Bullets and Butterfat

On Saturday morning I almost finished working out the chords to Serge Gainsbourg’s “Comment te dire adieu” (How to say goodbye to you), which is a French version of the Arnold Goland song “It Hurts to Say Goodbye” written in 1954. The lyrics to the English song are incredibly boring and the song was sung as a ballad. But in 1967 an instrumental version of the song was done by Brazilian pianist and arranger Walter Wanderley in the Bossa Nova style. French singer Francoise Hardy heard this version and wanted some French lyrics to sing with it and so Gainsbourg wrote them. They are so much more creative and clever than the original, and so I’ve written an English version of the French version of the English lyrics that tries to capture that same inventiveness with rhyme that Gainsbourg achieved. On top of that I really love the Bossa Nova arrangement of the song and I’m looking forward to learning to play it.

Unlike the Saturday before it was too cool a day for wearing shorts and an undershirt in the food bank line-up, so I wore jeans and my motorcycle jacket. The line-up was about as long as the week before, which was a bit longer than usual. I’m guessing that next Saturday it’ll be shorter because it’ll be the end of the month. As is so often the case I was just behind Robbie’s cart and the person ahead of him was an older woman sitting on a rollator walker. She was wearing a shin length dress over tights but the sleeves were short and I overheard her making a call to her son to tell him to bring her a jacket and to hurry.

I went downstairs to use the washroom and found the elderly food bank regular, Michael washing his hands. I asked him if he was still living in a shelter and he confirmed that it had been six months now. Ever since he told me a few months ago that he was in a shelter I’ve been curious how he cooks the food that he brings home from the food bank. This time I remembered to inquire and he answered that he doesn’t cook there at all. I asked if he only selects food at the food bank that he doesn't have to cook but he surprised me by telling me that he gives the food to a needy family, as all of his meals are prepared for him at the shelter.

I passed the time by reading several poems by William Wordsworth out loud, though not loud enough to be overheard very easily but just sufficiently to take in the poems in a rhythmic way. It was chilly enough though that I had to wear my fall gloves while holding my book.

After half an hour the woman with the rollator was still hugging herself without a jacket. I asked her how far her son had to travel and she told me he was coming from West Lodge. That would have taken him ten minutes but she explained that he had to do the important thing first, which was to stop for coffee. I said, “I hope he’s bringing you one too!” but she shook her head and told me with sad amusement that there was no chance of that.

About an hour after she’d initially called him her son arrived with her jacket. He was a tall, dark haired man who looked to be in his late 20s with a short, black Shenandoah beard like Abraham Lincoln’s. He stood in line with her and I wondered if he was going to shop at the food bank as well, which would have bothered me, since that would be butting in. But it was possible that he was just there to help his mother carry her groceries home. He left and I asked her if she felt better now that she had her jacket. “Much better!” she told me with a smile. He came back with an extra large Tim Horton’s coffee and did give his mother a sip.   

It was close to 11:00 by the time the line started moving and there were about thirty people after me.

On the north side of Queen two men with carts were waiting to cross and both of them were wearing tank tops as if it wasn’t a cool day. One of them was very tall and burly and yet he’d managed to find a tan coloured tank shirt that was a couple of sizes too big for him. He was bald, wore glasses and shouted across the street, “Hey you with the stupid hat!” The guy behind me, who was wearing a normal looking baseball cap grinned and waved back. From beside the food bank van, the manager, Valdene called back to him, “They’re all wearing stupid hats!”  

The two men crossed and came up to talk with the man behind me. Valdene, who seemed to know them, came back and gave them each a cigarette. An old man whom I’ve seen at the food bank off and on since I started coming, and who always has a slightly amused expression on his face came up from the back of the line to hold a dime out to Valdene. She handed him a smoke but waved away the dime, telling him, “Ten cents can’t afford a cigarette anymore!” He responded, “But it’ll buy matches.” She argued, “No, you can’t even get matches for ten cents!” He assured her, "I know a place!"

The lady with the rollator and her son, plus Robbie and his sister and I were told we could go downstairs, but since they piled into the elevator and I took the stairs, I got to the food bank ahead of them. 

The shelves had a lot of the kinds of things that I didn’t need, like single serve coffee creamers, restaurant servings of peanut butter and cans of some kind of creamy cooking additive consisting mostly of evaporated milk and palm oil. At the bottom was still the hand-bagged granola and since I hadn’t opened my bag from last time I didn’t take any. The only things I grabbed from the first set of shelves were four white chocolate and macadamia nut Clif bars, a cranberry-orange cookie and a little bag of BelVita cocoa breakfast bites.

There were quite a few varieties of canned soup but only one of organic lentil.

From three kinds of tinned beans I took the chickpeas.

Canned tuna was once again scarce.

Though I didn’t want any, I noticed that they were pretty low on rice and pasta as well. 

As I approached Angie’s dairy and meat station she called everyone’s attention to the bread section and said, “All the bread is fresh today!” She offered me a bag of 2% milk and I told her I didn’t want it, then she asked if I wanted some cartons of 2% and I said no thanks and finally some skim, which I also turned down. She said, “I guess we went through all that to find out you didn’t want any milk!” She gave me eight single servings of probiotic yogourt and a 225g container of pearl couscous salad with peppers, onions and currants. As usual lately I turned down the generic frozen chicken and the frozen chicken wieners. Angie asked, “We good?” I thanked her and moved on to Sylvia’s vegetable section.

Instead of loose or bagged potatoes Sylvia handed me a package of about thirty pre-washed but uncooked creamer potatoes that came with a seasoning pack of dehydrated onion, sea salt, garlic powder and chives. The package was a foil tray with a transparent top around which was a cardboard sleeve with name “The Little Potato Company”, headquartered in Edmonton. The potatoes inside didn’t look as well washed as the ones in the picture on the package and they smelled like dirt, so I’ll give the “pre-washed” spuds a scrub before I cook them. One is supposed to put a couple of tablespoons of oil on top of the potatoes, sprinkle them with the seasoning and then bake or barbecue them in the foil tray. It costs about $5.29 in the supermarket for this product, so it’s basically three times the price of the ingredients, which are all very easy to find separately, and so one is really paying for the packaging and the company’s lousy wash job.

Sylvia also gave me two short and thick carrots, a small cauliflower and two red bell peppers that were in much better shape than the peppers I’ve gotten for the last few weeks. She shrugged and gave me an apologetic look over how little she had to offer this time.

I walked over and perused the bread section and everything looked fresh as Angie had said, but there was nothing that really jumped out at me and I go through bread so slowly these days that I had to put a loaf in the freezer.

On my way down the hall, a man in his late sixties who I see pretty much every week there and who I think might be from Poland asked me why I don’t drink milk. I explained that I do drink milk but I just use the 1%. He argued that there’s not difference between 2% and 1%. Obviously there’s a difference since 1% has half the fat of 2%. For a person that drinks three cups of milk a day if they switched from 2% to 1% they could lose 2.5 kg in a year. He declared, "If you were living on a farm you would be drinking 100%!" I didn't argue with him because I wasn’t really thinking about what he was claiming, but he seemed to be under the impression that 1% milk contains 1% of milk and 99% water and didn't realize that the percentage count is of butterfat. On average, even whole, raw farm milk straight from the cow is not going to be more than 4%. Even if you melted European butter and drank it you would only be getting 82% butterfat. The only way to have 100% is to clarify the butter, which basically turns it into cooking oil that no longer has the characteristics of milk. As he waited for the elevator and I opened the door to the stairs I told him that I was raised on a farm. He smiled and said, “So you know!”

As I was unlocking my bike, the tall, burly man with the floppy tank shirt was still in line and telling someone about all the times he’s been shot. He indicated one area where a bullet creased his neck and also claimed that another shot was the reason he doesn’t have an Adam’s apple. He added that he still has a bullet in his leg that they couldn’t remove, declaring, “Yes it does set off metal detectors!”

It doesn’t take much food to fill my backpack and so most of the stuff that I get from the food bank usually goes into one of my plastic-fabric shopping bags. This time though the bag that I’d tied to my handlebar had so little in it that I decided not to take my food home to put it away before going to No Frills.

It looks like Ontario peach; nectarine and grape season is pretty much over. The only things I got from Ontario were Macintosh apples and the only products from Canada were BC blueberries. I bought a pack each of raspberries and blackberries from Mexico and made sure they weren’t the kind from the US company that grows its berries in Mexico.

I grabbed some cinnamon-raisin bread, a pack of chuck blade steaks, three bags of 1% milk, dental floss and since the Maxwell House coffee’s still on sale, I took another can of dark roast. I selected a few more items and they were just enough to keep me from regretting not taking the food bank groceries home first.

The woman in front of me at the cash had a lot of items and the cashier seemed slowed down by how chatty she was being with her. She was talking about her mother-in-law and how a lot of people complain about their mothers-in-law but she was lucky enough to get a good one. On top of that the customer wasn’t happy with one of her $20 bills because it was missing a corner and so though the cashier explained that as long as it has one serial number it’s still good, she had to give her another one.

When I got home I met my next-door neighbour Benji in the hall. He told me that our other third floor neighbour Shanka was getting cable but when the technician was connecting the cable to the box outside of Cesar’s window he was shouting at him, “You no use my box!” Cesar thinks that it’s only his box and if anyone else’s cable service is connected to it he’ll have to pay.

I bought a couple of cans of beer from the liquor store.

For lunch I heated the General Tso chicken that I’d had in the freezer for a couple of weeks. It was okay but nothing special.

I did some writing.

That night during dinner I watched an episode of Perry Mason.

In the story a crooked private investigator named Briggs has uncovered two buried scandals in a small town and tries to extort money from the parents of a young couple that are engaged to be married in exchange for keeping quiet. One scandal is that Marv, the groom to be, is the son of a man that was charged with and executed for a murder of a prominent citizen named David Latwell that was committed in the town 18 years earlier. The other is that the murdered man had been cheating on his wife with a fallen minister’s daughter named Lois. Briggs has paid Lois to return to the town so that he can use her as leverage for blackmail. Briggs had been initially hired simply to investigate Marv by Clyde Waters, the father of the bride to be, Helen. But when Briggs tried to extort more money than his initial fee, Waters went to the city to engage Perry Mason. Before Mason can talk to the blackmailer, Briggs is found dead in his motel, having been poisoned by a mixture of hydrochloric acid and cyanide. As Marv is a university chemistry student and as he had a motive because he’d caught Briggs upsetting his mother, Marv is charged with murder. Mason defends Marv in the small town court. He uncovers that not only is Marv innocent but so was his father and that the real murderer in both cases was Martha Norris, the wife of David Latwell.

This was apparently the only time in the Perry Mason series that there is reference to an innocent man having been executed by the justice system of the United States. Of course in reality it happens about 4% of the time.