Plastic Pigs and Fake Bacon

            On Saturday I pulled a muscle in my thigh while doing yoga. The movement I did was the same one I’ve been doing every day for more than twenty years. During the fourth part of the Sun Salutation exercise, from a standing position, with my body bent forward and my palms on the floor beside my feet I stretched my right leg as behind me as far as it would go. For the first time in 100,000 times of doing the stretch I suddenly felt a little tear in my thigh. I was able to do the movement eleven more times as usual but it ached each time. For most of the other poses that I do in my hour of yoga I didn't have any discomfort, but afterward it bothered me a bit while walking but not while riding my bike to the food bank.

            The line-up was a little shorter than usual. I found my place behind Robbie’s cart. Robbie sat down on the steps of 1501 Queen and lit one of his almost constant cigarettes. Tammy, who was sitting on the other side of the steps asked, “Can I have one?" but in a slightly teasing voice that showed that she knew what his answer would be. “No!" Then he told her, "I'm goin to camp next weekend.” I think he was referring to the annual camp for members of the Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre (PARC). Tammy asked, "Did you go last year?" "Yeah" "Was it fun?" "No!" “Then why do you want to go again?” "It's a different camp this year." I think that previous years it had been at the Sparrow Lake Camp in the Muskokas, which is run by the United Church. This year it will be at Camp Pine Crest in the same region, which is a YMCA camp. The PARC members’ camp tends to be a four-day outing.

            The African woman arrived that had been behind me last week, though I didn’t see her white cart with the snowman bag inside. She was going along the line and moving everyone's unattended carts forward.

            Wayne was hanging around, though he didn’t seem to be in line for the food bank. He was probably waiting for PARC to open. He had a little pink squeaky pig that he kept squeezing and talking about. He teased Robbie with it and asked him if he thought it looked like him. “Shut up Wayne! It looks like you!” Then Wayne looked at me and asked if I thought it looked like him. I just smiled because I couldn’t think of anything clever to say in response.

            Someone was walking by with a Golden Retriever and Wayne just happened to have a doggy treat in his pocket. He held it out and almost gave it to the big dog but pulled his hand back several times and said, “Not my fingers!" Finally he let it take the morsel from his hand.

            There’s a middle-aged man of east Asian descent whom I've seen on the street for twenty years and who hangs around PARC. Up until recently I’d always seen him with bleached hair but now it’s back to its natural colour. Wayne sent him across the street to the variety store to buy some of those fifty cent lottery cards and he gave him a couple for his trouble.

            Around 10:30 when we all started to get in line, the African woman was standing behind Robbie’s cart. I approached to let her know that I was ahead of her but she disputed it. She said she hadn’t seen me when she’d gotten there. She asked if I'd seen her and I confirmed that I'd watched her moving the carts. She said that was what she’d wanted to know and she was satisfied then that I'd been there. Instead of her usual white basket cart she had a black spinner suitcase. I asked her where her white cart was. She said that the cart had been too big for the amount of food she’d gotten last week and the one she had today was easier to carry.

            An African guy came up and said to me, “It's the first of the month!" I thought for a second and agreed that it was. He said, “That’s why there are so many people in line.” I told him, “There are less people in line this week than last week because people have gotten their cheques." He didn't think that everyone had gotten their social assistance payments. I told him that I couldn’t speak for ODSP but that I'd gotten my Ontario Works deposit. It would have been very unusual if all the payments hadn’t been made by the end of the month.

            As usual, the old guy with the cart stopped beside the line-up to go through the sidewalk garbage and recycling bin. I noticed that he found one doubled-over beer can that he placed in the larger section of his basket. For the long cigarette butt that he’d picked out he pulled from a pocket of his cart a folding tobacco pouch into which he carefully squeezed the contents of the butt. As I watched him continue west for the next bin, the African guy looked at me, shook his head and exclaimed in a low voice, "Horrible!" I didn't say anything but I didn’t really think of it in that way. I was just impressed with how organized the guy is. It seems to me that people that go around helping the city recycle should be getting paid by the government.

            It was almost 11:00 by the time Marlene started letting people in.

            I hadn’t seen the volunteer that helped me at the shelves before, but she was pleasant.

            As has been the case for the last few weeks, the selection on the shelves was very limited. There were some boxes of Bacon Dippers crackers on the top. Personally I don’t think that anything besides bacon should be bacon flavoured. Besides, they don’t even contain bacon but rather "artificial smoked meat flavour" which is created by combining yeast, flour, salt, soy protein and smoke flavour. Instead I took a half a cup sized package of mountain coffee. At the bottom was a bin of cookies and bars but nothing healthy looking. There was though a misplaced bag of the same coffee I’d gotten from the top, so I took that. There were a few boxes of Chex cereal and a bag of some kind of sugared cereal flakes, but I didn't find them attractive. There were lots of cans of chickpeas, black beans and peas, so I took the garbanzos. The lentil soup was the last can on the soup shelf and I grabbed that. Finally I got a small bottle of honey water with lemon.

            I didn’t want any of Angie’s 2% milk but I said I’d take the yogourt. She handed me one four-pack of raspberry Greek yogourt and another of what looked like yogourt for kids. I asked if I could trade for another Greek yogourt and so I got the strawberry rhubarb.

            She offered me some sour cream but the first two tubs on top of the pile of three were smeared with sour cream on the outside and I didn’t want to make my backpack all messy. I reached for the clean container on the bottom while Angie was trying to scrape the sour cream off the top one. She told me that I'd made her get her hands messy, but maybe it was a joking complaint. She gave me three eggs but I turned down the usual frozen ground chicken, hot dogs and vegetarian cheese. Just as I was moving on to Sylvia's section Angie asked if I was sure I didn’t want any milk but I told her I wasn't drinking the 2% because I'm overweight. Sylvia gave me a smile and said, "I was just gonna say …!" I said, “I went to the doctor yesterday and got weighed.”

            Sylvia told me to take what I wanted. There were tomatoes, potatoes and onions but I still had some of all of those things at home. She gave me a pack of three heads of garlic, a two-fisted hunk of ginger root, a red pepper, a lemon and a package of frozen vegetable rice primavera.

            The bread section was unsupervised again. There were some nice loaves but I didn’t really need much bread so I just grabbed a bag of date and chia breakfast buns to put in my freezer.