The morning alarm cut through my sleep like a wooden spoon through frozen butter. I felt groggy all through yoga and most of song practice. Interestingly, it seems it was because my brain was still stewing in pillow dope that I made less mistakes while playing guitar. I was running on automatic.
It was sunny and dry as I rode to
the food bank and it looked like it was going to be a nice day. It clouded over
almost right away as I got in line behind the large, pretty Black woman in the
mauve top.
A lot of the usual clients were
there, but a new addition was a very loud and social woman in her 50s with a
cane, long reddish brown hair and lycra tights with a print made from photos of
cat faces. She often waved her cane in the air when she was talking about
something or to someone that bothered her. She was socializing near the front
of the line, and that area near the door, perhaps because it is slightly set in
from the street, attracts some PARC regulars waiting for the free breakfast and
looking for a cozy cove in which to smoke. A woman in an electric wheelchair
who is often there was there this time and so was a very tall, dark haired
young man with doll-like eyes whom I often see walking slowly through Parkdale,
looking heavily medicated on some kind of prescribed psychiatric drug. At one
point I suddenly heard the woman shouting at him and gesturing with her cane,
“You leave her alone!” I didn’t see what he had done but I suspect that he had
been persistently bugging the woman in the wheelchair for a cigarette. His
response to the confrontation was to quietly and slowly move away.
The wind was blowing from the west
and so spent a lot of time on the west side of the line-up so that the second
hand smoke would be carried away from me. The only problem was that as the line
got longer I had to keep moving further west in order to read my book.
I was almost finished reading the
250-year-old science fiction story, “Micromegas” by Voltaire. I found a couple
of good quotes this time. The giant traveller from the Sirius star system asks
a philosopher on earth why he quotes Aristotle in Greek. The answer is that one
must speak about things one does not understand at all in the language that one
understands the least. After that Micromegas asks another thinker of Earth how
he understands the soul. The man answers that the soul is a pure spirit that
has received in the womb all metaphysical ideas, but after being born has to
relearn what it knew before and will never know again.
While I was reading just upwind of
the big man that was sitting and smoking on his rollator at the end of the
line, a young man stepped in behind him and asked him for a light. He lit a
brown cigarette that smelled something like pot but I think it was actually a
beedi. Beedis contain tobacco but they smell less unpleasant than western
cigarettes. They are apparently even worse for one’s health though. Every time
he took a drag he had a coughing fit.
The woman with the cane was chatting
with two women and a girl of about twelve that had come there together. The
thin woman looked something like Nelly Furtado, so I assumed she was
Portuguese. Not that all Portuguese women look like Furtado but every woman
I’ve met that looks something like her turns out to be Portuguese. The other
woman was heavier set, with lighter, curlier hair and she was using a walker.
The woman with the cane was surprised to hear that the girl was the daughter of
the thinner woman and she commented that she would have thought her to be the
daughter of the other, who turned out to be the dark haired woman’s sister. The
girl was very physically affectionate with her mother and when she didn’t have
her arms around her she was almost always had her hands on her in some other
way. The mother had her hair done up high in a simple but elegant way and the
girl was gently and admiringly touching her mom’s coiffe as they waited in
line.
The food bank opened late as usual
but later than usual. As I was advancing to being one of the front five people,
Moe came walking by. He stopped to ask if I’d gotten my bike fixed. I affirmed
that I had and that I’d changed to a cotterless crankset, which so far was
working better than the old system. I asked him what had happened with his
phone. I’d called him on the previous Wednesday and someone had answered to say
that he had given him his phone and that he didn’t have a new number yet. Moe
assured me that he’d only forgotten his phone at his friend’s place and that
his friend must have been drunk when I’d called. Moe said as he was leaving
that I could come by after the food bank but I told him Saturday is a busy day
so I’d maybe call him later in the week.
The worst time for the person behind
me to light a cigarette is when I’m at the very front of the line, because I
can’t really step away far enough to escape the smoke. The woman with the cane
was flirting with the guy directly behind me and telling him she liked his
“swag”. From the many meanings of the word, I guess she meant she liked how he
carried himself. They lit up cigarettes together while he complained that his
woman doesn’t like his swag so much. I don’t think the woman with the cane knew
either him or his woman but she took his side immediately and seemed like she
was ready take his woman’s place right away if he were to ask.
Two young women walked by, one of
them wearing a short red dress. The woman with the cane observed that she
wasn’t wearing any underwear. She expressed the view that it was wrong for a
“little girl like that” to be not wearing underwear because “that’s what men
like”. She continued, “There are a lot of diddlers in Parkdale!” The girl that
was there with her mother and aunt spoke up, “A teacher at my school …” And at
that point I was the next person in the door.
I got number 18, which was
surprising for the middle of the month.
Angie was back in the dairy and meat
section. The first choice she offered me was between a litre bag of real milk
and a jug of almond milk that looked like it contained perhaps 1.5 litres or
more. I told her I’d take the cow’s milk if it wasn’t sour, then I gently
informed her that the milk had been sour the week before. She said, “I know! I
heard all about it! Here, let me make it up to you!” then she left the room for
the back and returned a minute later a 2.5 litre jug of Tropicana orange juice,
which she was carrying low so it couldn’t be seen over the counter. She looked
around and told me to open up my bag, and then she slipped it in.
I got the usual bag of four eggs,
but they were large this time. The tubes of frozen ground chicken were back
after a meatless two weeks and the alternative to that was a bag of pizza
slices. I took the chicken because it’s more versatile and it would last
longer. She gave me a pack of the soy cheese slices. They taste like horse
sweat but they’re quick protein when there’s nothing else. For the last couple
of weeks the single servings of yogourt given out had been just two per person,
but Angie had packs of six fruit bottom yogourts. She stuffed an extra six in
my backpack.
From Sylvia’s vegetable section I
got three more packages of frozen sweet peas, a bag of baby potatoes, three
carrots, two onions, an apple, a banana, two zucchini that I would need to
operate on to remove the ripe parts and an eggplant. I turned down her offer of
beets.
Samantha was my guide through the
shelves, at least three of which were totally empty.
From the cereal I chose the All Bran
multigrain crunch with a hint of maple. First of all, if it’s “all bran” how
can it be multigrain? It actually tastes nothing like All Bran, which has
always been one of my favourite cereals, or any kind of bran flakes, especially
with raisins.
There was pasta and rice as usual
but no sauce, so I just took a can of diced tomatoes. Other than the tomatoes
there were no cans of tuna, beans, fruit, soup, vegetables or anything else.
There were no cartons of chicken broth.
Samantha grabbed for me six chewy
dark chocolate cherry trail mix bars. I picked a bag of Scottish potato chips.
Finally I was surprised to come upon a few jars of Vegemite. Samantha
was very curious about it and wondered what it was. I told her that it’s like
peanut butter for Australians and she said she remembered that song lyric about
the “Vegemite sandwich” but she got the name of the band wrong. She thought
that it was “Men Without Hats” that did the song “Down Under” with the lines,
“Buying bread from a man in Brussels / Six foot four and full of muscle / I
said to you speaka my language? / He just smiled and he gave me a Vegemite
sandwich …” but it was “Men at Work”. Men Without Hats was the Canadian band
that did “The Safety Dance”.
She asked what Vegemite tastes like. That is such a great question
because the flavour is hard to describe. Maybe it tastes like fermented koala
poop. Maybe it tastes like someone boiled the ocean down to the contents of one
jar. Many say that it tastes like the embodiment of sadness. I told her that it
tastes something like beer. She declared, “Well, I like beer!” I repeated that
it tastes only something like beer. It tastes a lot more like brewers yeast,
which I used quite a bit to flavour soups back when I was a vegetarian because
it gives things a cheesy flavour. But Vegemite doesn’t taste like cheese
either, though it has a cheesy aftertaste, sort of like if one were to blend a
strong cheese with soy sauce. I took the Vegemite not so much for the taste but
for sentimental reasons.
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