"Yes! We Have No Bananas."
6/25/2009
My husband was freaking out. Right there in the middle of the produce section of our local grocery store he was having a panic attack. “They only have green bananas!” he whispered to me so loudly over his cell phone that I was sure the entire store might have been interested in knowing why the absence of ripe bananas was posing such a crisis in this man’s life.
I tried quickly to figure out what was really going on. “So?” was the only word that came to mind as a verbal diagnostic tool.
It didn’t get us very far.
“I’m telling you they only have green bananas and I don’t know what to do!”
“Hmmmm,” was my second shot at figuring out what was really going on and then suddenly a lightbulb burned brightly in my head and I knew.
As a way of background explanation here’s what you need to know. My husband and I had long ago adopted the expression between us that declared, “We’re living in the green banana zone.” The expression, as we understood it, meant that people “of a certain age” had better buy only ripe bananas because if you bought green bananas you never knew if you were going to live enough to eat them. I admit it’s sort of black humor but in the broadest sense we took it to mean: If you want to do something...don’t put it off...do it ASAP.
We'd adopted the expression during the first few months of post retirement when we’d gone looking for something we could enjoy doing together (ASAP), and that something had turned out to be traveling. Since then we’ve hiked in Italy, run rivers in the U.S. and Costa Rica, and even built a house on a lake so the we could water-ski every summer, and while we’ve always known that life was finite ...we certainly didn’t think finite meant now. Which brings me back to my husband’s standing in the produce department unable to buy the one thing I had put on the grocery list...bananas.
“Oooooh, so are you thinking that if you buy green bananas I won’t live long enough to eat them?”
There was several seconds of (excuse the expression) dead silence. Finally he said, “Yes.”
“Okay, so here’s the deal. Go ahead and buy the green bananas and I promise you I’ll live long enough to eat them.”
“Thank You.” He said with a sigh.
It was long after that phone conversation had transpired, perhaps not until days later, when I finally fully realized just how frightened my husband had been. My cardiac diagnoses had unhinged him. He’d never showed it. I never knew it. I don’t think he even knew it himself. It wasn’t until he came face to face with the dreaded green bananas in the produce section of our local grocery store that he realized something he hadn’t realized before, that time for one of us just might be running out.
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Posted 6/25/2009 in Misc | |
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