The Banana Incident at Dinner
Leo Brandt
4 min read · June 3
How a single piece of fruit ended up on the ceiling, on the cat, and on three napkins.
The banana was, by all accounts, a peace offering. Dinner had been rejected on the grounds that the peas were touching the rice, and a banana was the negotiated settlement.
What I did not anticipate was the physics. A four-year-old holding a peeled banana with both fists is a loaded spring. One sneeze later, the top third of that banana was on the ceiling.
The cat, who has never once been in the right place at the right time, was directly underneath.
We laughed until my eldest fell off her chair, which restarted the laughing. The banana stayed on the ceiling for two days because every time I got the ladder out somebody begged me to leave it.
I left it. Some evenings you clean up, and some evenings you just let the banana be a monument.
