BaNa^2

For some reason I was remembering my youth where I had visited a local fair and won a plush yellow banana. I loved that goddamned banana and I couldn't be separated from it, even after it turned strange mottled colours of spilled food, drool, and hand and foot prints. I don't know what ever happened to it, but I'm sure it eventually ripped open at the seams and spilled the precious blood of styrofoam peanuts or whatever it was packed with. I'm sure my parents unceremoniously tossed it in the trash one day while I was at school and had to deal with hours of uncontrolled hysterics while I tried to deal with and grieve the loss of my closest family member.

I remember about six years ago, I watched Mark Harmon in The Deliberate Stranger and saw a five-second scene in which a little boy is being towed along by an adult, barely clutching in his free hand that very same plush yellow banana I knew and loved from my youth. Tears welled up and my face turned bright red. The pain was a real and immediate as if I were three years old again.

I loved that goddamned plush yellow banana from 1973.