July 15, 2009 – Life Begins at 41…or maybe 43

I woke up this morning with Dan Fogelberg’s “The Leader of the Band” going through my head. I have no idea why. I wake up to my TV, not the radio, and I don’t remember hearing the song on the TV. I didn’t hear it last night, nor at any time in the last several months. Yet there it is, playing continuously in my head, all morning.

Perhaps there are stray thoughts of my father percolating in my head, manifesting as this song. “And, Papa, I don’t think I said I love you near enough.”

I’m in a weird, sad, and melancholy mood the last couple of days. Last night, I had sudden and vivid recollections of the summer day our first dog died of a heart attack in our backyard. It’s been almost 30 years and I still feel it keenly.

How did I live 44 years without knowing this? Is this a cultural thing? Are there whole communities elsewhere in the world who have been secretly pitying (or laughing at) us for doing it the hard way? How did peeling them the other way around become the traditional way to do it here? Did some early banana eaters think “Oh, we must distance ourselves from the other primates by eating them the other way around, hardship and bitter skin be damned!” and then studiously pass that practice down to their progeny, despite the fact that the other primates clearly know the best way to do it?

Who is responsible for this conspiracy?

Rebel! Spread the word. Free your friends, family, neighbours, and colleagues from the shackles. Welcome to an easier, banana-string-free life* in which you never have to bite into a banana stem to kickstart the peeling.

* Peeling them like the monkeys do means the stringy bits that everyone hates on their bananas actually stay with the skin — no having to pull them off, only to have them stick to your fingers and everything else. The trade-off is that you have to deal with the kind of gross little dark nubby bit that lives at that end of the banana, something you generally don’t see if you peel it from the stem because it stays with the easy-open-but-unopened-if-you-peel-from-the-stem end of the banana. Know what I’m sayin’?