Food Bank Adventures: Separated by the Hearts We Stand On

            On Saturday morning I memorized verse seven of “Si ca peut te consoler" (If it’s any Consolation) by Serge Gainsbourg.

            Because I was offline for several days I fell behind on my blog posts and so now that I have wifi again I’m struggling to get caught up.

            At 9:45 I went to the food bank for the first time in three and a half months and consequently the first time since the city went into quarantine. I was very interested to see how they were handling social distancing at the Parkdale Food Bank.

            There are hearts big enough to stand in, each painted a different colour and positioned two meters apart from one another from the food bank door and heading west to the end of the block. Some had bags or carts sitting on them. I was almost at Beaty, which is further than I’ve ever stood in line but that was only because of social distancing and the line actually had less people than usual.

            The prematurely white haired guy two hearts ahead of me is a food bank regular and so I asked him what the situation is these days. He scowled and explained that they don’t allow us to come downstairs at all anymore. Boxes of food are brought up and given to us and we have to throw away most of what we get because it’s not what we would have picked from the shelves. That they’d taken away the power of choice was disappointing. Also, one of the only fun things about the food bank had been being able to discover new and interesting things on the shelves. With that capability gone it removes the sense that one is shopping like normal people would make for a dull experience.

            I took out my French-English book of stories and tried to find where I’d left off six months before in the middle of The Death of Judas by Paul Claudel. I started reading but faintly remembered that it was a part that I’d already covered.

            The guy one heart ahead of me returned to his spot and offered me a cigarette. I declined and he went away again. That the second hand smoke is kept further away in line-ups is one good thing about social distancing. I didn’t seven see anyone smoking this time, let alone smell it.

            A middle-aged woman with hennaed hair came down the line with a clipboard to check our membership cards. The guy one heart ahead hadn’t returned and so she passed his spot and came to me. I asked her if I could request not to have anything with artificial sweeteners. She’s one of those charming women who calls everybody “Hon” and makes you feel like it’s just you that’s her honey. She said, “Well hon, I don’t know if we can do anything about that but whatever you don’t want you can just leave by the door.”

            A few minutes later she brought out a big shopping cart piled with cardboard boxes full of food. She let the people at the front of the line empty the cart and then she went back inside. Not long after that she came back with another cart and came further down the line. I took a box and thanked her. I started packing things into my backpack and putting aside what I didn’t want.

            I took the bag of Frankie’s jalapeno flavoured Organic Clouds, made with puffed sprouted quinoa and brown rice. Frankie’s is a Canadian company from Laval, Quebec and there’s a ghostly picture of the family’s grandfather, Franceso on the cover of every bag, along withy a blurb that explains that the way he farmed was the inspiration for their snacks. Ten to one he wasn’t an organic farmer though.

            There was also three envelopes of instant chicken noodle soup and a cup sized container of Thai flavoured noodles. I got a can of fava beans, a 369 ml can of tomato paste, a 900 gram bag of baby shell pasta, a 600 gram bag of frozen sliced peaches, a 1 litre carton of 2% milk, a six-pack of a variety of fruit bottom yogourt, a seedless cucumber and a half pint of raspberries.

            The big score was one frozen chicken breast. I had worried that I was going to end up with frozen generic ground chicken or frozen chicken wieners, but getting a real piece of meat has been a rare treat in all my years of going to the food bank.

I saw only three things that I clearly didn’t want: a box of instant oatmeal, a jar of sugared peanut butter and a bag of toffee. I asked the guy one heart behind me if he wanted those items and he said that they were just what he was looking for.

            I looked at my phone and saw that I’d only been waiting for half an hour to get my food when previously the wait tended to be about ninety minutes. If I can get out of there without chewing up an extra hour or more of my Saturdays I don’t care if I ever get to pick my own items again.

            It put me in a good mood to be free of the food bank so early.

Outside of my place, my neighbour Benji was hanging around. I stopped to chat with him and then a few minutes later we were joined by our other second floor neighbour, Shankar. I've come to call our group "The Second Story Club" because we tend to chat together a lot, especially since we entered into the age of social distancing.

The night before that, after I'd spent five days without wifi, Shankar generously offered to share his wifi password with me. I gave him my chicken noodle soup from the food bank. He said he might start going there and asked what he needs to register. I told him to bring some identification and something with his address on it.

Then Shankar made a complaint about "brown people" from Sri Lanka like himself and said that they always line up for free stuff even if they are rich. Since Benji is a brown person from Guyana, I asked him if he agreed with that. He didn't. I said I think it's a matter of one's background. If someone started out poor and had to line up for free stuff then even if they become prosperous later on they might still behave as if they are poor out of habit.

Benji said that he grew up in Guyana when it was still controlled by Britain. he said the British were always concerned that the people in their colonies were healthy. He says that the whole country has gone to the dogs since it broke away from Britain. I asked if he would say that the British were good colonists and he said that they were. I wonder if the Indigenous people of Guyana would agree.

I went upstairs to put away my food and then headed down to No Frills. Last Saturday the line-up had been all the way around the block, but this time it only started from King Street, went up to the parking lot and then back down to the front door. It was about a third the size of the week before and I only waited about twenty minutes this time.

I got five bags of grapes, two packs of strawberries, a bottle of olive oil, a rack of pork ribs, three containers of Greek yogourt, and some mouthwash.

When I got back to my place the other two members of the Second Story Club were sitting on the bench that faces our building. I stopped to chat with them again. Shankar told me that he had once come to the poetry event that I used to run at the Gladstone Hotel back in the nineties. Tom Fisher had brought him there. I told him that Tom is annoying sometimes because he is so pushy when one visits him in his store in Kensington Market. Shankar said that being a pushy salesperson is a Jewish thing. I told him that it's not necessarily a Jewish thing but it sure is a Tom Fisher thing.

I had a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch.

I took a siesta in the early afternoon and 45 minutes later was woken by the noises of a struggle and by the familiar sound of shouting cops. There were about ten cops handcuffing a black guy against the back of his white car. He was struggling and arguing and they finally grabbed him by his legs and forced him face down in the street. One of them removed the man's belt and then tied it around his ankles. Eventually they let him sit up while two cops held him. He complained that they were treating him like a punk bitch. They removed some items from his car and put them in a big, clear plastic bag. The only incriminating thing I could see was an open can of beer, which the cycle cop (the only one wearing a mask) emptied into the gutter before putting into the bag. When armoured court services vehicle arrived they all carried the man horizontally and put him inside head first. 

I went back to bed for another 45 minutes.
I did my exercises in the afternoon while listening to Amos and Andy. This story begins during the war when Kingfish got scammed into buying shares in an oil well in Death Valley for $900. A few years later after the scammers are in jail, Kingfish receives a cheque for $900. Sapphire insists that he let her hold onto the money but he convinces her to have faith in him. He decides to invest in a lot on the side of a highway being built on Long Island. He gets Andy to join him in the venture so they can open a hot dog stand beside the highway. The person selling the lots seems like a feeble minded old man and Kingfish thinks he's pulled one over on him but the lot he buys is on the side of a cliff. Kingfish has the cliff bulldozed down to ground level but then finds out that the highway will be elevated and it would have passed right by the original height of the lot.

I had one fried egg and two strips of bacon with warmed up naan and a beer while watching the first episode of David Attenborough's "Zoo Quest" from the 1950s. Attenborough was a good looking young man but a lot more awkward in the way he spoke than he is now with his famously golden voice.

The main purpose of their quest was to find a kimodo dragon, but in the first episode they went to Borneo where they acquired a young orangutan which became tame. The natives tended to just shoot orangutans because they considered them pests that stole their fruit.

Apparently orangutans do not have facial muscles like chimpanzees and so it's harder to read their expressions.