As silly as this hat may look, there’s an incredibly special family tradition behind it.
That said, the lineage of my family is nothing short of complicated.
And I don’t say that to be disrespectful — I’m sure plenty of you reading this can relate.
But, on both sides of my family, generational alcohol abuse ran rampant.
There are a whole lot of layers and decades to that story, but the consequences ultimately led to the following reality:
I only ever had one true relationship with a grandparent.
My mom’s mom.
Mimi.
Introducing her properly deserves its own story — because this woman was one of the most selfless and generous human beings to ever walk this earth.
But for the sake of this Postcard, all you really need to know is that Mimi lived her life in service of others.
After a couple of my first backpacking trips, I always came home broke as a joke and ended up living with Mimi and my mom for a couple of sweet chapters of life during my mid-20s.
I was usually working two or three jobs at the time — partly to recoup everything I’d spent traveling, and partly to save up enough money to take off and do it all over again.
During those times, I was constantly running and gunning in and out of Mimi’s tiny little house at 416 Lakeside Drive.
And, without fail, every time I was rushing out the door for an evening shift at one of the restaurants I worked at, I’d hear the same six words echoing behind me:
“Do you want a banana, hun?”
I was usually late… or about to be late.
So, admittedly, it always felt like such an inconveniently timed question.
But then I’d turn around and see those big, round, crystal-blue eyes and her sweet, gentle grin — and there was no fuckin’ way I could say no.
So I took the banana, every single time.
Along the way, “Do you want a banana, hun?” became a running inside joke within our family.
Our Mimi may’ve passed away 25 years ago, but to this day — we still say it.
Only these days, the primary beneficiary of her thoughtfulness is a 70-pound Bernedoodle.
Because every night before bed, I ask Goose the same question Mimi used to ask me:
“Do you want a banana, hun?”
The only difference is that in 2026, his banana comes cut into chunks that get smeared with little dashes of peanut butter on top.
The second he hears those words, he knows exactly what’s coming.
My mom gets such a kick out of it that one of his many nicknames is now “Banana Boy.”
And because she inherited her mother’s inability to stop giving gifts to her people, she bought him this extremely fashion-forward bucket-hat.
She even went as far as to have one of her friends sew an elastic strap inside so it would fit snugly around Goose’s noggin’.
Yesterday evening , I put his hero’s cape on him for the first time.
He tolerated it just long enough for me to snap a couple of pics, but the second he jumped off the chair, he pawed that thing off in one fell swoop.
Apparently Banana Boy prefers to remain incognito while carrying out his superhero duties.
Though the hat will likely never get worn for more than a nanosecond, it sure makes me smile thinking about how far Mimi’s desire to take care of her people has come.
From her humble home on Lakeside Drive, where she simply didn’t want her grandson going to work on an empty stomach, all the way to my mom’s granddoodle getting peanut-butter-dotted banana chunks before bedtime.
Our sweet little Mimi never could have known that such a seemingly small gesture of hers — turned family tradition — would end up outliving her by a quarter century...
Yet every night before bed, a piece of her kindness and consideration still lives on.
“You want a nanner, hun?”
With Gusto,
Adrian
With Gusto is a digital treasure chest filled with two decades’ worth of around-the-world human connection. A collection of images and stories that remind you that there is still plenty of good left in this world.
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