The food bank line-up was quite short on Saturday, mainly because the Social Service cheques had arrived. I think that I was the 19th person there and I was behind the middle-aged East Asian woman, although I was actually behind the guy in the red baseball cap who was behind her, except that he wasn’t there until later.
I almost immediately had to step out of line to avoid the second hand smoke, which seemed particularly thick, as if mostly only the smokers felt the need to go to the food bank so soon after their welfare cheques had arrived. Fortunately the wind was not indecisive this time around and so as long as I stood east and upwind of any burning cigarettes I was choke free.
Bart was there, sometimes as usual throwing out twisted and obscene phrases into the cold morning air, but at one point though I caught him giving someone a detailed and it seemed coherent comparison of the popular gaming consoles. He told him that X-Box is for people that like to watch TV and who like to brag about how good they are at games. Nintendo has better sound as well as other qualities that I didn’t catch. Bart expressed the desire to get a Nintendo Switch.
Wayne was also present, but not dancing wildly as he tends to do. I have noticed him lately in the neighbourhood with what looks like a medically issued aluminium cane and he had it on this day as well. Perhaps he’d tripped over the light fantastic and hurt himself.
On my way downstairs to use the washroom, among those staying out of the cold in the entryway was the hyper-enthusiastic young blond woman who was there a couple of months ago, though she wasn’t quite as fully blond as she’d been back in September. She was singing Del Shannon’s “Runaway” with a guy old enough to know it better than her, and more impressively, she was clapping out the beat with her hands.
The e-cigarette guy, who lately has been back to smoking real cigarettes, was brandishing a shiny new black vaping device as he recounted on of his stories from his glory days of being a film technician on movie sets. I didn’t follow the conversation and so I may be wrong, but what it sounded like he was saying was that only the prime minister gets to have bacon on a movie set.
A guy that was a couple of spaces ahead of me in line asked me with no words but a look and an upward nod, what I was reading. I turned the book around and showed him the Norton Anthology of American Literature and shared that right then I was reading some poems by Robert Frost. He told me that he’d watch a documentary about Edgar Allan Poe and learned that despite his reputation he’d only written twelve horror stories. Having only read two stories and one poem, I couldn’t really argue with him on that point. But looking through the descriptions of several of Poe’s stories, I guess it depends on what one calls “horror”. He wrote a lot more than twelve Gothic mystery stories that were all pretty haunting, and many poems of that sort too.
I only read three Frost poems while I was waiting, but I read them each three times. There was “The Pasture”, about going to fetch the newborn calf; “Mowing” about the whispering message of his scythe as he made hay; but of the three, the one I liked best was “Mending Fence”, about walking with his neighbour as they repaired the stone fence that separated their properties, but being separated from his neighbour by the fence even as they were fixing it. He wonders why they have a fence, since neither of them has cows but rather he has apple trees and his neighbour has pine trees and so his apples won’t cross over to eat his neighbour’s pinecones. The other farmer keeps insisting anyway, “Good fences make good neighbours”.
I had to put the book away because it was getting too chilly to comfortably read. I got back into line and heard the woman in front of me talking to herself about hot coffee and toast while glancing back and forth to the restaurant across the street.
The food bank opened on time. As I arrived in the reception and shopping room there was a man I hadn’t seen before sitting in a chair to the left of the desk. When I was handing my card to Desmond, the stranger approached the desk and asked if Steve was there. He was told that Steve would be there in a little while but right now he was waiting for a driver. The man informed them that he was the driver.
Angie gave me a couple of one-litre cartons of 3.25% milk. I’ve gotten so used to 2% milk that 3.5% might feel like I’m drinking cream. There was a choice between a 500-gram container of cottage cheese and another the same size of 3.25% yogourt. I picked the cottage cheese but Angie let me take the yogourt as well. There was the usual bag of four eggs but the only meat on offer were packs of frozen chicken wieners, so I turned those down, since I already have some and my freezer is choked with more ice than storage space.
For the same reason I eschewed the frozen peas that Sylvia wanted to give me. I also didn’t need any bags of little potatoes, as I hadn’t even started on the two bags I’d received last time. She gave me one onion, two red peppers and three different colours of carrots: a handful of the regular orange ones, a few yellow ones and a few more that were yellowish orange. On the floor beside the other items was a large box of beautiful red kuri squash. The final vegetable was a long bunch of organic collard greens. We didn’t have collard greens where I grew up in New Brunswick and the first time I’d even heard of them was when Granny Moses and Pat Boone were literally singing their praises on an episode of the Beverley Hillbillies.
My guide through the shelves was the guy that hardly ever says anything and just walks beside you while gesturing at each shelf.
There was a variety of cereal on this occasion and I noticed a bag of spoon size shredded wheat without the box. That’s one of my favourite kinds but it tends to be too expensive at the supermarket.
I took a small can of pizza sauce and also a tube of Mutti tomato sauce with vegetables from Parma, Italy.
There was no soup-shelf this trip and there was no canned tuna either, but there were cans of luncheon meat. I selected a can of chickpeas and a container of mustard with jalapeno. He gave me five vanilla flavoured granola bars and I grabbed a bag of ginger flavoured coconut chips. My final selection was a snack, the packaging of which fooled me into picking it. I thought I was taking peanuts because the picture on the cover of the bag shows peanut shaped and coloured treats and the word “peanuts” is prominently displayed on the package as well. But it turns out that the main ingredient is corn flour, fashioned into the shape of peanuts while ground peanuts are part of the coating, along with tomato powder and yeast. That seems like a sleazily deceptive way to package a product.
I skipped the bread because I had some at home.
My food bank visit scored a fair amount of dairy this time and a pretty good selection of vegetables, though the meat was pretty sparse.
When I was unlocking my bike, the hyper enthusiastic blond woman came out with her box of groceries. She turned around and backed herself up to a guy in line and because her hands were full, she asked him to pull up her pants for her, which I guess under her coat were slipping down. He obliged her and as she was walking away she asked, “Did that make you hard?” “Not yet!” he replied.
That night as I was about to make dinner there was a knock on my door and it was my upstairs neighbour, David. He’d locked himself out of his apartment and since my next-door neighbour, Benji had just told him how I’d gotten his door open a few weeks ago, David wanted to know if I had some magic that I could do. He said he just got home from work and he really wanted to get inside and have something to eat. I told him I’d give it a try and got my chisel, my hammer and my screwdriver. He told me on the way upstairs that he’d just gotten back from Ethiopia a little while ago. Unlike with Benji’s door, which took half an hour, all I had to do with David’s is to hammer the chisel in between the lock and the frame until the door was open a crack. Then I rammed the door with my shoulder and it opened, though it broke the moulding on the doorframe. He didn’t seem to mind. Benji was at the bottom of the stairs saying, “Christian’s a handy guy to have around!” David asked if he could give me something but I just said that since I was there I could take back the beer glass I’d leant him back at the end of the summer. He gave it to me and thanked me. I didn’t notice till later that he’d stuffed a twenty-dollar bill into the pilsner glass.
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