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Going Bananas

Bananas are just there, in the fruit bowl. Not the kind of thing I used to think of often, except when I passed a bunch in the supermarket produce section. Were we out? Did I need more?

They were regulars in Cheerios, in school lunch bags, for snacks after school. Even when my sons grew up, an event I regard with both pride and nostalgia for the little boys they once were, I still bought bananas by the bunch. My husband was a confirmed banana snacker. But now he too is gone, leaving me a widow, a widow with a banana problem.

If I buy a bunch of bananas, most of them go bad before I have the opportunity to use them. I suppose I could go on a five-banana-a-day diet; probably not crazier than some of the diets out there I have tried and likely no more successful.

Sometimes, I pull off one or two bananas from a larger bunch at the market, but I feel like I am somehow cheating not buying the whole thing.

A good friend asked why I did not make banana bread. Easy, I come from a family that, depending on how charitable a description you give it, either chose non-cooking as a lifestyle or flat-out couldn’t cook. When I had to bring in a family recipe for some school project, I always wanted to bring in a restaurant menu.

In my ruminations on the subject of bananas, I have come to a reluctant but obvious conclusion about a relationship not much examined: the relationship between bananas and life.

I didn’t plan it this way, but I realize I am now living a one-banana life.

Gastronomically, I would not mind, for instance, living a one-Brussel sprout life, not one at a time but one forever.

But a one-banana life is not about eating at all. A one-banana life is about the challenges of growing older, of living life once again on my own. The non-gastronomic question now is how to make a one-banana life a full and meaningful one.

I grapple daily with the consequences of one-bananahood. I reach out, I join, I write with great enjoyment (and occasional struggle). Still, I feel at times that I am not equal to the challenges that one-bananahood requires.

One problem, seemingly trivial but ongoing, is who to talk to, not earth-shaking stuff, just casual conversation. That sounds trivial, but when you are alone, unless you feel comfortable having extended conversations with yourself and risking the world looking askance if anyone overhears, there is no one to have a conversation with. One of the inestimable, and underrated, joys of marriage is having someone to listen to you and not feel you have to talk sensibly, logically, or even coherently all the time. Just talk.

I can call always call a friend. But then I think I have to make sense. With a partner, I had the luxury of talk without the necessity to be sensible, interesting, or witty, though I like to think on occasion I was, if not all three at once, at least one of them.

Still, I realize that friends are the answer. But that is not a one-way street. Friendship needs tending; it atrophies without it. Sometimes it is easier to wallow in aloneness and not to remember there are other people out there leading one-banana lives and equally welcoming people leading two-banana and three-banana existences.

At least, on a practical level, I have found a solution, something that makes the everyday reality of a one-banana existence a lot easier: a store that unabashedly sells one banana at a time, all separated and laid out individually on the counter.

Cheerios, I’m ready!