Beyond Banana Bread

On the phone with Dad, discussing food, of course, and I wander out to the kitchen thinking I would stare into the cold refrigerator for a minute and a dinner inspiration would pop to mind. Whoa! What happened to those bananas on the kitchen counter? They looked fine this morning, but now they are so dark and fragile I can barely lift them into the waste basket. They have oozed and stained the counter.

Dad is considering whether to go out for cooked veggies or fresh. Wendy's? Boston Market? I tell him the bananas have got to go.

"What about banana bread?," he asks.

"These babies are beyond banana bread," I explain. We agree that Beyond Banana Bread sounds like a bad summer sequel movie or remake, maybe starring Mel Gibson. We get the giggles, especially when we decide we must each go forward toward our supper destiny with a cry of, "To banana bread and beyond!"

Although we've hung up, I still have the giggles. I see Mad Max himself, Mel Gibson, wearing a Fruit of the Loom classic tv costume for the grape guy. I try to say "beyond banana bread" aloud, but my tongue is tangled in Toy Story-speak with Buzz Lightyear, and it comes out like "Binaca Breath Spray". These bananas definitely belong to the post-apocalyptic science fiction movie genre.

Good grief! Back in the early 1970s when we were wearing gaucho pants, battle jackets, and hot pants all made of polyester double-knit, high school was the land of Binaca. We were all hurrying to our lockers in the halls of high school learning spraying wintergreen breath freshener on our tongues. Life was primitive in those Olden Days Before Backpacks. Bianca had just married Mick Jagger.

Told my youngest that my class was making a life-size papier mache jaguar, and I was still working out the design bugs in my junk-collecting mind's eye. "Just go on-line and get a schematic," he suggested. Oops. The diagrams are for Jaguar cars. My class is making an animal.

Same son went to see the remake of "Bad News Bears" last evening. What was he thinking!? He said it was an awful kiddie movie with cussing. Walter Matthau clones dressed in banana costumes do a Kilgore Rangerette dance routine just off camera in my brain.

Kick-step-kick-turn.

More rotten than the bananas, George W. makes newsreels of "Beyond Arrogance". Twenty-one U.S. soldiers were killed in Bush's post-apocalyptic science fiction Iraq in the past three days while the President touted teaching intelligent design in public schools and disbelieved Rafael Palmeiro's positive steroid test.

On a local level, my son is making a smoothie fruit shake. He fills the blender one-third full of ice cubes, then adds frozen peach slices and frozen berries. He peels a banana, and adds it with a bit of cran-grape juice, some fresh strawberries, and a peeled orange. Turns on the blender, and it freezes up. Put the banana in first! Always put the soft stuff into the blender before the frozen stuff!