The Great Banana Caper

Sister is mean.  Sure, she was instrumental in me being allowed to lounge on the couch and she’s very generous when it comes to buying me new toys and fixing my old ones, but when it comes to food and sharing, she can be downright cruel.

Waiting for Ice Cream

We have a very simple rule in my house: if you are snacking on something that I like (and what don’t I like?), you are obliged to share it with me.  If you’re eating popcorn, I expect some popcorn to rain down on me.  If you sneak a piece of cheese, I expect to get a sampling of it.  Same goes with apples, peanuts, crackers, oranges, bananas, and ice cream.  It’s simple--if you eat the dog eats.

Sister has been known to try to bypass this rule in the past, usually unsuccessfully.  She’s particularly fond of the head fake where she pretends to walk a snack from the kitchen to the living room by way of the dining room while I, predicting her destination, scurry from the kitchen into the living room via the hallway only to find myself totally alone.  Eventually I circle back to Sister still in the kitchen and force her to share, but it’s a lot of unnecessary work.

Well last week, Sister did something horrible--something unforgivable.  Sister succeeded in cheating me out of a piece of banana.

It started innocently enough. Pa offered to take me outside to do some business and I graciously obliged.  There was no reason for me to suspect that something nefarious was about to happen and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to bark at invisible entities just beyond my front gate.  Getting up, I headed for the door, leaving Sister sitting in her chair in the living room.

As soon as I walked back into the house, I could smell it; someone was eating a banana.  Quickly, I scurried into the living room and came to a screeching halt in front of Sister, still sitting in her chair, ready to assume my begging position.  But despite the fact that the aroma was strongest by her, Sister wasn’t eating anything.  I turned toward Pa’s chair thinking maybe the banana was there.  It wasn’t.  Frantically, I turned back to Sister and started snuffling along the top of the side table to her right.  No banana.  Beside myself with panic, I checked my pillow to see if maybe the banana smell was coming from a Kong waiting for me there (sometimes Ma does that, she sets up a Kong for me when my back is turned).  But there was nothing.  By this time, I was completely and totally frantic--my head whipping back and forth with my nose up in the air trying to find the source of the smell.

There was something else I noticed, though.  Sister was laughing hysterically which I’ve learned over the years is not a good thing.

Turns out, as soon as I stepped outside, Sister jumped up, grabbed a banana, and quickly ate it with the intention of consuming it entirely in my absence so that she wouldn’t have to share it with me.  To my great satisfaction, Sister was yelled at for being so mean to me and apparently felt so bad in the end that she even broke down and retrieved a second banana which she shared a majority of with me.

Did that banana make up for the trauma I underwent?  No, but it was tasty.