Bananas

     Yesterday finding myself with some mushy, over-ripe bananas, I wondered:  What to do with these?   And then I thought of doing something I haven't done in 40 years: bake!  Except for the baking powder to make them rise a bit, I realized I had all the other ingredients on hand to make banana-applesauce muffins.  Excited by the idea of finally doing something constructive on one of these long days at home in which I've been frankly "going bananas",  I pulled out my old muffin tin, threw everything in a bowl including some cinnamon and dried cranberries, placed the tin in the oven and wished the little muffins well.  I was winging it, working from long-distance memory, but once upon a time I'd made banana breads till they came out of the ears of my friends, so I remembered the proportions of the ingredients -- more or less

     Out of the oven they came, very short, -- muffettes, really, muffinis (?)  I tried one with a cup of tea.  Surprisingly tasty!  Now I was in heaven.  And I remembered, yet again ...


     Before my father was my father, he wrote to my mother, before she was my mother, hundreds of letters during the three years he served in the U.S. Army during WWII.  My mother, then a teenager, saved every one of them, including the envelopes and taped them chronologically into an album.  In 2009, after the passing of both my parents, I read that long chronicle of my father's year stationed in the U.S. followed by his years of service abroad in a mobile unit in England, France, Belgium and Germany.  It was one of the great reading experiences of my life. Among the letters I most cherish is a strangely moving one that he wrote one day from just over the Mexican border while he was in training in Texas.


     He had been given a free day to spend in Mexico.  There in a border town that he wandered through for an afternoon he found on some street corner a fruit vendor and purchased from him a banana.  Such a mundane, trivial event that would normally have not been rescued from oblivion!  But he so relished eating this particular banana.  It seemed better than any he had ever tasted!  I'm guessing this was in large part because he had not eaten one, -- nor probably any fresh fruit or vegetables -- in the previous two years.  From the start of our involvement in the War these foods had not been not available to the American public sector being reserved for the fighting forces overseas.  At home you had to grow your own in a "victory garden" that you planted in your back yard or on your rooftop, assuming you had a back yard or a rooftop.  That surely must have been why this felt like such a luxurious moment to my father.  He stood there eating his ambrosial-tasting banana while thinking only one thought: how could he send one to my future mother in Brooklyn so that she, too, would, for a few instants, be teleported to heaven .  But of course he realized this wasn't even faintly feasible.  It would arrive in Brooklyn as mush.
 

     Often when I am in a meditative mood while eating a banana, particularly an over-ripe one, and especially during these uncertain days when food shortages of all kinds pop up at the groceries and supermarkets, I think of my father. There he is, standing on a Mexican street corner dreaming of the delight his sweetheart would have in opening her mail and finding there the royal gift of a rare tropical fruit: a banana.

Maxine F.

Apr 2020