Bad Banana

Among the many, many, many cards and encouraging e-mails and phone calls I've received since my diagnosis (most of which I will doubtlessly never be able to reply to personally}, some of my favorite have been from the Sunday School classes at First Parish. We've taped them to the wall of my hospital room, and I look at them for inspiration every day.

But it took me awhile to figure out what one of the children meant in their message. It looks like the words "bad banana" covered by a large international VERBOTEN sign -- you know, a big red circle with a slash through it. I guessed this because there is another, smaller red circle with a slash through it pointing to the larger one just in case I didn't recognize what it was. So I understood that bad bananas are forbidden. But just what is a "bad banana?"

I love the way kids think. When I first announced my diagnosis to the congregation here, I described my primary tumor as being "about the size of a tennis ball, if you can imagine a tennis ball squeezed into the shape of a jalapeno pepper." Then it dawned on me. Here in Maine, jalapeno peppers are not exactly a standard lunchbox item. But bananas are!

So I did get the message, as well as a fun puzzle to challenge my mind for a few minutes on a slow afternoon. And even though the contrast is terrible and it could use a good photoshopping, here is a picture of my two MMC moose...if you look very carefully you just might be able to make out the bad banana right where you'd expect to see it if you had X-Ray vision. But at least THAT banana is gone now...and let's hope that the other one disappears half as easily as it did....