Toy was the kind of kid who made stuff up. His grandma used to tell him that, way out here in the country, the best friend a boy can have is his imagination. He was never really sure what she meant by imagination, but he tended to listen to the voice in his head and to roll things around in his mind until an idea became something more, so he saw pirate ships where others just saw cumulus clouds, he heard the conversations that farm animals had with one another and he soon discovered that something in his lunch sack could take wing and fly.

At least once a week Toy would get a banana in his lunch sack. He would consider that day a bad lunch day. He never understood why the fruit banana never tasted as good as the candy banana. Banana taffy or banana Now & Laters where just about the best flavor ever. One time his uncle gave him a chewy, chubby square of candy called a Banana Split and that was a banana a kid could get excited about, but a real banana, the kind that comes in bunches? … not so much. They were either too green or too brown; too soft or too firm, too bruised or too just-off-the-shelf.

Lots of the other kids seemed to get them in their lunches. Toy saw some kids eat as if it was perfectly normal. He also saw lots of bananas tossed about the playground like little yellowish boomerangs and it seemed every day there were barely-eaten bananas in the trash bin. In a certain way, Toy felt bad for the lost, uneaten bananas, like they were little fruit orphans, and he thought it would hurt his mom’s feelings if he discarded his banana like some of the others. He figured that if mom put it in his lunch it must have some redeeming quality that kids didn’t need to know about and that if today was bad banana day tomorrow would surely be a great grape day, so he kinda held his nose and swallowed the mooshy banana in as few bites as possible.

It was a Wednesday and “Crud!”, another bad banana day. Bananas aren’t that easy to open, they should come with instructions, Toy thought. Sometimes they break open with little effort and the banana peel just seems to glide down the body of the banana in three easy peel sections and other times, well, the pointed part that was attached to the bunch just doesn’t seem to want to open. What if the thing you really didn’t want to eat in the first place won’t open? Toy remembers encountering “locked” bananas many times and the only thing he could think to do was to twist and turn the top. He remembers that the banana doesn’t like that, that it just wasn’t made to be bent or folded and that this his pulling and tugging usually resulted in the banana peel splitting in some odd place. Toy knows that this “locked” banana scenario leads to an even mooshier banana and an extra bad banana day.

On this day, like the banana days before it, Toy’s fruit nemesis is the last item left in his lunch sack. He reaches in pulls out the little crescent moon of the fruit family and, without thought, tugs at the stem. “Oh good,” he thinks, “It’s an easy opener.” He takes a bite, winces a bit at the texture, and when he looks back down at the banana, the stem and the part of the peel attached to it had somehow flipped back over and now rested atop the partially eaten fruit.

Before he could flip the peel back and take another bite, the banana in Toy’s hand had become something more than just fruit.

He eyed the transformed fruit. He gently moved his hand up and down and the peeled-down sides of the banana seemed to flap ever so slightly, as the wings of a bird might do when catching a wind current on a spring afternoon. The banana stem, if you looked at it just so, had the appearance of a bird’s beak. Toy smiled to think that there had always been a bird in his lunch sack but then he was instantly saddened by the reality that once the banana was gone so was the bird.

For next couple of weeks Toy, and he really couldn’t believe it, kinda hoped to find a banana in his lunch, and when he did he would take a big bite and reconnect with Banana Bird. He found that Banana Bird, like birds in the wild, came in all shapes and sizes. Some had long beaks and short wings, some long wings and short beaks, some were tall and skinny while others seemed more round and squatty.

When he told his mom he would like a banana in his lunch more often she said, “I didn’t know you were so fond of bananas.” He explained to her how he discovered Banana Bird, how it’s nice to eat lunch with a friend. That it’s a little sad to see him go at the end of lunch but that if you eat the whole banana you’ll be able to meet a new Banana Bird the next time. Ma said that she wasn’t big on playing with your food but that you should make new friends wherever you can and that “if you peel back the outside layers in life and take a more thoughtful look at things you’ll be amazed at what you’ll find.”

♦

One day at lunch as the days began to get longer and warmer, Toy saw the playground know-it-all, a girl in the same grade as Toy named Sara. The boy’s lunch yard and the girl’s lunch yard were separate but you had to pass one to get to the other.

Sara said, “Whatcha got there?”
“Banana Bird.”
“Banana Bird? There’s no such thing!”
“Of course there is. Look at him.”
“Did you invent him?”
“No, there’s a bird in every banana, I just let him out.”
“Well, it seems kinda silly …”
“I didn’t know lunchtime was supposed to be so serious,” Toy replied, and with that Sara moved on.

A few days later, when Toy was on his way to the lunch yard he saw a crowd of girls making a clatter as if they were seeing something for the very first time. On closer look, they were huddled around Sara and laughing. What was that she was holding? A step or two more and Toy saw that it was a banana. Sara had met her very own Banana Bird and was carrying on, bobbing it up and down so that its banana-peel wings flapped in the breeze. When she saw that he saw her she blushed and Toy shook his head and hollered over, “Seems kinda silly doesn’t it?”

From that day on, Toy saw quite a lot of Banana Birds pop out of lunch sacks … imagine that. If you keep your eyes peeled, you can find a friend in your lunch sack.