CSI Banana 524 words

CSI Banana 524 words


My husband is addicted to bananas. Well, he would deny that. He says that he eats them for the potassium to prevent leg cramps.

Regardless of why he eats them, the result is the same. Our house is filled with bananas at all times - green bananas, hanging from a banana stand to ripen, yellow bananas, ready to eat today and occasionally, a brown banana, forgotten in the corner, drawing fruit flies.

Then there are the peels. I’ve found banana peels on the floor of the car, where he discarded them after eating while driving. There are the brown, smelly peels that I wake up to in the morning after he threw them next to the bed after midnights munch. There are banana peels on the counter, under the sofa, and, yes, once in a while, in the bathroom. Bananas have had their sweet insides torn out in every room and every nook and cranny in the house.

After exhausting all of my nagging techniques and subtle reminders that banana peels belong in the wastebasket, I started taking pictures of them and emailing them to the culprit from my iphone. Of course, the pictures didn’t change him, but I began to see the dramatic art of the banana peel and the various natural shapes into which they had fallen – twists, turns, brown fruit side up, yellow skin side down, little brown stem end in the middle. I began drawing tiny eyes and a sad mouth on them before photographing their torn little bodies. I even named a few – Danny Bananny, Little Miss Peel, Darth Banner, Hard-hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Sabanna.

I shared a few of the photos with my friends. One of them started posting banana albums on Facebook and suddenly The Banana Crime Scene Photos went viral. I had launched my career as a fruit photographer.

I got a call from The Apple Association of America (AAofA) wondering if I ever photographed cores. I thought there were some real possibilities for visiting the scene of an apple crime – half-eaten apples, discarded on the street like so much garbage, cores hungrily bitten down to the seeds, rotten apples hurled against the sides of buildings.
Yes, the apple albums worked out nicely and brought more fame and fortune. I’ve done any number of gallery shows across the world, although rotten fruit peels don’t do as well in China as in the United States. The Chinese prefer photos of decimated rice bowls, especially if they contain half-eaten squid.

I remain challenged by kiwi fruit. Those hairy little green guys are so ugly that nobody seems interested in seeing kiwi corpses. “Let them die – good riddance.” I was, however, successful with a photo of a mountain of rotten kiwis, weeping their little juices out. The Japanese liked it, anyway.

As I said in an Award Acceptance Speech recently, I will always be grateful to my husband and his banana buddies for launching my career. The banana has been good to me, and believe me, I show my gratitude every day by never eating one. I’ve always hated the taste of the darn things.