Mouldy Host

            On Saturday morning during song practice I watched the regulars walk up Dunn Avenue or park their cars in the Dollarama lot to cross Queen and get their morning coffee at the Coffeetime. I wondered what they are going to do after December 31 when the Coffeetime is gone. Although I think the franchise has changed owners at least once over the years the Coffeetime has been downstairs from me ever since I moved into my place twenty-two years ago. Although I assume the new tenant would be a restaurant of some sort, since the ventilation is already in place, with the gentrification trend advancing I doubt if the new tenants will be running a cheap coffee place. Will the old customers just shrug and walk the three blocks up the street to Tim Hortons? It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

I figured out a few more chord for “J’suis snob” by Boris Vian. I’m almost finished with the first verse and since all of the verses are musically the same I’ll just have the chorus to work out.

            I finished memorizing six of the ten verses of “Puisque je te le dis” by Serge Gainsbourg and almost nailed seven and eight.

            The food bank line-up seemed quite a bit shorter than the week before but later when I got number 25 it was obviously only slightly diminished. Graham was just ahead of me and told me I was the first person to come in half an hour. I asked if this would be his last time at the food bank, since he was getting his first paycheque next Friday. He said it probably would be the last time since he gets off early on Friday and would have time to do grocery shopping. I told him if he does have to come back I promised that I wouldn’t point at him and yell, “HAH hah!” He suggested that if he does come back it would probably be to volunteer. He said that people have been helping him out for seven years and so it seems only right to give back.

            Today was the day of the Caribana parade and Graham and I found that we have a mutual dislike of parades in general. I said if I wanted to watch vehicles pass me I could go back to hitchhiking. He told me he used to take his kids every year to the Santa Clause parade and hated it. His wife would stay home and say that it’s traditional for the father to take his children to the Santa Clause parade. My daughter was never all that thrilled with the Santa Clause parade, perhaps because I told her early on that there is no Santa Clause.

            Veronica arrived and took her place behind me. She said she’d been hoping I’d be here because, since she knew that I’m a yoga teacher she wanted to ask my advice about something. She said she’d been getting a pain in the upper right part of her back. I asked her what kind of exercise she does. She said she goes to physiotherapy and takes aquafit. I demonstrated an exercise where she would put her weight on her hands behind her on the floor and arch her back, but she said she couldn’t do that. I offered an alternative where she would sit on a chair backwards with the seat of another chair behind her, lean back with her hands on the other seat and then arch her back. She said she’d try that. She told me that the physiotherapist had given her exercises to do with a rubber band. I suggested that she stretch the rubber behind her between her extended arms and bring her arms back to squeeze her shoulder blades towards one another. She tried the movement and said she felt better already. I told her that might be psychological.

            I asked Veronica what the condition was that forced her to use a rollator. She said she has no trouble walking but has difficulty breathing while walking. She doesn’t know what causes the shortness of breath.

            Veronica went on to recount her long, complicated and sad medical history. She’s on long-term disability from Manulife after developing ovarian cancer. The cancer was treated, came back and treated again. Then she got a hernia but she can’t undergo a hernia operation until she loses weight. She’s been doing a lot of exercise but hasn't been able to change her eating habits and so the weight has stayed on.

            I wondered if the hernia could be pushing on her lungs and causing her breathing problems, but she didn’t know. I looked it up later and saw that a hernia could definitely cause shortness of breath by either pushing against the diaphragm or the lungs.

            The church group that gives out the pizza every Saturday down the street had moved their red car beside the line-up and there was a woman walking down the line and handing the pizzas out. Veronica told me that when she went to get a pizza from them last week they wanted to take her picture but she refused. On top of that the pizza they gave her turned out to be mouldy. Today as the woman was walking by with the pizzas Veronica asked her for one. She opened the one that she handed her and sure enough there were little spots of green mould on it. She asked me to hand it back but when I told the woman it was mouldy she looked at it and argued, “No, that's just the cheese!" I think the only edible mould on cheese is blue in colour and I don't think they were handing out gourmet Stilton cheese pizzas. She said she'd bring her another one but she never did. Veronica tried to be sympathetic and argued that maybe it was left overnight in the car. I said it takes about three days for pizza to grow mould so likely they didn’t buy these pizzas fresh last night.

I suggested that giving out pizzas is against the law without a permit but I looked it up later and found the Ontario Donation of Food Act, which states, "A person who donates food or who distributes donated food to another person is not liable for damages resulting from injuries or death caused by the consumption of the food unless the food was adulterated, rotten or otherwise unfit for human consumption and in donating the food the person acted with reckless disregard for the safety of others". So it looks like it's legal to hand out mouldy pizzas as long as no one gets sick. Or food that doesn’t kill the poor makes charities stronger.

But a Toronto food bank is considered a “food premises” and it falls under the Food Premises Regulation and Toronto Public Health insures that food safety measures are in place at the food bank.

Another question is why would they give out pizzas to people in the food bank line-up when they could just donate all of the pizzas to the food bank? Did they know the pizzas would be rejected? Are the pizzas a means to draw people into their church? Did they just want their church to gain a public reputation for being charitable?

I didn’t check the time when the line started moving but since I had number 25 and I was home by 11:00 I assume the food bank opened at the official time of 10:30 this time or maybe even earlier.

The first set of shelves had lots of crackers, taco kits, cookies and restaurant single serving containers of honey, jam and tartar sauce. There were also Cheerios on the bottom shelf. I just took a 250gram bag of two-bite brownies.

There were two kinds of tinned beans and I took a can of chickpeas.

I got a 295 ml bottle of apple-mango juice by a company called Apple and Eve. Apple and Eve is owned by a Quebec company called Lassonde, which also makes soups and sauces and imports wine. The company was founded in 1918.

The final item that I took from the shelves was a jar of Puttanesca pasta sauce. I knew that “puttana" means "prostitute" in Italian. Supposedly it got its name because sex trade workers of Naples came up with a sauce that could be made quickly between customers. It’s traditionally supposed to contain tomatoes, olive oil, anchovies, olives, capers and garlic, but in this version Classico left out the anchovies and the capers.

From Angie I got a 1.5 litre bottle of 0% milk fat ultrafiltered skim milk. I skipped the yogourt but took the three eggs she offered because I only had two at home. She offered me a choice between real cottage cheese and vegetarian mozzarella. I made her laugh when I said I'd take the cottage cheese because I didn't want to fart all weekend. In addition to the usual generic frozen ground chicken and hot dogs were bags of six Italian sausages, so of course that’s what I picked. Angie said she bagged them herself.

Sylvia gave me an unopened 1.36 litre bag of pre-washed little potatoes. I got my first daikon white winter radish, so I’ll have to figure out how to use it. She put a couple of oranges in my bag. I asked about the bunch of Swiss chard behind her and she handed it to me, asking, “You want my Swiss chard?” I thought that meant she’d put it aside for herself and so I started handing it back, asking, “It’s yours?" She explained that she'd meant it was from her section. She offered me an avocado but upon touching it I said, “It’s a bit soft". She declared, “I think so too!”

At the “take what you want” section near the door I examined the yellow peppers but each one seemed to have a squishy somewhere, so I just grabbed a yellow squash and a seedless cucumber and left.

As I was unlocking my bike and old man with a cane was walking by. He looked at me and smiled and so I smiled back, but then he stuck out his tongue and licked the air lasciviously in my direction. Yuck!

I took my food home to put it away and then headed down to No Frills. I got a couple of bags each of cherries and grapes. I ran into Mo at the fruit section and we chatted briefly about the food bank. He said he doesn’t think much of Valdene, the manager. I agreed that she is rude sometimes.

The Ontario peaches were finally here and so I grabbed a basket. I got a little one-kilogram air chilled chicken for $4.60, some Greek yogourt, mouthwash, wood soap and detergent.

For the exercise I took the long way home and took King west but this time instead of turning right on Queen I continued up Roncesvalles. Roncesvalles is the only street I know with those weird periodic elevated ramps for bicycles. I don’t know what purpose they serve. This was a much longer ride than I’ve been taking all summer and on my way north my right hip started bothering me a bit. I turned right on Howard Park, went east on Dundas, south on Brock and then home.

I had a toasted cheese, tomato and cucumber sandwich for lunch.

Nick Cushing was coming by later and so I did a quick cleanup of the bathroom sink and toilet and vacuumed up all the leaked sand from my ankle weights that I’d swept from the leaving room under the kitchen table.

Nick came in the late afternoon. I gave him a Budweiser and we chatted in the living room until around 19:30. H went out to eat some pizza and then come back later. I started making a burger for my dinner. Nick came back in half an hour with a couple of cans of Lech beer. We sat in the kitchen and the breeze coming in from my windows was a perfect temperature. He left just as my burger was ready. I had it on a toasted cheese bagel with ketchup, mustard, relish and hot sauce, with a can of Creemore and watched parts four and five of the documentary series “Victory at Sea”.

Part four was about the battle of Midway Island against the Japanese fleet in the Pacific. It’s where the phrase, “You sank my battleship!” came from. It begins with footage of Japan’s defeat of the British at Singapore, the greatest outpost in the British Empire. Then they conquer the US at Batan and take 36,000 prisoners. Up until Midway the US hadn’t had any big victories. The Allies manage to sink four aircraft carriers that had been used against the US at Pearl Harbour. 3000 Japanese died. The US lost a carrier and a destroyer and 300 men.

Part five was about the British defence of Malta in the Mediterranean against Italy and Germany. Malta survived 1774 bombardments. It shows footage of the meals served on British destroyers. It looks like British sailors ate pretty well during the war. 1229 enemy planes were shot down. Over the course of defending Malta the British lost one battleship, two carriers, five cruisers, nineteen destroyers and thirty-eight submarines. But Malta stood.