Banana

In New York, there’s a fence a few feet away from the outside rail, running the length of the grandstand, that keeps the spectators some distance away from the dirt. I was close enough to hear the steam come rushing out of Adriano’s nostrils when Edgar Prado brought him into the winner’s circle at Turfway Park in 2008, could have stroked him if I’d been crazy; with just a little lift up I’d have been on the track at Bay Meadows that same summer. It isn’t like this everywhere in the world, this guarded and set apart. Same is true on Riverside Drive, where I leaned against the statue of Joan of Arc and ate a banana. Sign says you ought to be right on the river, but really there’s the whole West Side Highway between you, not to mention the steep drop at the edge of the grass. Boy, I’ve lived here a long time, long enough that the fences just seem normal now, unless I take care to remember.

 

Yogurt, a bagel, and a banana

Failure to adequately prepare combined with the closure of non-essential campus facilities plus misty cold air like there’s a cloud on the ground along with the unfortunate results of a deadline check (December means December 1, not December 31) left me making do with the leavings at the campus coffee place with one hand while the other tapped out this book review, finishing both at roughly the same time.

 

Avocado sandwich and a banana

Since my day consists of about forty unscheduled minutes between the hours of noon and 9pm, I took twenty of them to think really hard about my avocado sandwich. I love avocados so much. If I ate local like I’m supposed to, I’d never get to eat avocados, unless I moved to California, and I tried that already and it didn’t suit me.  Then I ate my banana. Did you know that I like my bananas much greener than either D. or L.? I didn’t even realize I was eating them early until the last few months when both have noted on separate occasions that I was eating bananas too early and/or throwing perfectly good bananas into the garbage can as if they were spoiled. It’s like when I learned late in life that wearing my watch on my right hand signaled to the world that I was a lefty. I’ve since disciplined myself, and am wearing my watch right today. The bananas are probably next.

 

Cheese sandwich and a banana

I bought a new jar of mustard at the grocery store today. The label promised it would be extra hot. I still slathered it on since extra hot on a label at my grocery store really only means it might taste like a little something. I also bought some romaine lettuce. When I washed it in my salad spinner, a fly came floating up to the top of the water. I ate in front of the Miami–New England game, wishing the Jets were playing instead. Who invented the bye week?

 

Peanut butter and jam sandwich, plus banana

What’s great about being an adult is that you can fact check your hazy memories of youth and gain valuable corrections from the people who were there with you. Like, I made our lunches every morning in the dark, peanut butter and jam sandwiches until we graduated from high school. K. helpfully pointed out that I did not in fact make us lunch. I made me lunch, one sandwich, and cut it in half and we split that. Add another decade of weekly appointments with Dr. T., plzkthx.

 

Chicken sandwich and a banana

That cup of coffee I had at 10:30 with S.? Yeah. It ended up lasting for more than ninety minutes. Ninety minutes. Amazing. Considering it took three months for us to find a mutually agreeable time for coffee, I guess we had a lot to talk about. But it did represent a significant slice of my lunch hour, which I spent hurriedly gobbling leftovers from last night’s dinner with L., which was most certainly not the last meal I’ll share with her before she heads to Cleveland to move in with her fiance. Nope. That wasn’t the last meal I’ll share with my oldest friend in New York before she moves a thousand miles away. I won’t believe it.

 

White bean and arugala salad, plus a banana

You know how when you’re out in the country for the first time in a long time and the lights go out and you hunker down thinking you’re about to sleep better than ever because there won’t be any sirens or reggaeton or feral, mating cats but actually you can’t get to sleep at all because the silence builds to such a hum in your ears that you’d almost rather a block party so you can get some flippin’ shuteye? The library noise at the end of my shift had built to such a din, it was all I could hear, I started to lose it. Grouchy and having approached a table with the objectless threat If I have to come over here one more time, I determined we’d all be best served if I shut myself up in my cloffice with my dish and my fork and a good long blank stare at the wall.

 

Peanut butter and jam sandwich, banana, baby carrots, and goldfish crackers

You know what would be good for lunch? I asked as I sat in my chair and took photos of my feet against the trees in between reading pages of my genre paperback while L. put together the tent and air mattress and unloaded food and generally did everything that would make life possible for the next three days. A peanut butter sandwich. So that’s what the long suffering L. made me, with crackers and carrots in the little compartments in our plastic dollar store plates.

 

Spinach salad and a banana

I sat in my cloffice with the door closed and eked out the very last seconds of this spinach. If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit it had pretty much turned already, tell-tale dark green around too many edges. Still, it was good enough with chickpeas and feta and doused with olive oil and vinegar that leaked out of the container into a plastic bag on my way to work this morning. As I ate I chit-chatted with K. on googleychat (where have you been?!?) and paged through the White House photostream on Flickr. I love the White House photostream, especially the shots of the president just looking like a normal guy. His escalation of war in Afghanistan and weird affirmation of DOMA bum me out (among plenty of other bummers), but it’s so nice to have a president who appears at least human.

 

Salad, plus banana

I’ve been having trouble getting up and down my stairs with ease, due largely to my decision to replace personal fitness with eating candy and fretting about deadlines. I wheeze. Sometimes my knees hurt. I’m too young for this. So I nagged myself into the gym where I received helpful confirmation of my reduced endurance and lung capacity. Feeling too much like that one time K. and I were lapped and then lapped again in the mile at a junior high track meet,  I returned, hanging my head, to eat my salad in my cloffice while  formatting somebody else’s citations. I wonder if I would have gotten myself out of Idaho anyway, even without trying to get A Sport onto my college applications?