Would you like a banana?

My brother Tony was born October 19, 1968.  Most October mornings in Minnesota are crisp, brilliant, and perfect.  The morning Tony and my mother came home from St. Joseph’s Hospital was exactly that kind of morning.  Leaves scuffing around the ground in the breeze.

A day or two earlier, my father took me to see my mother during her laying-in with Tony.  To a four year-old used to luxury and a country home, the hospital hallways were stark and scary.  Old people half-covered in threadbare hospital gowns grimaced back at me in various degrees of pain and discomfort from their rooms as we walked by.  My father told me not to stare.

My mother looked wrung-out, like a dishrag.  The only part I really recognized was her smile.  Too exhausted to lift her head, her smile lit up my world.  Her smile always did that.  Everything was okay again.  She sorted out her bed linens.  I couldn’t jump up on the bed and hug her, which was my instinct, but I was allowed to hold her hand.  “Here,” she said, “have a banana.”

I love bananas.  I always have.  Monkeys at the Como zoo loved bananas.  My father had me convinced from a very early age that I had a long, prehensile tail at birth; he had it removed for convenience (his, not mine).  I still have not forgiven him for that: having that tail would have been terrifically useful.  I’m still only half-convinced he was lying.  It’s the kind of thing that is hard to prove or disprove, since I cannot see the locus of the either former or fictional tail.  Even with mirrors.  I’ve never researched it, nor asked doctors if it’s even possible.  I prefer the possibility that it might have been true.

The banana was a small one.  It was, in truth, only half a banana.  Many hours before, some hospital kitchen worker had cut it in half at the middle while preparing meager lunch trays.  The the exposed fruit was darkening.  I love the snap banana stems make.  I missed that the stem wasn’t there.  The banana tasted good.  The talk was of how much she missed me, and how anxious she was to get home and make my dinner.  My father worked long days, and I stayed with relatives.  Uncle Tony (my father’s uncle and my brother’s namesake) had the most quiet house of the relatives, and he made the best lunch.  He was a army sergeant in WWII and showed me disarmed grenades and emptied-out ammunition.   Behind his glasses, his eyes squished shut when he laughed, which I loved.  But nothing put my world right like my mother’s meals.  “When are you coming home?”

“Tomorrow.”  Rats.  Another night with mom not home.  I made my best cheerful face and said “great!”

Sapped of all energy from childbirth, starved and dehydrated, my mother had saved the half banana from her lunch tray for me.  Her first and last thought was giving me a treat.  Years later, she told me that during labor, the doctors would not allow her even water.  So my father wet his lips with ice and kissed her when the doctors weren’t looking.  And her first thoughts after all this were to save me a banana.  Stripped of all possessions, deprived of even water, alone in a stark cell of hospital room, she gave me the banana from her small tray because I like bananas.  Even at age four, I grasped that she was being selfless.

The episode was profoundly not-unique in my mother’s life.  Everybody who knew her has a story like my banana story; or better.  She was skilled at keeping a low-profile, so most people only knew their own story.  I doubt anybody but the Lord knows the scope of what she accomplished in 48 years.  Years later, she lay in another bed in the same hospital where Tony and I were born.  She had an IV tube in her arm all the time, and it was connected to a bag that hung on a coat-rack-looking device on casters.  She named the device “George” and lamented that George followed her everywhere, even to the bathroom.

A few weeks later, on a Wednesday morning, she died.  I was holding her hand when she took her last breath.  It was April.  The day was brilliant and crisp.  Uncle Tony and Aunt Alice were there.  So was my father and my brother Tony.  No one spoke because there was nothing to say.  We gathered up the flower pots that littered the room and put them on a cart the nurse had wheeled in.  A few weeks earlier, my brother had brought in a mylar balloon and tied it to her bed.  Now he undid the ribbon from the bed and tied it on the handle of the cart.  We all walked out exhausted and stunned into the windy morning.  We all stood in the drop-off zone while my father collected the car.  My brother quietly untied the balloon and let it go.  We all squinted and watched as the balloon jerked around in the breeze and floated up to a tiny dot above the office towers.  “Men of Galilee,” said the two men dressed in white, “why do you stand here, looking into the sky?”