The Great Banana Mystery

It first happened in 2003.  I had just graduated college, picked up stakes and moved to Los Angeles to "live the dream."  (I never did make it as a Hollywood actress, but I guess you actually have to go to auditions to make that happen).

Anyway, on my fairly limited budget (did I mention that I did not have a job lined up when I moved?) I bought some groceries, including a small bunch of bananas.

After putting away the groceries and making myself a light dinner, I went to bed.

The next morning, I woke up and decided that a banana would make an excellent breakfast food.  But when I looked at the bananas, sitting innocently on the counter where I had left them, they had developed what appeared to be dozens of little brown spots all over.  In a word - Eww.

This was very mysterious.  I wondered if perhaps Los Angeles had some aggressive breed of nocturnal fruit fly?  I threw away the bananas and went to the store to buy a can of Raid.

It took me four months and two apartments before I finally discovered the real cause of the mysterious overnight banana disease.

It was my cat.

(I know, I bet you thought it really was the enormous night-feeding fruit flies).

Seriously, though, bananas are to my cat what cocaine is to a drug-sniffing dog.  She has some sort of impressive "banana-radar".  She is drawn to the scent of an unopened banana the way that most cats are drawn to catnip.

Of course, she doesn't actually want to actually eat the banana. Just munch on the outside for a bit.  And it is quite specific to bananas, not any other kind of fruit.

My bananas have to go straight from my car to the microwave or the pantry. If I try hiding the bananas (for example, on top of the fridge behind the stacks of recipe books where I have never seen her go) she finds them. If I even walk in to the kitchen with a dozen grocery bags and set them down for a second, she will hone in unerringly on the one bag that has the bananas.

The strange part isn't that she won't eat the bananas. That's actually pretty normal for a cat. Fruit is, after all, basically sugars. Cats have a genetic deficiency that prevents their brains from liking sugar (and before you go thinking I'm all smart, I looked it up on the internets). The strange part is that her banana fetish serves absolutely no purpose.

Then again, neither does chewing on flip-flops, pawing at glass cabinet doors, rolling in dirty socks, or licking vertical blind slats. I guess I will never understand.