A Banana a Day
Keeps the horse pistol away
I don’t know how many hundreds, if not thousands, of times my father said this when I was growing up; “A banana a day will keep the horse pistol away.”
I spent a part of my youth living in El Paso, Texas. My parents would cross the border every week or so to buy extraordinarily cheap bananas (and other cheap stuff) in Juarez. If any of us kids would dare to say, “I’m hungry,” our dad would immediately respond with, “Have a banana.” We were constantly well stocked on bananas and we had to eat them before they went bad. Bananas from Mexico were a cheap way to feed four growing kids with bottomless stomachs.
You might think that I would have developed an aversion to bananas but I escaped that fate. I still eat bananas today but rarely more than one or two a week. I prefer to get my potassium from avocados. In the produce department, I am that annoying person who snaps just one or two bananas off a bigger bunch.
By the way, if you have rose bushes in your garden you should throw your banana peels onto the ground around a rose bush and let them rot there. Rose bushes love that!
You can also rub the inside of a banana peel over your skin in summer to keep mosquitoes away. It works to keep other things away, too.
Bananas have many uses and benefits. If one of us kids was stupid enough to respond to our father’s, “Have a banana,” we knew we would hear more banana talk; “A banana a day will keep the doctor away. Bananas make you grow. Bananas make you smart. Bananas improve your eyesight (most of us kids wore glasses). Bananas help keep you from straining and pulling muscles. Bananas improve your batting average. Bananas make your fingernails smooth. Bananas enable you to live to a hundred…” And, of course, “A banana a day will keep the horse pistol away.”
As much as our father pushed bananas on us kids, I never once saw him eat one himself. It turned out he hated bananas. He was a banana preacher who did not follow his own gospel. This didn’t bother me, though. I knew he was just being his zany self. (And I knew that he was trying to get all the bananas eaten before they went bad.)
Our father also liked to have fun with words and this is where the term ‘horse pistol’ comes in. As kids, we knew that ‘horse pistol’ sounds a lot like ‘hospital’ and we knew that our father never, ever used the word, ‘hospital.’ He always called hospitals, horse pistols. Perhaps he thought that if he uttered the word, ‘hospital’ then he would be jinxed and have to go to one and he hated/feared hospitals very intensely.
We thought this was just part of his constant word playing, but one day I finally asked my father, “What’s a horse pistol?”
“Well, a hospital is a place where you go to die. A horse pistol is… You know at the horse racing track…” (He lost me right there. I had never been to a horse racing track and knew nothing about them.)
After clearing his throat, he continued, “At the horse racing track they keep a special gun in a box in the stables. If a horse was to get a serious injury they would use that gun to shoot the horse dead and put it out of its misery. That gun is called the horse pistol.”
What?
He continued, “So you see, you can go to a hospital and be all hooked up to machines and slowly die or you can go to the track and live life fully… And then when you have an injury you can be quickly put out of your misery. Which sounds better to you?”
What?
“The thing to remember is that if you eat plenty of bananas you are cutting your risk of injury a hundred-fold and thereby reducing the risk that they’ll need to use the horse pistol on you. So, like I said, a banana a day will keep the horse pistol away.”
Oh.
This from a man who never ate bananas. In further irony, he eventually took the hospital route rather than the horse pistol route at the end of his life. It turned out never saying the word ‘hospital’ did not keep him from dying in one.
I do not always think of my dad when I eat bananas, but sometimes I do.
Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved.
Another story about my dad…