Dan Greene 'Magnitude of Memory Loss'

During the summers of my youth, the Sims’ and Lively’s had a kid exchange affectionately known as “cousin swap”. The trade included Paula and myself. The families would gather in Roanoke, Virginia at the halfway point known as Long John Silver’s.

Seriously… Would there be any other perfect place?

Sometimes we’d gather in Hillsville, Virginia where they didn’t have a LJS. The Tastee-Freeze would have to do in those cases.

I would go north to Pickaway, West Virginia with the Lively’s and Paula would come south to the thriving (comparatively speaking here) metropolis of Greensboro, North Carolina with the Sims’.

I love West Virginia and I always have. I dig the fact that you can wake up in the morning to find deer mere feet and inches away from your backdoor. I’ve even seen bears on Grandmother Clarkson’s front porch. I’ve seen bobcats and cougars running wild up there. And I’ve never admitted this to more than a handful of people, but my brother-in-law Kevin and I saw the Mothman once. I should elaborate on that story another time…

Another thing I love about West Virginia… During the summer, you can go to sleep in a house that feels like its on the outskirts of Hell because of the heat and then wake up freezing your ass off looking for any kind of cover along with a few more “Z’s”.

One time when I arrived at Casa de Lively, I immediately took my bags to his room where I was to spend the summer. I walked in and my eyes were instantly drawn to the bananas hanging about a foot and a half above the bed. There was a small ornamental hook screwed into the ceiling from which a thin rope was tied to. At the end of that rope was a small bunch of bananas.

Strange? Yes. So I stood there for more than a few seconds to ponder as to why someone would do such a thing.

When Dan come into his bedroom, I asked, “Dan? Why are there bananas hanging from your ceiling?”

He told me that sometimes he got hungry in the middle of the night. And to satisfy his hunger, he would simply reach up from a prone, sleeping position and grab a banana. He would eat it, toss the skin into a nearby trashcan, and go back to sleep.

I didn’t believe him. I thought he was setting me up for some kind of joke… Until I saw the banana hook being utilized.

I tend to only sleep about 7 or 8 hours and when I wake up, I get out of bed. I cannot lay around doing nothing even if I have the time to do so. It drives me crazy to lay around in bed more than 5 minutes after fully waking up. Unless there’s a lady involved.

Dan will lay there for hours after waking up and it used to drive me insane because I wanted to get out and do something during those summers. I’ve even clocked Dan at over 14 hours in bed when he wasn’t sick or sleeping. He was simply being lazy because he had nothing to do that day.

One morning after waking up, I tried laying there for awhile to see if I could get the hang of it. As I laid there painfully awake, I saw Dan reach up and pick off a banana to eat. He didn’t even open his eyes! After he was done eating it, he tossed the skin into the nearby trash can and went on with his business as usual… Lazing about.

I didn’t know if that was the most pathetic thing that I had ever seen or if it was the most genius thing.