“Lisa!” Marge says in an old episode of “The Simpsons.” “We have black bananas. And you know what that means.”
“Banana bread!” Lisa shouts with glee.
My work nemesis Apollonia is (as you surely know by now) severely unbalanced. Among her other quirks, she cannot abide bananas with black spots. “They're sugar spots,” I said. “They don't mean anything except that the banana is ripening.”
“They're hideous,” she shrilled. “I can't stand them.”
Mental illness is a terrible thing. But sometimes you don't know how deeply it goes.
I saw her the other day, and she looked like she'd been through an atomic explosion. “I just got off the shuttle,” she said. “As soon as I got on, I saw that the driver had a black banana. Oh, man. And then he stopped, and I knew he had to kill some time, and he peeled it, and he actually ate it. Oh, my god. I could smell that banana.”
“You have a very serious condition,” I told her. “Get help immediately.”
By now, everyone in the tri-state area knows about Apollonia's preferences. Partner and I were in the grocery store the other day, and he bought some really perfect bananas, but one had a tiny black spot. “Apollonia wouldn't like that,” he observed.
See?
(Do you know, this is the second blog I've written about bananas? There must be something profound about them.)
(And, by the way, I bake a killer banana bread. And black bananas are always the best in it.)
No comments:
Post a Comment