“And I shout at the bastard! ‘Hey, you!’ At the top of my voice.

“He looked round. And he see me. And he continue putting his two hands inside my garbage.

“‘Hey, you! Take your blasted hands outta my garbage!’

“And then, when I looked good. My God! He is a black man! He is a black man! It is a black man! The man pulling garbage outta my garbage bags, is one o’ we! My God-in-heaven! The garbage thief is a black man! It make my heart bleed.

“‘You come to that?’ I shout at him. ‘You don’t know you are a black man? You come to this? You loss your dignity? Where your decency?’

“Here is this black man, going through garbage, like women go through the bins at Goodwill store. And this hurt my heart to see it. This black man, with a large bag that have guess written on it, in tall, large white letters; his bicycle leaning up ‘gainst my wrought iron fence, and the back wheel still going round; and a cigarette dangling from his blasted mouth; and his two hands inside my garbage! I felt as if he was assaulting me, committing rape.

“‘What the hell are you doing?’ I screeled at him, the third time.

“And you know what that bastard had the nerve to say to me?”That bastard said to me, ‘It is garbage.’ He tell me, ‘It is garbage, isn’t it?‘“He look me in my two eyes, and say, ‘It is garbage.‘“My garbage is garbage?

“Well, all I could do was to laugh. ‘It is garbage . . . ‘”

So now, this morning, with all this on her mind, when Eye-Dora reaches Yonge Street and turns right, after passing some houses along Shuter Street that are boarded up, for the past five years, that have real estate signs that they are being turned into Victorian and Georgian townhouses, for two hundred and fifty-something thousand dollars each, but it is five long years now that the real estate signs appeared, and the houses are still boarded up. Cement blocks the spaces for windows and for doors. As she passes this morning, a car seat is beside one of the abandoned houses. It could be from a truck.