Back in my tweens, I lived in an apartment in New Jersey with my mom. We would often buy a bunch of bananas. They would then sit on the counter and, slowly, be eaten.
Well, they’d mostly be eaten. I say “mostly” because, for whatever reason, the very last banana would. inevitably, sit there and become overripe and eventually get tossed in the trash (so we would feel comfortable with, then, buying another bunch of bananas the next time we went grocery shopping).
This cycle repeated for quite some time (well over a year). Neither of us consciously and purposely avoided eating “the last banana”, but it didn’t matter. The last banana would always sit there … almost mocking us.
Until – one day – my mother, demonstrating wit and cleverness that I still do my best to emulate with my own children, had a flash of inspiration.
There were two bananas sitting on the counter. We both knew, deep in our hearts, that one of them was destined for the trash.
She proceeded to look at the bananas, look at me, and then back to the bananas. She broke one of them off of the pair, held it up and proclaimed:
“This is the last banana!’
And then peeled and ate it.
This, of course, meant that the remaining banana was not the last banana. It was the second-to-last banana … that just hadn’t been eaten yet.
Shortly thereafter, one of us would eat the second-to-last banana and, from then on, we never had a “last banana” problem ever again … because, after all, we made sure to eat the last banana early.
These days, whenever I buy bananas and see them sitting on the counter, I still (in my head if nowhere else) note that I’m eating the last banana early so I never have that issue ever again.
