When Life Gives You (Half) Bananas

Anne Lamott’s school lunch exercise

Photo by Mike Dorner on Unsplash

I recently read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird for the first time. For those who aren’t aware, this is a very popular book for those looking to improve their writing skills.

Ever since starting The Conscious Consumer, and especially after reading this post from my friend

Lauren Scott

, I knew I had to read it.

One of the lessons that stuck out to me most is her advice to write about your childhood, especially school lunches.

Lamott opens her School Lunches chapter: “I know I set out to tell you every single thing I know about writing, but I am also going to tell you every single thing I know about school lunches, partly because the longings and dynamics and anxieties are so similar. I think this will also show how taking short assignments and then producing really shitty first drafts of these assignments can yield a bounty of detailed memory, raw material, and strange characters lurking in the shadows.”

I was particularly intrigued by the specificity of this exercise and so proceeded to have a conversation with my partner about our school lunch memories.

What came up for me was quite funny, as it wasn’t so much a kaleidoscope of details or moments as it was one vivid memory.

What immediately came to mind was bananas. Not just any banana, but half a banana. A banana split through the middle widthwise, contained in a Ziploc bag. 

These were the epitome of lunch room terror for me as a young grade school child. 

Because both my parents worked full-time, I grew up with a nanny who acted as our surrogate grandmother for nine years. She took care of my younger brother and me during the work week, taking us to and from school and often packing our lunches.

One of her most repeated lectures to us was to clear our plates because there were starving kids around the other side of the world so we’d better not waste any food! 

I remember being a pretty picky eater as a child, but I don’t remember actually disliking bananas. Rather, it was a strong aversion to those specific lunch box banana halves. 

Now I can’t tell you why she cut the banana in half (was it so my brother could have the other half, or because she thought we each couldn’t eat a full banana on our own?), but this really added to the drama for me.

Something about seeing the exposed banana grossed me out, its edges often getting brown and mushy from rolling around in my lunch bag all morning. (At least she had the sense to put it in a bag so the banana guts didn’t splotch around the lining.)

Every day I’d sit down at lunch, unzipping my blue and purple tie-dye L.L. Bean lunch bag, knowing full well I wasn’t going to touch that banana. I’d eat everything else no problem, lunch quickly passing along as I chatted with friends. 

Then came time to head out to recess. 

But first, I had to get past the trash cans of doom. 

It wasn’t until I neared this obstacle did my thoughts return to the banana. You see, for little grade school Morganne, simply throwing the banana away was a Herculean effort of the mind. Guilt would immediately creep in the second I even thought about tossing the banana, my nanny’s words haunting the back of my mind, “don’t waste your food!”

As all the kids threw away their various lunch items or scraped the remains off their hot food trays into the trash, I awaited my turn, panic building. 

The trash cans were the only thing standing between me and my escape, the sunlight illuminating the crack between the metal double doors ahead.

Would this be the day I’d finally throw away my banana?

I’d try to summon the courage, thinking I could finally toss it, but I just couldn’t. When I got to the trash can I’d panic and back down, sealing the banana away in my lunch box for a different fate.

Upon getting home from school later, I’d unpack my backpack privately in my room, removing the banana from my lunch box before putting the bag back in the kitchen.

What did I do with that banana?

I stashed it under my desk, right behind the small bejeweled waste bin, so that it was completely hidden out of sight. Oh, the irony!

The act of bringing it home and not ever throwing it away somehow relieved me of guilt, as I would quickly forget about it after that.

But then came the inevitable day when my nanny or mom would be vacuuming and stumble upon a banana or two.

I’d immediately know they had discovered me when I heard them shout my name down the hall. “What is this!?” as they demanded to know why the heck they had just found a rotten banana beneath my desk.

I’d shrug and say I felt bad throwing it away. And that was that.

My boyfriend and I got a good laugh at this memory, because in retrospect, it doesn’t make any logical sense as to why I’d keep hiding the banana when I knew I would be caught. They’d never catch me if I just threw it away at school, wasn't that obvious?

It’s almost as if I wanted to be caught, so my guilty conscience could be set free for not eating all my food.

I chuckle at this now, because it says so much about me. You know when you remember something about yourself as a kid and you’re like, “yeah, that tracks”? It’s like sharing an inside joke with someone really close to you. But in this case, it’s your younger self.

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When Lamott quoted excerpts from her own school lunch memories, she illustrated how free-writing about the topic led her to uncover a boy she didn’t even know existed in her conscious memory. 

He was an intriguing character who she thought might make good fodder for whatever novel she was writing. 

While I think her point was that this exercise can lead to some random nuggets that fuel a completely different story, I found for me that it led to some insightful information about who I was as a child. (It ultimately helped me uncover my Enneagram type, but more on that later because that warrants a post of its own.)

In the meantime, I encourage you to try this exercise and see what you might uncover. Whether it’s material for a story, data for your self-awareness, or simply dinner table conversation, who knows what you have hiding in there?

Our memories, suffice it to say, are bananas! 🍌🙃

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