Cuckoo Bananas

Earlier this week, a good friend gave me a banana. At first, I thought this was a very unusual gift. Who sees a banana and thinks, "I think Trish would really enjoy this. Let me present it to her the next time we meet,"?
After accepting the yellow banana with minimal brown spots on it, I recounted a story from when I was a young tot. My parents left me with Uncle John during a trip to the Constitution State. Uncle John was the brother of "Grandpa G", the one and only - Orlando Pasquale.
Anyway, when my parents shut the door and made their way to the car, I, obviously, wailed for several minutes. It didn't take Uncle John long to find some way to amuse a 2-year-old. He grabbed the first things he could get his hands on - a banana and a bowl of peanuts.
It was on that day that Uncle John invented the world's first banana telephone.
He put the banana up to his ear, rotary dialed the phone number in the bowl of peanuts and called my parents and requested that they return to the house. My parents never did come back inside while I was awake but I've been told that poor Uncle John dialed that phone for hours because it kept me laughing.
This story made me think of other banana stories. Yes, there are more.
I remember eating a banana out of the fruit bowl after school one afternoon. When I bent the stem back to peel it, it didn't actually break the peel apart. I wiggled it back and forth and it broke down the front. I used my thumb to separate the peel and I extracted the banana from the peel with my fingers. My poor middle school-aged sense of humor encouraged me to tape the banana peel back together and return it to the bowl on the kitchen island.
Needless to say, when my mother reached for a banana to put into her lunch bag for the next day's lunch, she grabbed said "banana" and it collapsed in her hands. Aren't I a riot?
Nowadays, I use the term "cuckoo bananas" when referring to things or people that are simply ridiculous, like Bjork. People smile when I use this term because they're polite...but, let's be honest, they're smiling because I am cuckoo bananas myself. Perhaps more than anyone else.
In hindsight, this banana was possibly the most perfect gift for me. Thank you!