Roasted banana with vanilla ice cream was my birthday dessert.
I don’t think anyone knows this story except my mother. And she’s joined the Church Triumphant. And would have baked me apple pie à la mode instead anyway.
When I was very, very young I thought leather jackets were pretty cool and wanted one. I thought banana skins were sorta kinda leathery, so I was determined to make a leather jacket out of banana peels.
I ate several bananas. Then — being an idiot, but also a clever idiot — I knew I had to “tan” the peels somehow, so I carefully scrapped them clean and lay them out on the concrete driveway in the sun to “cure” or “tan” or whatever the hell it is that is supposed to turn banana peels into leather. (No mercury was available, thankfully, or I would have wound up mad as a hatter.)
Anyway, that sort of just made the peels brown, so trying to sew them together (why didn’t I at least try to cut the peels to fit?) failed utterly. Despite my diligent suturing.
The banana leather jacket project was abandoned.
The point of all this is…sips more depth charge…I am a clever idiot. I might not know anything about how anything important works, but I know tons about how semi-important things peripheral to important things work.
And hopefully, maybe, possibly that’s enough wisdom to fashion a whole lifetime out of.
We’ll see.