On Saturday morning I almost finished memorizing “Le Vide au Coeur” (The Empty Heart) by Serge Gainsbourg. I should have it nailed down and start looking for the chords on Sunday.
At about 9:40 I headed for the food bank. The elderly man who is usually near where I lock my bike was much further back than usual. As I passed him and pointed that out he explained that he’d gotten up late.
The line was longer than last week and the person ahead of me had the last painted heart. I made my spot two meters behind him, which was right at the corner of Queen and Beaty.
A talkative elderly man with a European accent took a position behind me that was much closer than two meters. He pointed out that the temperature wasn’t bad because it was only zero outside. I acknowledged that it was better than last week. I still had to wear my winter gloves though. With him and the man that came after him I discussed that today was turkey day. He said they’d given out hams on Friday and the line-up had been enormous.
I pulled out my duel language book of French stories and continued reading “The Return of the Prodigal Son” by André Gide. The prodigal has returned and the next day he talks with his father. His next meeting is with his authoritarian older brother. When he gets together with his mother she expresses concern about his younger brother who is now the same age as the prodigal was when he left. She is worried because he spends all his time with the family’s migrant farm workers who come from far away with stories of distant lands. The prodigal now goes to talk with his little brother to discourage him from going away by recounting how much he suffered. But when the younger brother questions him he has to admit that he wouldn’t have known that it was wrong to go away if he hadn’t left.
Rosemary came around with the clipboard and told the woman ahead of me that she wouldn’t be served because she’d already been there earlier in the week. But when she said she was shopping for two Rosemary told her she could shop for one. But later when the food came the woman asked for double from the volunteer and got it.
I asked Rosemary how she was. She said she was going crazy with the work preparing for the pre-Christmas food bank. She asked if I wanted a turkey, a ham or stuffed turkey breasts. She said the turkeys are a little big and so the chicken breasts might be a less messy choice for a single guy. That could be seen as somewhat insulting and sexist.
I told her I’d take the turkey. The breast is the least flavourful part of a bird and the idea that someone had stuffed them makes them less attractive on top of that because it means that someone has been handling them over and over and adding ingredients that I don’t know anything about. Also the taste of the parts of a turkey when they’ve been cooked while still attached to the whole is by far more sumptuous than pieces that have been removed and cooked separately.
Just before 10:30 they came around with the frozen turkeys and they were young and not that big at all. When I weighed it at home it was 4.3 kg. That means I should defrost it in the fridge for two and a quarter days, so maybe I’ll take it out of the freezer on the morning of the 23rd.
They started bringing the milk crates of food out around 10:30 and as the people ahead got theirs the line moved forward. When I passed the purple painted heart I noticed that it was more drastically scuffed away and faded than all the other ones. When I pointed that out to the person behind me who was standing on it I said, “Parkdale is losing heart!” He shook his head in sad amusement.
On top of all the other food was a bag of vegetables and fruit. It contained two parsnips, three carrots, one regular and one tiny onion, four red potatoes, one firm tomato and one that was slightly soft, two firm navel oranges, and one pretty striped delicata squash.
There were twenty instant coffee packets and one instant vanilla cappuccino packet from Tim Hortons. I took them because I’d given the ones I received last week to my neighbour Shankar and I thought he might want some more. He only wanted the cappuccino and the two little tubes of Colgate toothpaste that I got. I didn’t want those because they taste too much like mint candy and I prefer the slightly salty taste of Arm and Hammer.
One weird item was a packet containing a face mask but when I opened it up at home and reached inside it felt like touching soaking wet perfumed gauze. I realized that it wasn’t a facemask for wearing outside but rather a therapeutic beauty item. The brand name is Herb Day 365 and it is a “master blending” face mask with acerola and blueberry. Most of the lettering on the package is in Korean. It’s supposed to leave the skin looking clear and radiant but I’m not interested in sitting around for ten minutes with a wet mask over my face. The company behind the product is the South Korean firm The Face Shop and their official models are K-Pop stars Kim Hyun-joong of the boy band SS501, Seohyun of Girl’s Generation and Suzy of miss A.
There was one chocolate chip granola bar; a box of dill, sea salt and olive oil Triscuits, two small bags of potato chips, a litre carton of an organic fruit fusion drink containing various juices: apple and or grape, raspberry, cherry, carrot and filtered water; a 165 ml can of coconut milk; a can of organic tomato sauce; a can of boneless sardines (I wonder if the boneless sardines are harder to catch); two small containers of fruit bottom yogourt; and two cartons of milk about a half litre each.
There was also an envelope containing a Christmas card from the Drake General Store with a minimalist image of a beige rectangle topped by a red triangle, representing a house. Larger in the foreground as if falling is a golden sprig from some kind of generic evergreen and above that are fifteen white spots of various rounded triangle and half circle shapes representing falling snow. Across the card in the centre but tilted at different angles are the words “Tidings of Comfort + Joy”. Inside the card was a $25 gift card for Walmart. I don’t know if the card was sent by The Drake or Walmart but I’ve noticed that the face mask I mentioned before is a product sold at Walmart.
I put the big bag of various whole wheat buns, the pasta, the beans in tomato sauce, the tomato paste, the tomato soup, and the canned corn back in the milk crate and held it out to the nearest people. Three food bank clients picked through it until it was empty.
This was certainly a much better haul than the week before and an average haul for a pre-Christmas food bank. There were no greens but at least some vegetables and fruit.
After unlocking my bike I called out a general, “Happy holidays!” before riding away. A couple of people returned the greeting.
I rode home to put my food away and then headed back out to the supermarket. At No Frills the grapes were cheap but too soft and so I got three bags of clementines. I also bought two pomegranates, a half pint of blueberries, and mouthwash. When one doesn’t buy grapes it sure does knock a lot off the bill.
For lunch I had a toasted Montreal bagel with onion cheddar and tomato.
Once again the cold that I thought I was coming down with went away. This happened last month as well.
When I weighed the turkey I also weighed myself and discovered to my surprise that I was only 91 kilos. That’s only a kilogram above what I would consider normal but I’ve been feeling so much heavier. I guess I’ve just lost tone.
I chatted with Benji and Shankar in the hall about the pandemic and about gurus. I told them that when I was visiting a Hare Krishna temple in Vancouver in the late 70s I witnessed a kidnapping. A devotee’s parents came to visit him and when he got in the car Ted Patrick the father of deprogramming was there. They the devotee and drove away with him, one assumes that they went to a hotel, tied him to a chair, starved him, kept him from sleeping and read him Bible passages.
I said I stayed at the Krishna temple in Toronto overnight and in the morning when they’re getting their daily quota of chanting in it was like being inside of a beehive. They’re all using the japa beads and chanting “Hare Krishna … Hare Rama” but they’re doing it so fast it sounds like, “Mmmmmmmm …”
I said some of those gurus in India can get away with anything because the government won’t touch them. Benji mentioned that there are some pretty corrupt Christian preachers too, which is true.
I pointed at myself and said, “Us atheists never do anything wrong!”
I spent a lot of the afternoon writing my Food Bank Adventure and so I only had time in the early evening to do a little research for my Canadian Literature exam.
Douglas Coupland says that CanLit is when the government gives you money to write about life in small towns or the immigrant experience.
I had a fried egg with a Montreal bagel and a beer for dinner while watching Andy Griffith.
In this story Andy’s girlfriend Ellie discovers that no women are running for the town council and so she decides to fill in the gap. Andy puts his foot in his mouth several times by saying that he thinks it’s silly for women to trouble themselves with politics when they’d rather be trying on hats. The men of the town are outraged but Andy says that Ellie has to get 100 signatures in order to officially run. The men and Andy don’t think it helps that Barney’s was the first signature but he argues that his girlfriend Hilda Mae sweet talked him by calling him “creampuff”. Ellie gets her complete petition and becomes an official candidate. Andy advises the men to cut off their wives’ charge accounts but the women in turn cut off the men from home cooked meals. Finally Ellie comes to tell Andy that she’s giving up because she didn’t want to start a civil war and then when Opie asks, “Did we beat those women?” Andy feels ashamed and he stands up to endorse Ellie for council.
This is the first appearance of Florence MacMichael as Hilda Mae, though she only played Barney’s girlfriend once more. She was a regular on Mister Ed and My Three Sons. She founded the Sierra Madre Playhouse and worked in local theatre both as an actor and director.
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