Three Micro-Stories By JS

  The sad walkers were out again this morning. The four walked closely together in two groups of two forming the four points of a square, visible if you were looking down on them from twenty-five feet directly above. They walked silently, expressionless, unmoved, and blank. They walked at the same pace and in a type of formal sullen unison, they all heard the same beat which kept them coordinated in step. Why were they sad, on that he could speculate. Perhaps they were mourning; someone to whom all four were deeply connected had passed away. Maybe the walking was one way to cope with the intensity of their grief.

  Friends are attendants on a ferry, a ferry that is you. They assist in crossing the river of your life. But, once you cross and land on that other side, there is no choice but to leave all friends behind. Then you start a new journey. Appreciate your friends now, while you are still making the crossing.

   In the summertime, as a young child my father would drive to the Carvel stand in Croton NY, where I usually got a small dish of soft serve ice cream. My father, on the other hand preferred an ice cream cone. Ice cream cones are for the hands-on type of people and dad was a carpenter. On one occasion, I asked for and got the big deal, a banana split, replete with every conceivable thing that one could throw at ice cream. It was all there, cherries, chocolate syrup, butterscotch, sprinkles, whipped cream, nuts, and a helpless banana, docile, subservient, and mocked by two, or was it three, dominating scoops of ice cream. Beneath its visible extravagance, the banana split was a metaphor for a power struggle, if there ever was one. As I was young, I was hopelessly overwhelmed with eyes bigger than my stomach, and I only managed to get through part of it, guilty again of wasting food.
  I narrate this story for really only one reason, and I even did the light scholarly homework required. Turns out the banana split was invented in the very early 1900s. Wikipedia describes an optometrist coming up with some farfetched far flung ice cream idea and capitalizing on it as well. Jump ahead to the late 1970s, and you can clearly see where I’m going with this. We’re talking about a good 70 years or so of the banana split wedged and tamped deep into the modern psyche. An archetype it became, resting proudly as one profound piece of the vast psychological puzzle. No longer is it necessary to question what a banana split is, we are virtually born with its design etched into our minds. People are saying that leading childhood researchers believe that the first word out of a child’s mouth is in fact “na-na” and not “ma-ma”. The “na-na’ refers to the banana, ba-na-na. And somewhere in the world, this makes perfect sense. Now here is the final piece of this thesis that will bring it all home. What event occurred in the 1970s that has any relevance at all to any of this? You are correct, and thank you. I knew we were in bipartisan agreement on this singular issue from the very start. Yes, indeed, the everything bagel, invented in the 1970s has found its intuitive psychological and grub-worthy parental home. Sprung from a psyche basting in the archetypal elegance designed by that infamous optometrist, the everything bagel is none other than the long lost child of the banana split.