Swinging Toaster

            Early Saturday morning was the first in a long time when it was so chilly that I had to close my windows. It warmed up later.

            I continued to edit “J’suis snob” by Boris Vian on my Christian’s Translations blog.

            I worked on translating the extra lyrics that I found for “Oh mon amour baiser” by Serge Gainsbourg. Since “baiser" can mean both “kiss” and "fuck" it wasn't really possible to find one word that plays with the double meaning in English and so I just went with "kiss". The song is basically a list of places and ways to kiss and I needed rhyming English versions of the final list:

Baiser sein (kiss breast)

Baiser ventre (kiss stomach)

Baiser rein (kiss kidney - but kidney is also a sexual reference, as in "reach my kidneys")

Baiser hanche (kiss haunch)

Baiser cuisse (kiss thigh)

Baiser tout (kiss all)

            I went with:

Kiss my breast

Kiss my paunch

Kiss my sex

Kiss my haunch

Kiss my thigh

Kiss the rest

            It was still a bit chilly when I was getting ready to leave for the food bank. I considered wearing jeans but it looked like it would warm up while I was in the line-up and so I wore shorts and sandals. I putt a long sleeved shirt in my backpack just in case. The food bank line up was much longer than the week before but then it was abnormally short because of the rain. This would probably be the last long line-up of August.

            When I was locking my bike in front of 1499 Queen West, Bart was there for the first time in a long time, blurting out things due to his condition. He said, “He can’t afford schoolbooks! That’s why he’s fucking stupid!”

            Veronica was already there and I took my place four places after her and behind a blue cart. I walked back up to chat with her. She told me she’d started reading my Food Bank Adventures at newz4u.ca. At first she began reading the most recent but then decided that it would b better to start from the beginning. She said that she took issue with my portrayal of a Christian woman’s happiness as mental illness. I remembered the person she was talking about and I’ve seen the woman a few times since I wrote that. She was referring to “Hypermanic Joy”, my September 11, 2017 post. The woman in question had been extremely exuberant during the waiting period and had told several strangers that they were “good”, “beautiful” and “pretty”. I explained her elation as probably being a hypomanic episode and Veronica was offended that I was denying that she could have been happy simply because she was a Christian. If just being a Christian gave people that level of elation we would be surrounded by ecstatic people all over North America. I told Veronica that I’ve met lots of bipolar people that on the upper end of their mood swings could almost convince someone that they were a divine being, but it had nothing to do with their religious beliefs.

            Veronica told me she was enjoying my posts because there are a lot of characters and they seem like players in a soap opera. I’d never thought of them as soap operatic but I think a TV show about a fictional weekly food bank would be unique and interesting. It could be like one of those edgy sitcoms that often deals with very serious issues while at the same time being funny.

            Someone called out my name and it was Moses, one of my former yoga students from when I volunteered as a teacher at PARC. He was wearing a t-shirt with the message, “Don’t Drink and Derive”. He asked how my French studies were doing. I told him that I’d completed second year FSL at U of T but that it had been very difficult and so I’d decided a few years ago to leave the FSL minor for the last and to work on improving my French on my own. Recently however, upon entering fourth year I’d realized that my minors of FSL and Philosophy were just dragging my GPA down and so I requested to change from an English Major to an English Specialist. That way I could drop FSL and Philosophy, and keep studying French on my own without suffering academically for it. I won’t find out if they’ll allow it until September.

            He asked if I have any postgraduate plans and I told him that I’m hoping to go for the Masters Degree in Creative Writing, but they only accept seven students a year for that program. I said I'd taken a Creative Writing course last winter with Albert Moritz, the new poet laureate of Toronto, and that he’s been helping me edit my book towards publication.

            Moses told me that he’d be auditing a couple of Yiddish courses at U of T this fall. I said that could be fun, since there’s so much humour in Yiddish. He informed me that Yiddish was his first language and he is fluent and so I assume it’s not a Yiddish language course he’ll be auditing but maybe a Yiddish culture course.

            We talked about language as technology and how it transforms over time. He said he’d recently read a book about the history of the semicolon, from the time it first appeared, two years after Columbus set sail and found the new world. I mentioned how aspects of our language have changed drastically even over two hundred years. For example, it wasn’t that long ago when the word “girl” referred to both a male and female child. Very recently we have the expanded definition of the word “genocide” that has gotten some people worked up in protest.

            Moses told me that he’d recently had a tumour removed and since it had been on his heart he wrote the tumour a love poem.

I recounted how just a day before that I’d had a dream in which I learned that songs are the flowers of truth.

We said goodbye and Moses continued west.

I was surprised to see that Graham was back in the food bank line-up, even though he must have gotten paid the day before. I asked, “What are you doing here?” and he answered, “I’m hedging my bets.” He explained that he’d reported his income to Ontario Works and wanted to see how much they deduct from his next cheque before he spends what might have to be rent money on groceries. It turns out that even though we are both on Ontario Works, his situation is different and social services actually sends money directly to his landlord. I hadn’t known that was something that happens but he explained that it’s a deal that Ontario Works makes with landlords to keep tenants from being evicted if they fall two months behind on the rent. This is called “pay direct” and they will also pay for utilities like electricity and heating in the same way.

I talked a little more with Veronica and she wanted to argue towards the existence of god, asking, “How did the universe get here if there is no god?” I countered, “How did god get here?” If god could just be without a creator then so could the universe.

She declared that there is no proof of creation but there is also no proof of evolution. I laughed and said, “Of course there’s proof of evolution! There are fossils!” There are also artefacts. Now there is also genetic proof. She challenged, "Then how did life start?" That's actually a very good question. Graham mentioned panspermia, the idea that life on Earth was seeded from elsewhere in the universe. Most scientists think that life just came about on Earth as a result of the right conditions, the right amount of certain chemicals combining, the right amount of heat, the right amount of electricity and the right amount of water. The conditions for new life forming from scratch no longer exist on our planet and it was probably a one in a zillion chance that it would have happened in the first place.

Graham was talking about the mostly useless items that are offered on the first set of shelves in the food bank. I mentioned the taco kits and he added that there’s never anything offered to put I them unless you want a taco shell with tomato sauce or flavoured mustard. Of the canned goods he said he gets tired of the chickpeas, since there's nothing much that one can do with them but put them in a blender and make hummus. I told him that I put oil and garlic on them and it’s pretty good. His final complaint was about the bread and the fact that it's not sliced. He said it's good bread but he can't fit it in the toaster. I told him that for me a toaster would just be another thing to clean and something that takes up counter space. Ever since I left home as a teenager, if I’ve had access to a kitchen I've just used the oven to make toast. I related how when I was a kid we had an art deco toaster with doors the swung up and down. One would put the bread on the door while it was lying down and swing it up close it. One turned it on by plugging it in. Of course it didn’t toast both sides and so the bread had to be flipped.

While we were talking about bread, Mo was walking by and stopped to say hello to me. I held out my hand to shake his and he instead grabbed my forearm and so I clasped his as well. He asked us what the difference is between "beauty" and "beautiful". I said "beauty" is a noun and Graham said, "beautiful” is an adjective. Mo was not satisfied with our answer and went on to declare that the sun is beautiful and what we see is beauty. Mo was slurring his words and appeared drunk. Graham tried to shake his hand but Mo said he doesn’t shake hands but only does the arm clasp. I've heard him say that before but I've also had him shake my hand. He continued east.

Graham said that where he lives near King and Dufferin is packed and chaotic now that the Canadian National Exhibition is on. I added, "And then there's the air show" expecting to find an ally in hating it, but it turns out that the air show is the only thing Graham likes about the Ex. He shared that "Top Gun" is one of his favourite movies. I told him about a movie from 1994 called “Sleep With Me". It stars Meg Tilly in her last Hollywood film before moving back to Canada to raise her children. There’s nothing outstanding about the film as a whole except for a scene during a party in which Quentin Tarantino explains to some other guests the homoerotic subtext of the movie “Top Gun". 

Marlina didn’t seem to be there this week and there were no numbers given out. Valdene the manager barked that if we weren’t in line we couldn’t go downstairs. Given that everyone she was yelling at was in line it seemed like she just wanted to hear her own voice being authoritative.

It took a long time for them to open and it was after 11:00 by the time the line got moving.

From the shelves I got a box of oven baked corn crackers, a 60-gram pack of pecan pinwheels and a can of chickpeas.

Considering how Graham and I had been talking about how they were always there, ironically there were no taco kits this time. There were boxes of Cheerios and granola bars among other things that I didn’t take.

I reached for some of the “Organic Slammers" pureed fruit snacks but Larissa told me they are baby food. “They're not baby food!" I argued. They're marketed for kids, as there's a drawing of a boy on a skateboard on each container, but they aren’t baby food. She insisted that she'd seen the box they came in and they are baby food. I looked at the Slammer Snacks website and the splash image is a photo of a ten year old kid kicking a soccer ball. Maybe on the box that Larissa saw was the name Baby Gourmet, which is the parent company of Slammer Snacks.

Angie had 2% and 3% milk but that’s too much fat for me so I took a 900 ml bottle of Happy Planet mango and passionfruit smoothie. Angie said I could take two. I didn't want yogourt, eggs or frozen hot dogs, but Angie said for me to wait. She spent about a minute digging to the bottom of the generic frozen meat bin. She pulled out a 450-gram pack of frozen extra lean minced turkey. I took it and appreciated her getting it for me. As I was stepping away she asked if I wanted a big bag of lentil soup. I said, “OK” and she reached into the freezer behind her to grab a 3.68-kilo bag of frozen yellow lentil soup. I exclaimed, “That really is big bag of lentil soup!” She confirmed, “It sure is! Keep it frozen!” I could have used the bag of frozen soup as a weapon.

From the bread section I took a stone-baked rectangular medium pizza-sized flatbread and three cheese bagels.

Sylvia gave me a 680-gram back of little potatoes, two oranges, a couple of mandarins and a pair of apples. From the “Take what you want” section I grabbed the firmest five from a box of overripe plums.

The giant bag of soup and the meat were a good score but it sure was a long wait in line to get them.

I went home to put my food away. Before I headed back out to the supermarket my next-door neighbour Benji told me that our upstairs neighbour had his place broken into the night before while he was in bed sleeping. He woke up and found his door broken. We speculated that it must have been someone David knew because it wouldn’t have been likely that they’d get into the building without a key unless someone let them in. He has lost his building key on more than one occasion. I locked my door when I left.

From No Frills I got a plastic basket of Ontario grapes, two bags of black sable grapes, two bags of cherries, a half pint of raspberries, a basket of peaches, three containers of Greek yogourt, some mouthwash and some shampoo. When I left the supermarket I only had change in my pocket.

I had a beef patty and a big pretzel for lunch.

I did some exercises in the afternoon and then took a bike ride to Bloor and Bathurst, south to Queen and then home.

I worked on my journal.

For dinner I heated the frozen chicken nuggets that I got from the food bank a few weeks before and watched an episode of Wagon Train.

This story begins with a young man named Tom unknowingly comes too close to a campsite of outlaws. Their leader, the Laramie Kid thinks Tom is there to get the reward for his head but Tom doesn’t know what he's talking about. In Tom's pocket the Kid finds a land patent that Tom’s father earned for fighting in the Civil War and which he’d passed down to him. When the Kid cruelly rips it up Tom grabs a gun from one of the outlaws and fatally shoots the Kid. One of them shoots and wounds Tom and then they take him to a tree to hang. Just then they hear a posse coming and they leave Tom for dead. On the wagon train a wealthy woman named Mary Halstead is travelling out west in hope of tracking down the son she’d abandoned when he was a baby. She has only a few months to live and so she wants to find her boy before he dies. When the wagon train finds Tom still alive Mary is hopeful that it's her son Earl but his scar is on the wrong hand. Nonetheless she feels maternal towards Tom and nurses him back to health. Meanwhile the Laramie gang are out for revenge on the man that killed their leader. Not realizing that Tom is on the wagon train they try to lure it into an ambush to rob it but Tom recognizes and shoots one of them. As the man is dying he says, “First you got Earl and now me!” Tom suddenly realizes that the Laramie Kid was Mary's son. He tries to keep the fact that he killed her son a secret from her but a lawyer that she had hired to track Earl down tells her that her son was the Kid. Mary is upset and sends Tom away. He is captured by the Laramie gang while confronting the lawyer on the trail. They take Tom to hang him again. When Mary learns from the lawyer that Tom is about to be killed, she goes to him even though she is now so weak she can barely walk. She finds the gang about hang Tom and proves to them she is the Kid’s mother. She pleads with them not to kill Tom and argues that Earl would have listened to her. The new leader decides that she may be right but he has to kill one of the men who is not convinced. As the gang rides away, Mary dies in Tom’s arms.

Mary was played by the great Agnes Moorhead, who started out as a child singing in church and later became a dancer and singer in the St Louis Opera. She earned a Doctorate in Literature. In the late 1920s she became involved radio acting and was the voice of many famous characters. When she signed a contract with MGM pictures she insisted that she still be allowed to work in radio. She was so versatile that she was impossible to typecast. She was nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Magnificent Ambersons and then three more times after that. She was the first woman to host the Oscars. One of her most acclaimed television roles was in The Twilight Zone episode, "The Invaders" in which she plays a mute woman alone in a remote prairie farmhouse being confronted by tiny aliens from outer space. Her most famous part on television was that of Endora the witch on Bewitched.