Bananas-Day-o

In a ritual that I have repeated hundreds of times, today I stopped by the local neighborhood mom & pop fruit store. My usual purchases of apples, onions, OJ, and always the greenest bananas that I can find. I really hate just a few days after buying them when the yellow bananas get mushy and don't taste good, those little fruit flies multiplying by the second, flying all over the place, ugh.


Buying bananas is a science to me, some people excel at picking the best cantaloupes, honey dews or other fruits. My expertise is in selecting, detecting, inspecting the finest greenest bananas. I am the Juan Valdez of Banana pickers, you remember Juan, from those old coffee bean picker commercials on TV, only the best are selected by demanding experts, like us.


I even know where the owners secretly stash their green bananas because they have to efficiently as a business sell the bananas by rotating the too ripe bananas getting sold quickly and not get stuck with throwing them out, so there is also a science to their not putting the green bananas out too early for the customers to buy. It really is a complicated theory to understand, especially on weekends when no new shipments arrive. Never buy bananas on the weekend, they are old, and ready to rot.


If you ask them for green bananas, they will say they don't have any, but a few weeks ago I discovered their hiding place for the stash, hidden deeper than Bin Laden was. So I buy my stuff and also get 2 nice bunches of green bananas and go to the checkout. This really nice hard working kid, the owners son, does checkout and we always talk about sports, his store, the weather, whatever naturally comes to mind. Today he asked me about how the weather was outside, even though he is standing 3 feet from the outside door and window. I get the feeling that his family chains him to the checkout counter and even makes him hold in his bodily fluids until his shift is over, before they allow him to use the bath room. No doubt he is also watched by them through wireless video cameras. I never see him eat anything, no time off for breakfast, lunch, dinner. He is skinny as a rail, like a toothpick.


So I get home and put my purchases away but I only can find 1 bunch of bananas, where is the second bunch? We all have "senior moments" for a lot of different things, I can understand throwing your car keys in the garbage during one of those "moments", it happens, but how does one misplace a bunch of bananas?


You know the drill,"Oh Shit" while going through the shopping bags from the fruit store already in the garbage can, looking in the front and back floors of the car, retracing the steps taken once the bags entered the house. Strange, still no bananas, so the next step is always "if I were a (fill in the missing senior moment item) a bunch of bananas on the lam, where would I go to hide? It would be the most unlikely place that they would go to outsmart and torture ones search to find them. So I looked in the bathroom, my bed, a couple of other strange places, nothing found.


OK seriously, this is bothering me now, it's not like the end of the world but kind of embarassing to me, how does one lose a large bunch of at least 6 bananas. I figure surely the kid forgot to put them in my bag or I left a bag in the wagon by the store parking lot. Like I said these are green trophy bananas, I want them, I need them. So I quickly jump into my car, shoeless bare feet, wrong eyeglasses on, no drivers license and I put the pedal to the medal to go back to the store and reclaim my lost bananas before someone steals these prize bananas.


Great, my wagon is right where I left it in the parking lot and my Brooklyn automatic radar scans the wagon in a nano second before I am even out of the car, no bananas in the wagon. I go into the store and ask the nice kid "did I leave my bananas here at the check out counter, or do you have a magic trick that makes them disappear and can now make them reappear". The kid looks at me with a weird look and says no there are no bananas, he says that he remembers putting them in my bag with the apples. I look back at him with my own strange look, and say,"that is strange , I can't find the bananas I bought". We both then look silently at each other and I make a strategic withdrawal back to my car, hoping he doesn't think I am too crazy.


I know that I need to just retrace my steps again, also look in the most obvious places now, since often things will reappear right in front of ones eyes, that we didn't see the first time. Well I looked and looked, no bananas. Gone, that bothers me for an hour or so, or more. Well actually it still bothers me, I almost always solve these mysteries.


I imagine in my mind the kid munching on my bunch of green bananas, having a good time in enjoying my "gift", or someone immediately seeing the bag left in the wagon when I drove away and they are admiring this beautiful bunch of green bananas, on their counter at home, a lottery winner of the day for them.


I guess that this will get chalked up to one of those very mysterious forces of nature that we all encounter and cannot solve. I refuse to consider this as "my senior moment", this will go down as a "cold case" of petty larceny by banana stealing gypsies. I do know that I will now add bananas to my long list of things to check in the future before I leave a store, Bank, or anyplace.


The sun is now beginning to set as I look outside from the comfort of my  homes living room window, I hear myself humming softly a song from my youth, so many years ago,  but of course one of those "important" things still for no known reason remembered by me-It was sung by Harry Belafonte:
Day-o, day-ay-ay-o
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Day-o, day-ay-ay-o
Daylight come and me wan' go home


Work all night on a drink of rum
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Stack banana till de morning come
Daylight come and me wan' go home


Come, Mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Come, Mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan' go home


Lift six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan' go home


Day, me say day-ay-ay-o
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Day, me say day, me say day, me say day
Daylight come and me wan' go home


Beautiful bunch of ripe (GREEN) banana
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Hide the deadly black tarantula
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Lift six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Day, me say day-ay-ay-o
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Day, me say day, me say day, me say day
Daylight come and me wan' go home


Come, Mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Come, Mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Day-o, day-ay-ay-o
Daylight come and me wan' go home
Day, me say day, me say day, me say day....ay-ay-o
Daylight come and me wan' go home


I am home and I still have 1 bunch of green, fresh bananas to tally man and eat.