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The Banana Story

True story:

My mother grew up in far northern Maine.Limestone, Maine to be exact. It is a tiny little town smack up near the Canadian border. It was reportedly a hot-bed for illegal liquor runs during the dark years of prohibition.

Sometime back in the 1950s one of the great-uncles passed away. As was tradition, his body was laid out in a casket in the front parlor of my great-grandmother Ida’s house. All the family gathered there. This was back when they still had traditional wakes where everyone sat with the body all day and night until the burial.

So everyone was sitting around in the parlor visiting and perhaps sipping cups of coffee, trying to stay awake since it was late at night. It was fairly crowded according to my mom who was about 10 years old at the time.

Suddenly the great-uncle’s body sat right up in the casket!

Of course all hell broke loose (I love to tell "all hell broke loose" stories!). There was running and screaming. Pulling of hair. Gnashing of teeth probably. Chairs were knocked over by mourners in their haste to get out of there.

Once the commotion cleared, it turned out that the body had just experienced one of those quirks of dead bodies. It had some sort of involuntary (it would have to be involuntary since he was dead!) muscle reaction that happen sometimes with dead bodies apparently.

They managed to get his body back down into the casket and people resumed their mourning. But one of the uncles was simply beside himself with consternation. He had been sitting in a corner of the room eating a banana when this event occurred. He had just peeled some of the peel away and taken one bite of the banana.

The problem was that he did not know what happened to the banana when the big commotion got started. He didn’t know if he ate it or threw it. They never found any sign of the banana or the peel anywhere in that room or the adjoining room. All he could surmise was that he must have swallowed the whole thing, peel and all, in his panic.