A Carrot Cake Comes to Mind

the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation.

–Emmanuel Levinas

 

November, 1999. It was my first semester at University of Toronto. I was overwhelmed by many things that first year of my PhD, but what stands out in my memory is the required “Methods in Religion” course that all first-year PhD students in Religion had to take. It didn’t help that I was the only female in a class of six. We had been assigned Levinas’s Of God who Comes to Mind. I was in way over my head—I understood not one sentence! Not one sentence! The professor graciously tried to explain: “You can make a large donation to a homeless shelter and help a lot of people, but Levinas is speaking about meeting a street person on Bloor. Not only throwing change into his cup but recognizing in his face a fellow human being, and letting him see your face. This is Levinas’s authentic relationship.”  

 

June 10, 2014. We three sisters, myself, Julene and Rosabel, had tickets for the tribute concert Sleeping in the Devil’s Bed: The Music of Daniel Lanois at Massey Hall. The line up was impressive enough, but it was Emmylou who was drawing us there. It had been Rosabel’s birthday two days ago, and Julene and I planned to celebrate in an ever-so-low key way. I baked a carrot cake, which we were going to eat before the concert. I wasn’t sure how to transport a cake downtown on public transit without damaging it, so I cut four pieces. Four large pieces, even though we were just three, to snugly fill the container so that the pieces couldn’t move if I was jostled on the subway or if my container slipped sideways in my backpack. Massey Hall is no place to eat birthday carrot cake we realized as soon as we arrived—there’s no lobby to speak of and the seats are tight—so we walked one block to Eaton Centre and plonked ourselves down on the cushioned cubes in the aisle near the Shuter-Yonge entrance. I lifted three pieces of cake out of the container and placed them on the not-so-elegant plastic lid at the centre of our sister circle. I set the container with the lone piece of cake off to the side. Starbucks was only thirty feet away so I walked over and picked up three lattes. We didn’t sing happy birthday, but the cake was good!  

 

A man entered the mall off Yonge Street, where we had entered earlier. He hurried past us, heading straight to the James Street exit. He was obviously using the mall as a throughway. He spotted the lone piece of cake—all eight cubed inches of it with its substantial layer of cream cheese icing—and his hungry gaze didn’t leave the cake as he kept walking. And then, twenty feet past us, it’s as if he finally understood what his eyes had known all along. He turned. 

                                

 

I knew before he even spoke—“Can I have the piece?”—what he wanted—“Yes!”—I handed him the piece. I was honoured by his request; there’s no other way to say it. This fourth piece, it hadn’t been only a last-minute practicality meant to fill the empty quarter of my container. I had been guided to add it by the possibility of just such an exchange, one that transcended the pan handling dilemma I regularly encountered in Toronto. Our eyes met—a carrot-cake-cream-cheese-icing moment of serendipitous joy.

  

But he had also seen our latte cups. He paused, glanced towards Starbucks and asked, “would you buy me a cup of coffee, too?” “No,” I said in a moment of hardening. Perhaps I had given enough—perhaps he had asked for too much—perhaps it was I who had asked for too much. 

It has taken me more than five years to write this post. I have discussed it with several people, but would like to thank especially Christine Schloen, a great conversation partner and a top-notch massage therapist, for her insights into homelessness and panhandling.

Thanks to Douglas Fast for creating the Eaton Centre-carrot cake montage.

If you’ve never heard it, please listen to Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed me Yet, featuring a London homeless man and Tom Waits.

of ice rinks and orange crush

in my deaconship with respect to the other, I think more than I can grasp.

The skating shack in Blumenort was a rough structure, two rooms with plywood walls in the middle of which banged a noisome furnace meant to warm us when the cold bit through our socks and skates. Many the time have I laboriously tied up my skates in the girl's change room or cried tears of frozen pain in the bumble of knotted lacing, shivering as close to the furnace as I dared, kept back by the aura of older girls crowding the warmest spots.

In February, when the feeble warmth of the sun began to crack the stronghold of winter, Blumenort held its annual Family Day. Who cared about the games, skating, hockey, broomball, coke drinking contests which took place on that day. I was too young to participate in most of those activities anyway. For me those rough plywood rooms evoke only one memory of that day worth recalling: being handed a sweetly glazed doughnut along with a bottle of orange crush. There were big flat cardboard boxes filled with doughnuts from Don's Bakery and cases of orange crush stacked on the floor, but I, in my five-year-old world knew only the wonder of the doughnut and orange crush that was my very own.

I'd like to think that it was this near iconic doughnut and orange crush moment that inspired the game we played called Buddul, Buddul, Buddul (hold a bottle of orange crush upside down and listen to it buddul) but more probably it was the collective imagination of a group of cousins. Most of the players in the game took the role of orange crush bottle but one child was designated the farmer and another the thief. The farmer started off the game by filling all his bottles with orange crush and then tightly capping them. At the top of the lawn, we, the now full orange crush bottles stood. The whistling farmer walked away around the corner of the house in pursuit of a much deserved coffee break (might he have been getting himself a doughnut?) as the nefarious thief crept up to the bottles from around the other corner. Furtively he snapped the lids off all the bottles with his bottle opener then rudely pushed them over. Gleefully, we, the bottles, rolled down the gently sloping front lawn, buddul, buddul, buddul-ing out the orange crush as the farmer frantically dashed back to save whatever he could of his fast emptying bottles turned giggling, hold-your-stomach-laughing children.

Empty pop bottles, orange crush or otherwise, were a treasured find. We'd amble along the streets of Blumenort--all five of them--looking for discarded pop bottles. At the far end of Blumenort near the #12 highway was where we'd often find them, lying in the long grass of the ditches. We knew they were here, away from the nestle of houses where my family lived, because this is where strangers would dare to throw bottles out of their car windows as they drove by. For every bottle we found we got two cents at the store and for two cents you could buy one bazooka bubble gum. When we'd collected enough bottles, two, three if we were lucky, we'd walk to the store and trade in our glass for gum. Then we'd share the gum around, laugh at the comics and teach each other how to blow big, pink bubbles.

But to return to the skating shack from my ramble through orange crushed memories. The skating shack holds more than the child-wonder pleasure of a doughnut and orange crush. One Sunday afternoon as I skated back and forth and around the rink I watched a gray-haired, ashen-faced man stumbling, clinging to the side boards as he worked to learn to skate. After making it painstakingly a quarter of the way around the rink he abandoned his efforts and returned to the warmth of the shack. I was ashamed for him, I pitied him, I marveled that a grown man could not skate. Circling on the ice that winter day in my childhood I recognized him as the father of one of my classmates and felt a prick of dis-ease as I watched him, vaguely aware that his was a world that my warmth-filled, doughnut-happy one couldn't grasp. Part of my inability to understand was of course because I was a child and two decades later when I heard that he had died on a park bench in Toronto I understood better what mental illness and single parenting might have meant for this man and I now recognize that my ten-year-old self noticed something of this dislocation in his skating attempt even while I passed judgment.

I now live in Toronto, rarely drink orange crush, and futilely wish that Tim Hortons would make doughnuts like Don's Bakery used to. The skating shack and rink are often no more than dim memories for me, but they are memories I honour. They pull me into warmth and security yet they simultaneously conjure up disorientation and dislocation. It is not the simplicity of a child's world that I reach back to, for my memories remind me that it wasn't simple--how possibly can a jumble of frozen tears, happy games, uneasy judgment, excited wonder and shameful pity be labled "simple?" I reach back because I recognize a continuity between that jumble and what my life has now become. Without doubt older, most times wiser, but still unable to grasp the perplexing ambiguities of wonder and joy, shame and pity, friendship and alienation that have come my way.

(the opening quotation is from Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 151)