God Rides a Yamaha by Kathy Shaidle

Author:Kathy Shaidle [Shaidle, Kathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wood Lake Publishing
Published: 2012-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

Where the clocks, and the people, don’t work

A Monday morning in January. Sub-zero. Six inches of snow. Not the day I’d have chosen for my first annual Disability interview.

I cursed (under my breath) as I slipped along unshoveled Parliament Street. At the taunting, wobbling panhandlers (still celebrating New Year’s?) encamped, like a stranded Arctic expedition, at the corner of Gerrard. And (aloud) at the speeding car that grazed the stroller being pushed by the bundled-up mother beside me as we were all about to cross that street.

When I arrived at the Family Benefits office, I shoved my papers to a harried worker through a slot in the bulletproof glass. It was 9:50, but the clock that hung behind her read 11:47, and remained in that state of karma-breeding maya for the duration of my visit.

The other waiting clients seemed just as broken. One longhaired, tattooed man knocked persistently on the glass partition, demanding an immediate replacement for a lost cheque. Refusing to believe that cheques weren’t printed on the premises, he just kept spelling out his name, letter by letter, and rattling off his Social Insurance and caseload numbers, as if they were a mystical lock combination, or magic spell which, if recited often enough, would grant him his impossible wish.

The rest of us were mute, save for the odd sniffle. The downcast crowd, with their makeshift vinyl winterwear and mismatched mittens, and casts and canes, resembled a none-too-successful junior hockey team, waiting for the bus back to Orillia, or wherever home was.

Bus terminals are terminally pathetic, but at least they have coffee and donuts. And clocks that work. And the promise of eventual departure.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful to live in Canada, where a doctor I didn’t pay convinced a government I didn’t vote for to give me money for doing nothing more spectacular or productive than just getting well.

And I hate it. I hated that office. And as ashamed as I am to admit it, most of all I hated the shabby, beaten-down clients. And myself. Because that morning I was, by implication, “one of them.”

I suppose I always have been, having lived below the poverty line much of my life – a fact which shocked my hardworking mom and me when the “Single Mother With Child” level was announced one night on the news. After all, we’d lived on far less for years. I was 19 then, and equally amazed a few months later, when my college loans officer asked if my mother had “left out a digit” in the form-box marked “Income.” I’d never thought I was poor.

And I thought of my colleagues at Catholic New Times, just a few blocks south of the Disability Office. When they’d hired me, years ago, they’d practically apologized about the modest salary. Why? Given my lifelong frugality, it was more money than I knew how to spend – even in high-priced Toronto. I still didn’t think I was poor.

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