Fake Pneumonia

            On Saturday morning I continued to translate "On n'est pas là pour se faire engueuler" (We Didn’t Come Here to be Shouted At) by Boris Vian. I finished the first verse and chorus. It seems that every verse and chorus describes a different situation in which people in authority behave like bullies. I spent some time trying to figure out if “la fête à Julot” referenced in the second verse is an annual event in France but it looks like the speaker is just celebrating his friend Julot’s birthday.

            I finished memorizing “Rocking Chair" by Serge Gainsbourg and reworked all of the lines so the last word of each rhymes with “chair" although I was pushing it in one line with "polyester". In the song the speaker is in a rocking chair and reading works by Henry Miller, Baudelaire, Apollinaire and Nabokov. The implication at the end is that she is masturbating while reading. I assume I’ll be able to find the chords online since this song was on Jane Birkin’s greatest hits album.

            It was snowing a bit when I joined the food bank line up at around 9:50 and judging by the carts ahead of me it seemed like a short line for the middle of the month. Beth was two places ahead of me and I asked her if Veronica was taking shelter from the cold inside. She said she hadn’t seen her and so we concluded that either her Wheel Trans ride was late or she wouldn’t be coming.

            I pulled out my Indigenous Studies textbook, Ways of Knowing by Yale Belanger and began to read about several aboriginal self-government treaties that have been in effect since the late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries. Some examples are the Nisga'a Treaty, the Champagne-Aishihik First Nation Treaty, the Gwich’in and Inuvialuit arrangements and of course the formation of the vast territory of Nunavut. These all seem to show that progress is being made and so it’s odd when people claim that nothing has changed in the treatment of Indigenous people since the 19^th Century. Certainly not enough has changed but there's a big difference between that insufficiency and nothing. The water situation on many reserves is still atrocious but in Trudeau’s first term his government cut the long-term water advisories in half.

            Someone lit a cigarette two places behind me and the wind was blowing from that direction, so I stepped off the curb and found a sweet spot on the street behind where the Parkdale Food Bank van was parked. Beth was concerned that I might get hit by a car. I explained that no one was going to come up fast directly behind the van. She thought that the Wheel Trans might but I argued that they would stop directly in front of the door, which is why there’s a space after the front of the line so they can pull up and extend their ramps without hitting people’s carts.

            It began to snow harder and my book was getting wet, so I put it away. I noticed that Graham had stepped into line behind the guy with the cigarette. I went back to chat with him, plus his spot was upwind from the smoke.

            He told me that the apartment he’d been hoping for fell through because the landlady wanted to rent to a relative.

            One of the hard-core regular food bank clients who’s been arriving at the front of the line at 6:30 every Saturday for years, came back to ask us if he could "borrow" a cigarette. I was surprised that after all this time he hadn't noticed that I don't smoke. Graham turned him down and after he walked away he said, “It’s my New Years resolution.” “It's your New Years resolution to stop smoking?” “No, to stop lending out cigarettes to people.” He said they never give them back. I agreed that it would be hard to return a cigarette after one has finished with it.

            Graham said that he might go by his workplace in the afternoon and put in a few hours. I asked if he gets overtime but he said that he would need to work more than forty hours a week to get overtime while he only works twenty-eight. He told me that his employer has to be careful to not give him too many hours because then the government would expect them to pay for his benefits, like maybe a little dental.

He said he hasn’t had his teeth cleaned in six years. I told him it’s only been a couple of years for me. I used to go to a discount dental clinic called Smile City at Bloor and Dundas West. For years I had been able to combine my Green Shield plan from U of T with their discounted prices so that it worked out that I paid nothing. But two years ago they told me that they were getting trouble for doing it that way and wanted to charge me. It would have only cost me $40 for a cleaning but $40 is so much more than zero that I stopped going there.

Graham said he’d gone to the U of T School of dentistry a few years ago for an extraction and found everyone to be very professional. He asked the student that pulled his tooth how many extractions he’d done so far. The student answered, “Counting you? One.” Graham said they charged him $125 and he seemed to think that was a pretty good deal. I asked him if he'd been receiving assistance from Ontario Works at the time and he confirmed that he had. I told him that although they don't cover cleaning or fillings, extractions are free under Ontario Works and they also pay for one denture every five years.

I looked into other dentists last summer, including the U of T School. I found the U of T clinic to be very expensive and was surprised that they don’t offer a discount to students and they don’t even accept the insurance that U of T students pay into with their tuition. The U of T dental school would not exist without the University of Toronto so it seems to me reprehensible that they would not feel obligated to serve the community that keeps them alive. I wrote them an email last summer telling g them that they should be ashamed of themselves.

Smile City is still the cheapest that I've found. I need dental work but I'm trying to hold out for four more months when I turn sixty-five and dental work is supposed to be free. Looking it up now I see that it would be only free for low-income seniors and that those that want the benefit have to apply. The plan does cover cleanings, fillings, tooth repair and to a limited extent dentures. The benefit runs from August 1 to July 31 and patients need to apply for each year. It looks like I can apply in four months but I’ll have to hold out for six months to get the benefit starting on August 1. Maybe then I won't have to go to discount dentists with questionable skills.

I forget how we started talking about Alberta but I told Graham that I’d always passed through Alberta and had only spent one night in a hostel in Calgary when I was seventeen and another when I was twenty-three. I only remember the earlier one because the hostel was so crowded that I was among the many that had to sleep on the floor in the hallway. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to someone trying to grab my blanket and accusing me of having stolen his. The next day before I caught my bus to Vancouver I hooked up with this guy and we went across the street to panhandle inside the lobby of the police station where plain clothes cops were actually giving us change.

I was surprised when Graham told me he’s never been west of Ontario even though both of his son’s live out in Vancouver.

It was time for us all to take our places in line and so I stepped ahead. Graham called out, “You’re gonna get all the steak!”

It turned out that Veronica had been inside the whole time as she came out to take her place in front of Beth.

There was a heated argument between the guy that had asked to borrow a cigarette and Valdene the manager. He said someone was butting in but Valdene insisted that person had been there all along. Other people nearby were shouting their opinions on the matter. A woman ten places behind me yelled out “Shut up!” Graham said, “I like coming to the food bank because everybody's so nice here!" Valdene called out, "Who here needs to take their medication today?” Graham raised his hand and answered, “I do!” Valdene also raised her hand and said, "I do!"

The food bank opened pretty much on time and the line moved fairly quickly. When I was at the front, the woman ten places back that’d been shouting, “Shut up” came walking down the line, went inside and then down the stairs. When I got to the reception desk the woman was there and being confronted by Valdene about butting in. Then when she gave the receptionist two food bank membership cards, Valdene said, “You’re shopping for two people, AND you’re butting in?” The woman declared several times that she had pneumonia and had to get home right away. Valdene shrugged and let her go ahead. It’s interesting how Valdene has in so many cases accused people of trying to rip off the food bank in situations that are not obvious. But in this case when the woman was so blatantly lying she just let it go by. The woman showed more symptoms of being on crack than having pneumonia.

There were way more volunteers than usual standing around and waiting to help people shop the shelves. The young woman to whom everything is “Awesome” was my helper again. I said, “There are more volunteers than there are clients today!” She asked, “Oh, so line-up isn’t very long today?” I said, "No, the line-up is long. I was merely commenting that there are a lot of volunteers.”

I took an embarrassingly long time on the top of the first set of shelves. That’s the shelf with all of the odd items and quite often they are more interesting than they are necessary. I finally settled on a 450-gram dispenser of seasoned salt and a can of poutine gravy. I tend to make my own gravy and so I don’t know when I’ll use it.

From the next shelf down I grabbed a bag of Que Pasa organic rainbow tortilla chips. Since “Que pasa” means "What's happening?" it doesn't instil a lot of confidence in a product made by a company that admits in their name that they don’t know what’s going on.

From the bottom shelf I selected a carton of Nature’s Path organic flax plus maple pecan crunch cereal. Nature’s path is a multi-award winning Canadian organic food company and it was voted one of the top fifty employers in Canada in four different years. In 2018 Nature’s path quit the Organic Trade Association because it has allowed GMO companies to become members. The founders of Nature's Path, Arran and Ratana Stephens are disciples of Kirpal Singh, who died in 1974 and now there are a shitload of gurus fighting over which one of them is the true successor.

From the next set of shelves I got a can of chickpeas, a tin of tuna and three fruit punch drinking boxes.

From the soup section I picked a carton of spicy black bean soup, a tin of organic cream of mushroom soup and another can of mixed congee. The congee can was the same shape and size as a pop can except that the metal was a lot firmer. I guess congee isn’t technically soup. Wikipedia says it’s a kind of rice porridge to which is added other things to make an infinite variety. This can, in addition to rice, had mung beans, pinto beans, red beans and peanuts. It looks like this mixed congee is actually a dessert congee that can be served cold or warm depending on the season. There’s a picture on each side of the can of the same bowl of mixed congee and one can see all of the different kinds of beans listed in the ingredients in their whole forms. But customer reviews say that it’s actually all blended together into the goopy consistency of baby food. Above the soup in the picture is a red ribbon with a slogan written across it in Chinese on one side and English on the other. I think that something was lost in the translation because the slogan sounds like it could be the subtitle of a horror movie: “There is something more than you want." This could actually partly describe the food bank experience quite well but it could be completed with, “Less than expected but more than you want".

In addition to the usual three eggs Angie gave me a pack of frozen smoked sausages and another pack of frozen bacon. She was also offering yogourt and milk but I didn't want any. 

The bread section for a change was full of a wide variety of items. I grabbed a medium pizza crust, a bag containing two loaves of naan, a pack of four squares of cherry cheesecake and a pack of six almond tarts with raspberry filling.

Sylvia gave me four clementines, a couple of onions and a head of leaf lettuce. She tried to pass me some potatoes but I told her I have enough.

From the box by the door I took a couple of grapefruit.

It wasn’t a bad take this time, especially in terms of the bread.

As I was unlocking my bike I saw the woman that had reasoned her butting in with the excuse that she was in a rush to get home because she had “pneumonia”. She left the food bank and carried her bags of food into PARC. You know what they say, "Starve a cold, free lunch a fake fever."

The snow was blowing hard as I rode my bike home, however the flakes weren’t the soft and fluffy kind but rather those hard crystals that felt like a hail of needles hitting my face.

After putting my food away I was warmed up enough to face the storm again to ride to the supermarket. Fortunately the wind was at my back as I rode to No Frills where I bought grapes, strawberries, a pack of minced turkey, Greek yogourt, mouthwash, dental floss and kettle chips.

For lunch I had the last of my ham in a toasted sandwich with old cheddar.

I worked on writing about my Food Bank Adventure.

That night I fried some ground chicken with onions and bacon. I spread some Bolognaise sauce on the pizza crust I'd gotten earlier from the food bank, put the meat and onions on top, covered the whole thing with sliced Cracker Barrel cheese and made a pretty good homemade pizza. I had one quarter for dinner with a beer while watching Zorro.

This episode wrapped up the story arc about the evil assistant governor Rico and the rebel Joaquin. It begins with Diego and Bernardo going to see Joaquin at his hideout only to be taken prisoner. Joaquin is angry at Diego for advising him to come into Monterrey with a flag of truce to talk with the governor. It had turned out to be an ambush and only Zorro saved him. Joaquin of course does not realize that Diego is Zorro. Joaquin later releases Diego and then tries to carry out a plan to ambush Rico and the governor. He and Theresa are captured but Rico offers to let him go if he would go and kill the governor. The next day is the governor’s patron saint’s day and he always prays at the shrine outside of town. If Joaquin does not carry out the plan an unfortunate accident will befall Theresa while she is in custody. The next day Joaquin does try to ambush the governor but Zorro stops him. He chains them both with leg irons within shouting distance and gives each the other’s key, forcing them to talk out their issues. Meanwhile Theresa’s guard tries to get friendly with Theresa by bringing her water. He asks, “Am I not kind?” She takes the water and throws it in his face, answering, “Yes, kind of wet and kind of stupid!” He is about to get back at her when Zorro intervenes and knocks him out. He can’t release Theresa because the captain has the key. He duels with the captain while Rico tries to shoot him. Suddenly the governor arrives with Joaquin and arrests Rico, the captain and the bad soldiers. The story ends the way the arc began with Theresa singing at her tamale stand and Garcia singing along.