From my bed very early on Saturday
morning I heard unfamiliar voices in the hallway. One of them was a woman but
one with a Canadian accent and not Jamaican like my neighbour Nicky. I’ve been
wondering if Nicky moved out or if she just went away again, as I didn’t see
her around at all for most of the summer. She was back briefly in August but
then I saw three or four big suitcases packed and sitting outside her door on
August 31 and I haven’t seen her since. So when I heard the unfamiliar voices
in the hall I thought that maybe someone new was moving in. I fell asleep and
dreamed that I had new neighbours that were Ontario white trash and lived
entirely on chocolate bars. In reality the unfamiliar voices were probably just
questionable people that my upstairs neighbour David let into the building.
Before
going to the food bank I wanted to print a copy of “I Wandered Lonely As A
Cloud” by William Wordsworth to read while waiting in the line-up because
that’s the first piece we’ll be covering in my Romantic Literature class that
begins on Wednesday. But I didn't have time to track down that particular piece
and so I just printed Wordsworth's bio and part of the first poem in the anthology.
It was a lot
cooler in the apartment than it has been since the spring. It looked like it
might warm up outside as the morning matured but I decided to play it safe and
so I wore pants for the first time in a long time and stuffed a long-sleeved
shirt into my backpack. I was a couple of minutes later leaving than usual.
I was just walking
my bike off the sidewalk when my next-door neighbour, Benji called after me. He
said something about the key and the lock and so I thought that he’d locked
himself out again. I came back to open the door but he told me that my key
wouldn’t work because someone in the building had broken their key and so it
was stuck in the lock. He said he'd come downstairs to get a coffee and then
discovered that he couldn’t get back in and so he'd been waiting for someone to
come out so he could get back in but when I came out he didn’t see me from
inside the donut shop until I'd already closed the door.
He’d called our
landlord, who lives in Burlington and he would be coming later. Meanwhile if we
could get to the backyard of the building next door we could get up to our deck
by way of their fire escape. I once waited two hours outside when I forgot my
key and only when I saw a woman entering the building next door was I able to
ask her for help getting access to the back. She let me in through the garage
in the alley and I was able climb the fire escape and cross over to our roof to
reach my place. But since we didn’t have contact information for any of the
tenants next door we'd have to wait for someone to enter. We could also wait
for the sushi place to open and ask to go out through their back door. Since
that might be a few hours away, I went to the food bank.
When I got there
and opened my backpack to get my bike lock out I immediately put my long
sleeved shirt on. I noted that my place in line was behind the empty purplish
grey backpack that was lying on the sidewalk behind the row of carts. I
buttoned my shirt and thought that I really should have brought my jacket as
well.
There was a strong
breeze from the east blowing down the line and there were people smoking almost
up to the east end of the block, so the second hand smoke was getting to me no
matter where I went. They should develop a harmless chemical to put in the
tobacco that will turn second hand smoke a bright colour like red so that
people that don't want to inhale it can see where it’s streaming on the wind
and avoid it.
I read about the
life of William Wordsworth. He and his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge pretty
much invented poetic Romanticism. He was an avid hiker and traveled that way
all over Europe, especially France where he fell in love with a French girl and
got her pregnant. The political situation and his financial situation wouldn’t
allow him to bring Marie and his child to England so he had to leave them in
France. He did support his daughter though. He was very sympathetic to the
French Revolution but disillusioned by its aftermath.
I read a little
more of Flaubert’s "The Legend of St Julian the Hospitaler". Julian,
as a mercenary general rescues an Asian kingdom from a conquering caliph and is
given the king's beautiful daughter for his wife. He settles down but refuses
to hunt for fear that he will accidentally somehow kill his parents and fulfill
the prophecy. Finally though he can’t stand it anymore and goes hunting. While
he is gone an elderly, hungry and destitute man and woman arrive at his door
and Julian’s wife receives them. They reveal themselves to be Julian's parents.
That's as far as I got but my guess is that he comes home thinking that they
are invaders and kills them in the dark.
The person behind
me in line was an older, short and slim Polish man who smokes a lot. He
complained to me that he was in extreme back pain. I asked him if he'd gone to
see a doctor but he waved the idea away and shook his head. I think that meant
he’d been to the doctor but it didn’t do him any good. He said he'd had some
massage but when I asked if it had helped him I didn't get a clear answer. I
inquired if he'd been given any exercises to do and he dismissed that as well.
I told him that if I didn’t exercise every day my back would be in pain as
well.
Behind the Polish
man was the African woman that up until two weeks ago had brought a white metal
basket cart and last time was pulling a black spinner suitcase. This time
though she had a cart that looked like an orange milk crate that had been
somewhat expanded and considerably heightened with added wheels and a pull up
handle on one side. I teased her that she must have a home full of carts. She
laughed and assured me she doesn’t and that she'd just bought this one out of
need for something lighter than the metal cart. I assume then that the suitcase
had been a temporary solution and she wouldn’t regularly want to carry food in
something she uses for her clothing.
Between 1499
Queen, where the food bank is and the apartment building at 1501 Queen is a
meter-wide lane blocked by a vertically slatted wooden gate where obviously
some people pee at night. On the sidewalk in front of the gate someone has
scratched the message: “I’m Not Down w Doug Ford”.
I didn’t check the
time but it seemed to me that the line started moving close to the proper time
of 10:30.
As has been the
case lately there wasn’t much variety on the shelves. My volunteer in that
section was the nervous Ukrainian lady whose name I think is Marlena. On the
top shelf there were boxes of gourmet tea with the word "maple" in it
but since it didn't have the words "Earl Grey" I didn't want it.
Instead I grabbed a small bag of coffee. She said, "The boss is here,
please, I take for you! Don’t take yourself!" Since not a single other
volunteer cares if a client takes the items themselves or not, even when the
boss is there, I ignored her request, unless she was standing next to the item
I wanted. For someone that frequently tells clients to “hurry up" it
seemed like a waste of time for me to back away from an item just so she could
step in and take it for me. She didn’t say anything about it again.
Below the tea and
coffee there were some tortilla chips and some cookies. I just took another bag
of coffee and she gave me two more since I hadn't taken anything else.
On the bottom
shelf was some granola and a bag of organic multi-grain flakes, and I took the
latter.
From the usual
selection of canned beans I selected my usual can of chickpeas. I like to have
them cold with chopped garlic, olive oil, salt and a little paprika. The first
time I had them that way was back in the early 80s when I was living in the Annex.
At that time, on the corner of Spadina and Queen there was a restaurant where I
used to hang out with some friends, and though it’s Greek owner didn't call it
a "Greek restaurant” there were some Greek items on the menu, such as
garbanzos served in that way.
Below the beans,
for the first time in several weeks there were cans of tuna. Marlena made sure
I took the Ocean’s flake light tuna in water rather than the No Name brand
because she said it was better.
Between the canned
goods and the pasta was some kind of spice or grain, hand-bagged, with each bag
amounting to about the size of a softball. I asked her what it was. She
answered, “It’s cumin, but you probably don’t cook!" "You don't think
I cook?” She responded defensively, “Well, I don't want to cook!" Her
response implied that she was at the reluctant end of the cooking spectrum and
that I couldn’t possibly be inside of it with her. I’ve been known to make a
curry from scratch and so I took the bag of cumin seeds.
From Angie’s section, I didn't want the
2% milk, but I got 750 grams of Liberté
organic yogourt. She gave me the usual three eggs but when I turned down the typical offerings of frozen ground chicken, hot
dogs and vegetarian cheese, she dug behind her in the fridge and gave me a frozen
General Tso chicken dinner. General Tso chicken is a spicy Hunan style dish
created in the 1970s by a Taiwanese chef in the 1970s and named after the
renowned 19th Century military leader and statesman of the Qing dynasty who was
from the Hunan region of China.
Sylvia offered me potatoes but I thought
I had half a bag left at home and turned them down. It turns out that I should
have taken some because most of the spuds in the bag have gone soft. She gave
me a bundle of scallions that had gotten slimy as a fry of eels. Later I peeled
off the rotten leaves, washed them, bagged them and put them in the freezer.
Sylvia also gave me two large field tomatoes that were mostly firm.
The bread shelves had a pretty good
selection but I only grabbed a pizza-sized fokachio romana rosemary and onion
bread. I felt sorry for it because it had broken up into about six pieces
inside the bag but I thought it might go well with my eggs.
As I was unlocking my bike there were
only four people left in the line-up.
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