Mistaken Identity

            On Saturday morning when I got up it felt like it was going to be a day for making only left turns, since I was in pain whenever I twisted my neck to the right. I only really noticed it during yoga.

I translated a little more of "Complainte du progrès" by Boris Vian. I needed a word for “stove” ending in “er" and a word for “glass oven" with the same suffix but I couldn’t even think of a well-known brand of stove that ends in "er". I settled on another but related appliance and came up with “a slow cooker with a glass cover". It doesn't really matter what the item is as long as it’s a modern kitchen appliance that the speaker is offering to the one he is courting.

            I memorized all but one verse of “Kawasaki” by Serge Gainsbourg. I'll have no problem finishing the memorization on Sunday.

            I contemplated wearing my jacket to the food bank but it was only just cool enough for it as I was getting ready to leave. I was pretty sure it would get warmer as the morning progressed, so I decided on an unbuttoned long sleeved shirt instead.

            I got there at 9:42, which is only a couple of minutes earlier than usual. I stepped in behind a redheaded guy that I’ve chatted with before there. We talked about the weather and he said it was supposed to rain in the afternoon. I commented that September is the rainy season and that we often get the dregs of hurricanes. He told me that on Wednesday it’s supposed to be 28 degrees. I said that we still get some hot days in the fall.

I told him that I grew up on a farm in New Brunswick and I remember days in October during potato picking season when we would start in the dark before sunrise with frost on the ground and by the last hour of morning it was so hot that guys were working with their shirts off. He said that he grew up on a farm in Cape Breton and he knows exactly what I’m talking about. I asked if he was Scottish or Irish and he answered that he's a mix of Irish, Norwegian and Mi’kmaq. I told him that I’m Scandinavian too and that my father was from New Denmark, New Brunswick while my mother's parents grew up in a Swedish settlement in northern Maine, on the edge of the French area.

He commented that a lot of people speak French in northern New Brunswick. I told him that my mother grew up in a French community in Northern New Brunswick and eventually became a French teacher. The only time I passed French in grade school was when she taught me in Grade 6. Before that she’d taught in one-room schoolhouses until they closed them all down in 1967 and moved all the kids to new elementary schools. On room schoolhouses were before my companion’s time and so he asked about them. I explained that there would be four or five grades being taught at once by a single teacher. This was back in the days when if a student failed a grade they had to retake it and there were some there that had spent a few years in Grade 4. Some of those kids were bigger than our sixty-year-old teacher but she could still handle them.

Veronica arrived about twenty minutes later than usual, explaining that the Wheel Trans driver had been late. She pulled out a book to read and I asked her the title. It was a self-help book about becoming debt free. I inquired as to how much the book had put her in debt. She answered that it hadn’t cost her anything and she tries to keep her purchases low. I told her that I do the same where books are concerned and try to get as many of my academic texts as possible online. Most widely published textbooks and books in general can be downloaded free from the Russian site “Library Genesis".

Veronica observed that the church people that used to give out the pizzas hadn’t been there for a couple of weeks. She wondered if it was because it had been pointed out to them that their pizza was mouldy. She also couldn't understand why they hadn’t noticed, or for that matter why Little Caesars hadn’t noticed. I suggested that on Friday nights Little Caesars probably makes pizza in bulk to be ready for parties, but sometimes ends up with a surplus, which they give or throw away. But that wouldn’t explain why the pizza was mouldy since it certainly wouldn’t happen between Friday night and Saturday morning. The pizza would have to have been made earlier in the week. There were too many possibilities to know the answer without asking the church group.

Graham surprised us again by joining the food bank line. As he’s been there every other week since starting his job I asked, “Are you coming out as bi … weekly?" He gave us the bad news that he'd been suspended from his job because of something that turned up in the criminal background check. He explained that there is another person with the same name and birthday in England as him and who even arrived in Canada on the same day that he did. That person has been convicted of sexual crimes in Canada and the only way for Graham to prove he is not that person is through a fingerprint check, which takes a few weeks and costs $85. Graham warned his employer on the day of his job interview that this would happen because it’s happened before and so they are holding his job for him but meanwhile he has to go back on social assistance until the investigation is over. That’s a bizarre story.

I told them that I’ve been a victim of mistaken identity a few times as well. I have a criminal record from when the cops planted hash on me when I was eighteen and so my mug shot is in their records. About twenty years after that I was living in the Beaches and one night there was a knock on my door. Two detectives were investigating a murder that had been committed in Thunder Bay a year or so before that and the suspect looked a lot like my picture. They wanted to know where I had been on a specific date and year. Fortunately I’d been keeping a diary and I was able to look it up and tell them that I had worked for a moving company in Toronto on the day of the murder. They checked it out, saw that it was true and didn’t bother me again.

I recounted also how on two occasions almost exactly a year apart I got stopped by the police while riding my bike. Veronica said, “I thought that only happens to black people”. I told her that it happens a lot to black people but that sometimes it also happens to big, scruffy looking white guys. I was also wearing a black hoody with the hood up, which the fuzz tends to consider incriminating. In both cases there had been an armed robbery by someone wearing a hoody and so rather than look for the real crook they decided harass me.

Veronica asked about my original arrest and why the police had planted drugs on me. I explained that I’d been panhandling on Yonge Street, which the cops didn’t want me to do but it wasn’t against the law. Their solution was to put hashish in my pocket and bust me for possession. Veronica suggested that I could apply for a pardon but I said the idea of asking to be pardoned for something I didn’t do rubs me the wrong way.

When Marlina handed out the numbers I got number 18, but it was her last number and so she went downstairs to get more. She didn’t come back for over half an hour and when she did Veronica got number 26, the person behind her got 27, but the next two people got 24 and 25.

Veronica lamented that people that take the stairs get ahead of her while she’s taking the elevator. I suggested that if she were to just go down the shaft without the elevator she would get there first. She jokingly accused me of wishing her dead several times after that.

Veronica told me that after the food bank she would be hanging around PARC until 13:30 because that’s when her knitting class there starts.

The food bank opened late and it was 11:15 by the time I got downstairs.

From the shelves I got a can of coconut milk from Thailand, a small bag of zesty cheese Doritos, a can of chickpeas and three individually wrapped gourmet chocolate coated chocolate cookies with a cream filling. There was a big box of gourmet crackers but I didn’t have room for it in my cupboard.

From Angie’s station I didn’t take the milk, the frozen generic meat or the bologna but I got three eggs and a 500-gram container of raita, which is masala tomato and onion yogourt.

The bread this time consisted of all the same kind of white loaves and so I didn’t take any.

Sylvia let me pick through the avocadoes she had but they were all overripe. She offered me limes but I didn’t do anything with the last limes she gave me so I turned them down. I also didn’t take the bag of onions she offered because I only planned on eating one onion this week and I had it at home. I could always get more onions from the food bank next week.

From then “take what you want” section near the door I grabbed one small orange pepper and an acorn squash.

This was a pretty sparse haul at the food bank and everything I picked fit easily in my backpack.

After the food bank I went home to put my things away and then headed back out for the supermarket. At No Frills I saw that the Canadian apples were out so I got five. I also took two half pints of raspberries, three bags of red grapes, a bag of black sable grapes, some Greek yogourt, detergent, mouthwash, Miss Vickie’s chips and a jug of white vinegar.

After putting that stuff away I decided that since school would be starting on Monday I’d better go downtown to buy some pens and notebooks. I rode up Brock to Bloor and travelled east. While going through the Annex I decided to stop at Midoco and buy some Pilot pens. I used to purchase them there when I lived in the Annex and then later I would get them from Staples. But then a few years ago Pilot raised their prices and so Staples stopped supplying them. It was extravagant of me because they cost $3.32 each, but I bought three.

At Staples there was a cute young blonde Buffy the Vampire Slayer type woman in leather pants and a matching jacket browsing the sketchbooks.

I bought two purple 5 Star notebooks, one 200 page one for my fall Decadence course and one 300 page one for my Indigenous Studies full year course. I also got a pack of five extra-fine point pens.

I got home at around 14:00.

I had three corn crackers and cheddar cheese for lunch.

I took a late siesta.

When I got up I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy.

This story was funny, although it’s another that I'd heard before. Kingfish’s two nieces from the south were supposed to come and visit but his wife Sapphire has to go to a family reunion in Philadelphia and she’s told to tell them to postpone their visit while she is gone. Kingfish sees Sapphire off at the station and she leaves him with no money so he can’t get into trouble. But after she catches her train he is approached by two young women looking for a hotel. He charges them $5 to rent his place for the weekend and he goes to stay with Andy. But the next day he gets word that Sapphire’s sister is sick and so she’ll be returning home early. Kingfish asks the young women to leave but they refuse. Kingfish alters his marriage licence to make it look like an eviction notice and has Andy pose as an official from the fake Board of Evictions and so the girls are about to leave when the phone rings. One of the girls answers the phone and it’s Sapphire calling from Philadelphia. She asks Kingfish who answered the phone and so he tells her it was one of his nieces because they didn’t get his telegram telling them not to come. Sapphire says she'll be home in three hours. Kingfish begs the girls to stay to pretend they are his nieces but they refuse and leave. Now Kingfish needs two girls to pose as nieces for an hour and so Andy finds a couple. When Sapphire gets there she comments that the two girls don’t look alike but Kingfish explains that it runs in the family because their mother and father don’t look alike either. Everything is fine until the first two girls have a change of heart and return to pose as Kingfish’s nieces so there are four nieces in the house. Then who arrives but Kingfish’s actual nieces who really didn’t get his telegram after all. The show ends with Sapphire breaking a lamp over Kingfish’s head.

Sapphire was played by Ernestine Wade. It’s interesting that while most of the black men on Amos and Andy were played by white men, the series was a major employer of black female entertainers, introducing them to the mainstream.

I thawed the frozen minced turkey that I’d gotten from the food bank and made two burgers. I had one of them with a tomato on a bagel for dinner with a beer while watching Wagon Train.

This story begins in Mexico with a revolutionary about to be executed by a firing squad. At the last minute of course he is rescued by his fellow rebels. He crosses the border and joins the Adams wagon train. There he finds Perdita, who had been the wife of his friend Miguel, another revolutionary. Perdita is travelling with her husband Casey and his two brothers. Miguel had given a large sum of gold to Casey to buy guns but before Miguel could get the guns he was found dad. Perdita says that Casey had been kind to her in her loss and so she married him. One day Sierra helps some of the men mine for salt when a bullet knocks his hat off. He finds the bullet and it matches the French bullet he wears around his neck that killed his friend Miguel. Sierra and some of the men go into the rocks to look for the shooter. Sierra sees one of Casey’s brothers cock his gun and aim at him and so Sierra shoots and wounds him. When the others come Sierra tells them it was an accident but he later tells the Major that Art had tried to kill him and shows him the matching bullets. Later Perdita comes to talk with Sierra. She says she knows he came for the gold. She says that she knows Casey has it but she doesn’t know where. She says when she coaxes the location from Casey she and Sierra can go away together. Sierra has contempt for her for having betrayed Miguel. He wants the gold to take back to Mexico and buy guns for the revolution. He tells her to tell Casey to give him the gold but she tells Casey that Sierra tried to make love to her. Casey and his brother Hughie confront him but the Major stops them from getting into a gunfight and orders them to duke it out. Hughie takes on swing and then Sierra beats the crap out of him. Later Casey gets sick and his brother rides into the nearest town to get a doctor. While the doctor is there Casey dies. The doctor takes the body with him because he’s also the undertaker. At the funeral Sierra walks in and demands that the coffin be opened. As Sierra opens it Hughie pulls a gun but the Major slugs him. The coffin turns over and Casey comes out alive with a gun. Sierra kills him. Somehow Sierra gets the gold and takes it back to Mexico.