My daughter had the audacity to tell me I peeled my banana the wrong way the other day.  And since I am rather smitten with her, partly because she looks and acts a lot like her mom, I listened up.

She went on to show me, with graceful, deft movements, how to do it the proper way. 

I detected several problems immediately with her peeling process. 

For starters, my hands don’t look nice like hers. 

I don’t have long enough fingernails.  Why?  Don’t ask.

I don’t have the touch.

Her way seemed a bit feminine.  Which is good for her.

My mind went off to some future work project that involved a bunch of guys.  The canteen serving lunch would serve a healthy meal, which would include a banana.  

We guys would sit around, leaning up against some wall whilst we ate our healthy meal. 

Conversation would run rapid fire, until.  Until I started peeling my ‘nanner.  The right way.  Words would slide into slurs and slurs would drain off into silence.  All eyes would be on me as I tried, of course with confidence, to get my ‘nanner started peeling from the bottom end, not the stem end. 

It would start much like it started when one of my students, and that a girl no less, asked me on the third week of my first year being a schoolteacher if I could get the contact paper separated from its backing for her. 

I had a very distinct picture of her beautiful hands, (just like my daughter’s) as she handed the paper to me.  I also had a very distinct picture of my hands; scratched, scared, calloused, short fingernails, and their futile attempt to get the paper started. 

Just as I squinted and squirmed myself into various contortions trying to get the paper separated, I saw myself totally divesting my efforts on the ‘nanner as silence ensconced the whole group.

Until.  Until one of my buddies would step up and say, “Give me that.” 

He would flip it around, grab the stem, and with a quick, masculine flip of the wrist, have that thing peeled, all the way down to the mushy bottom end that I had spent so much time squeezing and squenching on. 

I read a while back, that you can read a person’s personality by the way they push their food into their mouth. 

I wonder if the same could be said about how a person peels a ‘nanner?