What the Banana Said

I love to look at the colorful lunch boxes in the windows at Powell's Sweet Shoppe on Second Street. I'm certain that they must have the same appeal to today's kids that a Jetson's or Flintstone's lunchbox had on me when I was their age. For most of my young school life I had a brown lunch sack each day. My mom would lay out one sack for each of us and in beautiful cursive, write one name on each. She used the capital T that looked like a J for the T in Tim.  

We were a large Catholic blue-collar family, my parents wouldn't be shelling out hard earned cash for easily lost, soon-to-be-bored-with, cartoon character lunch boxes. Of course, of all the kids I ever ate lunch with, the contents of lunches were very nearly identical: sandwich, fruit, snack. Back then the sandwich would have been wrapped in wax paper, a slice of bologna or peanut butter and jelly between two pieces of Wonder bread, fruit only came in three forms, apple, banana or orange and the snack would be something junky but delightful to a kid, a ding-dong or Twinkie.  

What made my lunch different from everyone else's, despite its brown paper wrapping was that, if I had a banana in my lunch, my mom would write something on it! Sometimes it would be the word "Hi!" or there would be some little smiley face but minus the encompassing circle or sometimes it would be a picture of a star. By the time lunch came around, the black lines the ball point pen had made would be tinged with brown from the bruising. Now I was a pretty shy kid and sticking out was not always fun, but having personal notes on your banana became a curiosity to my school mates. It was, well, cool that my mom put stuff on my banana.  

"What's on your banana today?" kids would ask. And I would dig into my lunch sack and pull it out and everyone would crowd in to see. There would be chuckles and someone would say "That's funny!" And, for a quiet middle kid in a big family, it was nice to be the center of attention if only for a few minutes.

I carried on the tradition my mother began. My kids got notes on their bananas too. A funny message in the middle of the day is a small expression of love that literally feeds the soul.

Tim Bulone is an ardent observer of life on the swirling blue marble. He works at Davis Group Consulting and creates fine art and canvas prints which he likes to sell from time to time at http://www.MyFamilyArt.com He is an early morning pedestrian in Belmont Shore, where he resides with his wife and a variety of pets.