ve been acquainted with him since the mid 90s when came to my open stage at the Gladstone Hotel, as well as to a gig that Christian and the Lions played at the El Mocambo and shot a video that aired on TV Ontario. The last thing I knew that Phil was involved in was the gallery at 1313 Queen Street West. Phil stopped to ask me where the Tool Library was. I told him and he and his boy went inside.

            Mohammed Ali, whom I often chat with at the food bank, stopped for a moment on his way to Brock Avenue. He told me that someone had given him fifty beer cans and so he was cashing them in because he didn’t’ want to leave them lying around his apartment. I informed him that the only way one can keep them without attracting cockroaches is to rinse them out first.

            The food bank was about twenty minutes late opening this time because the computer guy was late again. It seemed that the closer people got to the front of the line the more they wanted to have a cigarette before they went inside. One food bank line-up must pay for the braces of one tobacco executive’s child.

            Inside, I got number 20. The white rapper was ahead of me at Angie’s cold food section. He asked her for milk though there wasn’t any on display. She reluctantly got him a half litre of milk and told him it was the last one. He also wanted one of the bottles of iced tea on the counter but she indicated that he’d already gotten the milk.

            When I got to the counter she asked me in a low voice if I wanted milk. When I nodded she slipped me one litre bag. There was the usual bag of eggs, but the amount of eggs was reduced from five to four. She gave me a tube of frozen ground chicken and a choice between two 100-gram fruit bottom containers and one 500-gram vanilla Greek yogourt container. Of course I took the Greek yogourt.

            In the vegetable section, Sylvia had heads of leaf lettuce that was losing its charm. She gave me three tomatoes, two of which were actually firm. There was a spotted apple, a red onion and four potatoes, two of which were sunburned. I asked her what happened to their garden, since this time last year they’d had a rich harvest of all kinds of vegetables. She broke the news, “What happened to our garden this year is that the rain killed it!” I guess it was that rainstorm back in May that did it.

            As I started to shop the shelves, cereal shelf had Multigrain Cheerios and All Bran Multigrain Crunch. She highly recommended the All Bran and I was going to take it anyway. I guess it can’t be “all bran” anymore if it’s multigrain.

            Another shelf had the usual choice between tuna or peanut butter. Since the peanut butter was the sugared kind, I took the tuna.

            I turned down the pasta and rice. I might have taken some pasta sauce if they’d had it though. There were no canned beans or any kind of soup. In fact the only canned food they had besides the tuna were cans of creamed corn and beats. I didn’t take either.

            I turned down cookies, wafers and crackers but I was intrigued by a bag of crispy bacon flavour potato chips by Mackie’s of Scotland. I didn’t know that “crispy bacon” was a flavour distinct than “bacon flavour”. I took the chips.

            From the bottom of the last shelf I got six cookies and cream pastry crisp bars and two Fitjoy chocolate chip cookie dough protein bars.

            In the bread section there was more of the sliced multigrain gluten free bread that I’d selected last time. I was disappointed with the texture and I found it kind of dry tasting. I’m sure it’s fine for people with celiac disease but not for me. I picked instead a loaf of pumpkin seed bread and a bag of triangle buns.

            I was glad to get the milk, since that’s the main thing I missed when they didn’t have any last week.

            It’s too bad about their garden though, not only for me, but also for them. I think there was a considerable degree of pride, especially in Angie, when they were giving people food that they grew themselves.

            After I’d put the food bank groceries away on Saturday my internet connection failed. I worked on my journal for a while, but I got sleepy and so at around 12:45 I took a siesta.

            I dreamed that I lost my front bike flasher. I think there was more to the dream than that but I don’t remember. The ideas of “front” and “light” are probably significant.

            When I got up I had the internet back, and it lasted through the next three hours but then suddenly the Coffeetime network became a secure network and I was asked for a password. I didn’t have time to deal with it then because it was time for my bike ride.

            I was pretty much alone riding across the Bloor Viaduct and the Danforth was close to being empty of cyclists as well.

            I finished exploring all the streets between O’Connor and Dawes Road and between Massey Creek and St Clair. I went to St Clair and Victoria Park and then went back down Dawes Road. Two blocks south there is a laneway marked as Captain Demont Lane. The day before I turned in there and found it to be just a short driveway. It seemed odd to me that the city would bother to make up a street name and sign for a driveway. I checked Google maps and found that the lane is supposed to go in, then curve around to go south behind the stores on Dawes Rd and then end on the next street, which is Gower. So on Saturday I went to Gower to see if there’s a Captain Demont Lane there and there was. I rode past a shave headed middle class guy watering his flowers and followed the lane between the boring low rise condos to where it’s closed off from the one at the other side by a gate. On the way back out I said to the bald guy, “Excuse me!” He responded, “Yeah?” without turning to look at me, which I think shows poor breeding. I asked how long the lane has been closed off. He finally turned to face me when he answered, “About six years now.” I said, “Wow! Google maps is way behind!” He explained, “Well, they don’t know that this is a private driveway.” I told him that it seems odd to me that there would be a sign that names the lane at either end but that it would be fenced off. He shared, “We closed it off because we were getting trouble from 500.”

            I assume he meant 500 Dawes Rd. When I later did a search on 500 Dawes, the very first result was a YouTube video with the title: “500 Dawes Rd – the worst building in Toronto. When I looked up Landlord Watch’s list of the worst landlords in Toronto, the one for 500 Dawes was listed as number 1, but West Lodge Apartments, up the street from me was number 3.

            Demont was the captain of the Coburn, which sank in Lake Superior with him on it as well as most of the crew and some passengers while transporting wheat between Duluth and Detroit in 1871. I guess Demont is overseeing another disaster now.

            I stopped at the second Starbucks on Danforth. I had all the numbers right for the washroom door code but I had them in the wrong sequence. At first I thought it was 6975, then I tried 6957 and finally I got 7596.

            When I got home I saw that Coffee Time really had switched to a secure network. I considered going downstairs with my laptop to buy a coffee so I could find out the password, but I didn’t want to spend any of the $5 I had. I was able to go online through the network across the street anyway. On Sunday though, once people are using the café’s wi-fi I might have to go downstairs and sacrifice the cash after all.

            A young, drunk man in the passenger seat of a car that was waiting at the traffic light in front of my place, shouted out to a pedestrian, “You wanna go to a party tonight?” I went to the window to look out at the guy as he called to someone else, this time an elderly man, “How about you sir! Would you like to service my friend here on his birthday?” The old man, not understanding the reference, simply waved as he walked and cheerfully said, “Happy birthday!”