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Wisdom Offerings
A
Perfect Day for Banana Fights
“The skin color’s all uneven
and I hate when there are dark spots. Like mush. What’s so
hard about getting good bananas?” says she in fruit frustration.
Evidently a scourge on their otherwise near-perfect love, “we
always fight about bananas.”
“
OK, ok,” he barks, “I’ll go out later. I wanna watch
the hockey now (it’s the Olympics after all).” He snarls
below his full-blown voice, having been up with the baby since 6am.
In her defense, she’s been up sterilizing, burping, changing,
cajoling, doing the heavy lifting just like he has. They’re
team players after all. “
I don’t know why you can’t tell these aren’t good
bananas!” the complaint finds its way from her tired moving frown
to his irked heart and I haven’t done it right again scarletly
pulsing blood flow and up and out the front door he flees in search
of great bananas. Reminds me of my brother’s family frettings
too. Not so long very ago, well maybe 15 years…. when I was with
a man, a foreign correspondent, dark and Swedishly undone, we overheard
the awful news….”Can’t get good workmen these days,
the renovation on the new house is slow, so damn slow…and the
deer are running wild about the land eating the flowers, taking over,
it’s chaos, totally out of control.” My brother lamented
after his summer place in Bedford Hills moved to Pound Ridge with 27
acres of prime out-of-the-city property - highest property value in
the land along with Malibu - and two new country houses – his
and hers - with a clear rock water running stream. My X man and I bemoaned, “Yes,
they’re having deer problems! O animal shit! t’ boot.
Not to mention the ever-present menacing threat of the wild giant
overfed
Westchester Beluga County TICS!”
We were wishing we might have deer problems some day too. (Maybe
even fight about bananas? or the stalwart ever popular and fresh
Swedish
New potatos.)
I just happened to be feeding the baby when the banana fight broke
loose! I know exactly how long it takes my green bananas to get perfectly
ripe with delicious yummy dark spots that let me know its sweet yellow
meat is ripe for melting in my mouth so satisfyingly. After finishing
feeding the unaware-of-the-banana-problem three-month baby Bee, I
burped her, changed her, put her to revel with her classical-music
playing
Fantasy Island Mobile and her paci(fier); I stole into the kitchen
filled with clear glass bottles sterilizing in a nursery assembly
line, nipples pinkly fresh for use, rows and rows of Similac in the
fridge,
herbal teas lining a well-ordered closet shelf, hand-painted sun
and moon clocks for baby Bee with very different times? a pretty
newly-painted
semi-gloss white linen window looking out upon a frozen Central Park
and I quietly clipped one of them too ripe bananas and secretly scarffed
it down . In truth, I was, by this late afternoon, very hungry, only
having had some peanut butter toast hours ago but that’s not
why that starling-yellow ‘nana tasted so good that particular
February Sunday, close to Valentine’s, after the Jets’d
really let us down ):
Canary banana cream. So filling and so sweet. The handsome father
did soon return, a new brown bag of (I imagine) bananas of perfection
in
hand, a little miffed but banana-mission-wise. Lovely lifelike very
sleepy robotized mom and dad (She a little worried she’d gone
too far when he walked out…He, glad the banana job was done)…lightly
crossed parent-paths in the newly-painted kitchen’s yellow
archway while the baby played cooingly with her mat toys - where
the new mom
and dad snuggled and held each other lovingly, knowingly, for a we’re
in it for the long haul precious moment in the twilight of a near-end
winter’s day, pausing to embrace, exchange deep river blue
eye contact that is theirs alone….recharge their long-time
loving ways before the dinner crash came too fast upon them with
the nightly
baby-sink-bath and the washing of Bee’s hair (stimulating her
still forming head and scalp in preparation for a full head of golden?
locks someday to appear), and yet another 8–ounce bottle soon
to suck.
Banana fights are the worst! All yellow and hard to suppress the
build up of damage from the past, the banana traumas! I don’t know
this first hand. It’s more by hearsay and witnessing the irreparable
damage “bad” bananas can incite. And really, dear friends,
isn’t this a matter of taste?
But I always say, cornily I admit, “all’s well that ends
well.” So let us let this bad banana day which rectified itself
in familial joy, fade into the history of our history and pave the
way for royal purple-red cherries, pinkly organic raspberries, duckbill
orange tangerines, fat casaba melons, tart green local Granny Smiths
and all the fruit that truly heals.
Can it be Bee fell asleep in the languor of her loving near-park
hive. I’m only a cherry berry grandma. Feelin’ the love that
resolve of fruit can bring….
cherry
grandma 3/2010
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