Bananas

What do you know and how long have you known it?

What do you call those moments when everything in your world seems to shift into a new light? I remember a friend¹ in seminary telling me that I was having an “existential moment” and then having to explain to me what that meant. Before you think this was some capital M moment, it was probably something like realizing that all Fruit Loops are the same flavor regardless of their color.

Maybe you would call it having an epiphany, a eureka (or aha) moment?

T’is the season when many of my peers are on the delivering end of some sad news for their growing children. At some point we all reluctantly confirm that the duties of certain figures related to holidays, or the loss of teeth are actually carried out by parents. I can remember where I was when the scales came off for me. It all happened at once. It seemed like the instant that I learned the truth about “S.C.”, (literally the same second), I remembered how all the silver dollars that I had received from the tooth fairy were stamped with the same year, and that my parents always kept them in a “safe place” for me. It was the same silver dollar. Of course it was. The E.B.? How long had I known? Once something becomes absurd to you, it is hard to even embrace the possibility that you believed otherwise before.

Those are not fun epiphanies to talk about.

I had a moment in my early 20s during which something like that happened, but in the opposite direction.

Towards the end of my time in college I began riding my bike, like a lot. Enough to spend a big chunk of my small savings on a new bike, and yes, to wear the spandex and the helmet, and to feel part of the cycling subculture. I could talk shop about components and tire pressure, or why euros call them tyres. We could talk about the sounds of cleats clicking into pedals at the beginning of a group ride, or about the first time you fell over at a stoplight because of your shoes being clipped into pedals, and how hard it can be to walk in those shoes while off the bike.

Oh, and the bananas. They were just part of cycling (as I assume they still are for the Carbs, the Potassium, etc.) You could store a banana in the back pocket of your cycling “jersey” when you rode. Even if they were a tad firmer than I preferred them, the time in my pocket would accelerate their ripening process. The best part was that unlike an energy bar (or pop tart, or p.b.& j.), bananas came with their own container that I did not mind chunking into the woods after I finished the mid-ride snack.

I had one friend that I rode with most often during the week. We would make a big loop out into Lafayette County that would satisfy my craving for exercise, fresh air, and the little boost to my ego that comes with being “into” something that most people don’t really know much about. Trae would usually join me on the ride. His house was 10 minutes into the normal route from my apartment, so I would call him when I left, and he would just ride out from his driveway as I passed by. When Trae could not, or would not come along, I would ride past his house anyway. When I did, I would often try to throw my banana peel at his house. Because that is what college guys do, we throw things at other people’s property and think, “Oh what a fun fellow I am with the hijinks and what not”.

One day, I called to alert Trae that we needed to ride and that I would be on my way. He did not answer. Assuming he was not at home, I started off for the second or third day in a row to fly solo. I guess he didn’t “get the message” that I intended to communicate by littering his back porch with banana casings. “You left me to ride by myself.” It had now it was two days in a row, surely he smelled the bananas. As I passed his house, I saw that his car was there in the driveway. Well, that was not acceptable. He had screened my call (not as easy, but still do-able back in the days of landlines and answering machines). I circled back on my bike, dismounted and snuck around the back where I could bang on his window and scare him and then scold him for not riding with me.

I slowly crept up, careful to keep my shoe cleats from making too much noise on the damp boards of the back deck. At some point one of those careful steps turned into what was well near a full front split, which somehow then catapulted me sideways into an inexplicable free fall, which ended as I slammed onto my side, my helmeted head resting on the wooden surface just outside the back door. The untended deck-wood of a college rental apartment can get become moldy and very slippery, but something happened during the slow-motion descent that I will never forget.

The elapsed time between my beginning to lose my footing and my near face-plant on the semi-rotten planks must have been less than a second, maybe slightly more because of that typical over-corrective balance check that can delay a fall, but also promotes a kind of lever-action acceleration that can make things worse.

Somehow in that very brief moment (even without seeing anything near my feet), I knew that it was not moldy wet boards that caused me to slip. It was a truth that I had been told since my earliest days of childhood through comic strips and movies, Saturday morning cartoons, and any number of slapstick applications.

If you step on a banana peel, you will fall on your face.

Before I even hit the ground, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had slipped on a banana peel that I myself had thrown onto this very porch during the last 48 hrs.

At no point in my previous two decades of being able to associate banana peels with falling-down, would I have connected it to reality. I had seen anvils and known they were heavy, I had seen dynamite blow things up, I had even seen someone suffer such a precise trauma to the head that it produced cartoon-quality goose-egg swelling. But suddenly it was like my whole life made sense in a way that I had never known. Dots connected, clouds parted, and there was a renewed sense of hope and purpose. Because I had just experienced something that I should have known all along. But (unlike learning about Santa Claus) I wasn’t ashamed of my ignorance, I was thrilled.

It was a “knowing” (not like those silly lessons after G.I. Joe cartoon episodes), but real concrete experiential knowledge of a truth that I had been told my whole life without knowing that I could trust it or if it even mattered.

For every time that I had not stepped in quicksand, not briefly hovered in the air with my feet spinning after running off a cliff, for every time that I had not seen someone’s head take the shape of a frying pan after having been struck by it, I had just been given this little gift.

The gift that there is some magic from my childhood that holds up.

I tried to explain it to my friends that week, but it seemed like their only takeaways were.

1. Ben busted his @$$.

2. It is funny because you’re the one who threw the peels after all!

3. I see the scrapes and bruises, but “oh my gosh, do you shave your legs!?!”

All valid things to point out and to laugh about, but it left a little ache in me that no one else really wanted to hear much about the level of consciousness that I attained during that instantaneous fall that felt like it lasted a lifetime.

Or maybe I hit my head harder that I realized.

Those were the days.

1. I wouldn’t have made through seminary or any number of existential crises without Rev. Kelly Wayne Dotson.