Dec. 30, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

Timing, as we are so often told, is everything. That supposed truism will be on display in 24 time-zones around the globe come Monday night as 2008 is ushered at 24 different midnight hours.

Nowhere will it be more in evidence than in Manhattan's Times Square as at 0000.01 Hours Eastern Time the big ball will have reached its nadir to strains of Auld Lang Syne. Television viewers, already bleary-eyed from holiday lubrication, will have watched the digital countdown calibrated in seconds.

And in the blink of the eye, a new year will have been rung in. If I am still awake at that hour, my eyes, for no known reason, will tear up as I kiss my wife and others who won't mind the gesture. It will be the exact, right moment for resolutions.

My first resolution will be to improve the banana logistics of our domestic life.

Here's the deal. For going on 29 years in the division of our household labor, I have done the grocery shopping. It is often the only time of the week during which I feel I am in control. As with most everything else I do, I approach grocery shopping the way Gen. George C. Patton approached his fabled drive across Europe.

It is a matter not only of making the list and checking it twice, but of timing the trip when I know (as I do) our supermarket's produce delivery will have been made. I am not an impulse buyer as much as a quantity buyer. My wife frequently asks with varying degrees of good humor why we "can't let the store keep those 48 rolls of toilet tissue for us until we use up the 24 you bought last week."

We used to have that conflict over canned tomatoes, and, before that, frozen orange juice and I've forgotten what all. At this stage of our lives, the conflict is over bananas.

I like to see the decorative bowl on our kitchen counter brimming with fresh fruit - mostly bananas. I don't eat three bananas a year, but they are part of my wife's careful diet. She likes them only when they have turned a bright yellow with nary a brown spot and when the fruit inside is still firm.

That's where the matter of logistics comes in. Obviously I do not bring home 24 or 48 bananas at once. But since I try to keep my visits to the store down to twice a week, I try likewise to supply sufficient bananas to last between trips. If I buy four at a time, one or two of them might end up being rejected because they have passed the point of acceptability to you-know-who. If I come home with only two, the bowl may be banana-less until my next trip

The banana logistics are complicated because one never knows what the state of the supermarket's bananas will be: green as the day they were picked, or already in a state of decomposition or somewhere in between. My produce man, who already has discerned that I am somewhat of a kook, takes a dim view of my breaking off one from one stalk and one from another - which I sometimes to do in order to have, say, four bananas at different stages of, ah, development.

Speaking of kookiness, I have been tempted to mark them "Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday," but being aware of warning signals emanating from the love of my life to the effect that she has had about enough of my compulsions, I have thus far restrained myself.

"Why," you are wondering if you haven't already stopped reading, "does Cook think anyone would care about his banana war?"

Well, it isn't the bananas. It's the timing thing that concerns me.

Woody Allen says, "80 percent of success is showing up." I would amend that saying by adding the words "on time."

A banana stays at the zenith of its goodness for maybe a day. You either eat it then, or choke it down later because your mother taught you not to waste food. So the idea is to buy bananas in just the right quantity at just the right time. Sometimes under ripened bananas go directly from hard and green to brown and mushy, I know not why.

In 2008 America may have a moment of near-perfect political ripeness: that day 10 months hence upon which its voters may cast ballots for just the right person at the right time who has vowed to do some of the right things this nation so desperately needs done. I hope we don't screw it up.

Remember the logistics of bananas.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.