It was the height of festivities at the Luddite Club’s holiday party. Co-founder George led the toasts:
“Let’s hear it for the phone book!”
“Good old phone books!” everyone said. Or almost everyone.
“What’s a phone book?” a teenager wanted to know.
“What, indeed!” roared George. “Let me tell you, they were darned useful. Used to be, every year you got a phone book; everybody was in it; and that was that. But now, no one’s in the book any more!”
“Why not?” asked the teen.
“Because now,” said Chairman Fred, “you’d only get the names of people using your same phone company. So if you want to call someone else, you’d have to find out what company they’re with, and what book. And how can you do that, unless you call them up and ask them? Which you can’t do, because you don’t have their number! It’s a circle cruise to nowhere — and they call that progress!”
“Um, sir,” said the teen, “Why don’t you just use white pages?”
“Weren’t you listening? There is no such thing, any more.”
“I mean “whitepages.com”. You can look anybody up, and get their number!”
“Really?” said most of the party-goers. But not George. He had a different question.
“Who let you in here?”
“I came with Aunt Judy and Uncle Jack. This place has the best popcorn — do you really cook it on top of a stove?”
“My nephew — he’s always hungry,” I explained.
Just then, the boy tugged on my sleeve so sharply, I almost spilled my Irish coffee.
“I just remembered. Uncle Jack said to tell them the banana story.”
“What banana story?”
“He said you’d know — it’s something about seeds.”
“Oh, that.” I took a banana from a nearby fruit basket. Then I plucked a jackknife from the Club’s holiday tree, which was decorated with working pocket watches, slide rules, even an abacus or two.
I sliced the length of the fruit and opened it up. “You see this line of tiny dots, down the center of the banana? That’s all that’s left of its seeds.” Club members squinted down.
“But they don’t work, anymore. You couldn’t grow a new tree from them. Which is why every banana in the world traces back to the same original plant. Which makes them susceptible to disease, like one that’s going around the world today, threatening to destroy every banana plantation in the world!”
“That couldn’t really happen, though?”
“It’s happened once already, in the 1950’s. Back then, we used to have a sweeter banana, called the “Gros Michel.”
“I knew it! The past really was sweeter!” exclaimed Fred’s wife, Gladys.
“But they were all wiped out. Luckily, there was this new variety, from the hothouse of William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire. He collected samples of plants from all over the world — including bananas. So when the blight killed off “Gros Michels”, there was this other one, the ‘Cavendish,’ to use instead.”
“Problem solved!”
“Not really — because of the seed thing.”
“And Judy might have solved that,” said my better half…. “if there were still phone books!”
“How’s that?”
“See, these two botanists were on the radio, describing the Great Banana Crisis; and it made me hungry for a banana, so I started to eat one. But just as they mentioned the seeds being small, I bit down on one!”
“So I looked at the remaining half-a-banana, and it had seeds! Actual seeds!”
“‘Eureka!’” I thought. “‘I might just have solved the crisis!’ But — what could I do? The radio show was pre-recorded. I tried to contact the Department of Agriculture; I even tried the National Arboretum!
And here’s the thing. They each had a website — with maps, and policies and department charts. But absolutely no telephone numbers!”
“What about a mailing address?” asked George.
“What could I do with that? Mail them the bitten-off half of a rotten banana? They might have come and locked me up!”
“Who, the Banana Police?” said my husband.
“Judy, what would you have said over the phone, anyway? ‘Quick, get me your banana expert, I might be looking at the answer to all your problems, but I’m getting hungry?’ ”
“Gosh, that sounds like every night at our house,” muttered my beloved.
“So what did you do?”
“I ate the rest, of course.”
So now we’ll never know if I could have solved the Great Banana Crisis…and all because the phone book has gone the way of the banana seed!
