The Amazon Banana Truck Story
Am I living in an HBO mini series?
For my regular readers, I decided to take a different approach to this week’s letter and attempted to spin a narrative tale out of some real world experiences I recently had. The style will be different to what you are used to, so I encourage you to sit back, grab a cup of coffee or tea or diet coke, and enjoy the story.
In the high heat of midsummer, my wife and I were vacationing in a quaint, nostalgic coastal town. A place where American flags swing from poles posted to locally owned and operated shops, where feet exclusively live in sandals and Bed & Breakfasts are greater in number than chain hotels. It was a paradise peninsula, a perpetually preserved upper middle class beacon that could draw sundresses and boat shoes from up and down the East Coast.
Of course it catered to tourists, but not in the tacky and aggressive way of the Florida strip malls, making you feel claustrophobic with bright neon Pensacola Beach sweatshirts. No, the town offers a sweet temporary escape, more like a honey trap than a tourist trap. The Hamptons of Maryland, some might go so far as to say.
Though we were vacationing, we also had a great purpose to serve on our weekend getaway. One of the most important roles a young couple such as ourselves has to play during this time of our lives - that of the wedding guest.
Each wedding is unique in flavor, and we were greedily looking forward to this ceremony and the following reception. For one, we would only be serving as guests, finally outsiders of the cult-like ring of the wedding party that had consumed either one of us for the past several marital events we attended. We would be independents, showing up on time, but no sooner. Walking to our dinner seats, but not practicing a dance beforehand. Appearing in photos, but no more than the few shots the photographer may catch of us enjoying live band in the background.
For another, the family hosting the wedding was, we will say, very “well off.” Not that you would ever know it, as they are humble and kind folk, but we held secret hopes that they would pull out all the stops for this special day. I will remark, the stops were, indeed, pulled out in full.
When planning our visit, we wanted our very own authentic slice of paradise, to gleam just a sliver of the yacht club lifestyle for a moment in time. Could there be a better place to settle into small town coastal America than a B&B in the heart of downtown? You read that right, that’s just Bed & Breakfast, not AirBnB. The idea of being hosted in a home with a handful of other resident strangers sharing the same roof felt like a wholesome idea at the time. So we elected to stay in the tallest tower (the attic) of the final B&B available in town (we procrastinated). Just steps away from an ice cream shop opened late to catch the last sweet tooth seekers of dusk, and with a picturesque view of the docked sailboats owned by the town’s snowbirds.
To play the role, I packed leather sandals and white pants and aviators and my fanciest stainless steel watch. My wife packed sundresses and pearl earrings and wide-leg trousers and even wider wide-brimmed hats. Gone were the athletic shorts, scrubs, baseball caps and graphic t-shirts of city living and working. Monsieur and Madame had an excuse to indulge in opulence and sophistication, but only subtly, this was a beach town after all.
On a typical first-time visit to a new location, tensions in the car between my wife and I tend to thicken as we putz through traffic, miss key exits and eventually fail to find parking at the final destination.
This pattern rang true for the first half of our trip, escaping the urban jungle with all the other wild animals behind the wheels of their vehicles trying to free themselves from heated concrete and overcrowded city parks. But then we crossed a metaphorical bridge, and a physical one, and felt the mortal stresses melt away as we sped along rural roads as evening brought us to our getaway Elysium.
The music on the radio filled the air instead of urgent requests for directions. The windows rolled their way down and we could hear the town buzzing with the anticipation of the weekend. Local bands were setting up equipment at breweries and bars. Sidewalks emerged peppered with dog walkers and children holding sticky, dripping cones. We watched from our windows as we edged through town, looking at the outside world like it was playing on a screen rather than being a reality we could step out and touch.
It was as if the entirety of the second half of this trip was a gentle downhill, and our vehicle coasted it’s way into the shadow of our new short-term home of its own accord.
We had arrived.
Our car parked snuggly in the gravel lot in front of the Victorian mansion (is there a single bed and breakfast in existence that is not Victorian in style?), we walked up the front porch taking in our home away from home. It’s white siding glowed in the blaze of the evening sunset, the front deck creaked with age and the weight of stories it could not tell. The attic windows, where we knew we would be staying, winked down at us, promising a limited but gorgeous view of the pier.
I can’t recall the last time I stayed somewhere without using my Marriott Bonvoy points, and was pleased to be well received by a “hostess in training.” This was a sweet, young girl, likely belonging to the local high school and hoping for some easy summer dollars. She nervously walked us through our reservation details, and was shadowed by the Inn’s owner, an elderly woman who was friendly in a stern hosting-is-my-job-and-I-take-it-seriously type of way.
Warm cookies would be available to guests at all times, and absolutely must be tried.
You will be in the attic unit and the air conditioning instructions are in your pamphlet.
There are 5 rooms in the house, and you are staying during a weekend with full capacity.
The seafood restaurant on Mulberry street is an essential meal during your trip.
And most importantly of all, breakfast is served at 9am sharp, all guests are strongly encouraged to attend and socialize.
This is a bed and breakfast after all. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning.
So our night continued on, and we joined most of the wedding guests for drinks and small plates at a local restaurant in preparation for the next day’s ceremony and celebration.
As we made our way to bed, with shoulders slightly hunched so as not to bump our heads on the slanted ceiling of the attic room, we both expressed how much we were looking forward to brunch the following morning. We had not yet seen a glimpse of another guest staying in our shared cove.
We woke up just over an hour before breakfast was to be served. The sun peaked through our short windows, hinting that the anxiety over wedding weather could be put to rest, and today would grant serendipitous blue skies and ocean breezes.
We made our way downstairs, where the large wood table with ten matching chairs sat empty. Hot coffee welcomed us, steaming from silver serving carafes. We poured ourselves a cup, taking my first serving black while my wife added a dash of cream.
As we took our place at the table, I felt a looming feeling of liminality, that we had anchored one foot in our reality and stepped the other into the middle of an HBO mini series plot.
Was I about to meet my Nine Perfect Strangers? Was this trip turning into season 3 of White Lotus? I believe these are supposed to start with the dead body in a flash forward, and only then work from the beginning onwards?
Fiction had merged into reality, and we had ourselves a set of characters slowly joining us as they walked down the stairs and rounded the corner into the dining room.
First, there was the solo traveler. An elderly woman with a thin morning dress on, slippers and a messy tangle of orange hair atop her head that all showed her comfort in this B&B ritual. You might guess that she will attempt to read your palms later if the conversation slows down enough. We will call her Tanya, because she shared a striking similarity to everyone’s favorite White Lotus character.
Next, we have the honeymooners. While they weren’t actually on their honeymoon, they were celebrating their one year anniversary and if we call them honeymooners it fits better into the plot alignment between my weekend and a dramatic prime-time limited series. This was a young couple, close in age to myself, who looked in love and eager to partake in whatever planned excursions this trip had in store for them.
Another couple, a bit older with young children left at home for this getaway, sat themselves diagonal to our spot at the table. We will call the man Amazon Tech Bro and his wife Emily (because she reminded me a bit of Emily Blunt).
Finally, we had the Anti-Socials, who actually had been downstairs before we poured our first cup of coffee. They were middle-aged and were tucked around the corner at a private table, still yet to enter the scene.
If I were casting the whole table, I might call us the wedding crashers or naive first timers.
Guests seated themselves around the set chinaware, murmuring hellos and good mornings but mostly keeping to themselves.
This odd assortment of personalities came together and would be welded into conversation by the insistence of our host, making sure everyone was seated and served in unison.
This agenda immediately ran into conflict as the Anti-Socials were not enabling our host to reach the appropriate head count. She navigated her way to the private balcony, and in a polite voice with an underlining firmness, requested that the Anti-Socials join the remainder of the guests at the table for breakfast.
A silence filled the air, and I realized that everyone at our table was eavesdropping on the conversation occurring a room away. After a lengthy pause, the Anti-Socials said that no, they were fine taking breakfast on the deck.
That would be most wonderful, our host said through a smile that sounded like it had transformed into a grimace, but really is not in the spirit of the bed and breakfast, and insisted they join the other guests for french toast in the dining room.
We heard the screech of chairs scraping the floor, and like scolded children, the Anti-Socials shuffled to our table, and sat awkwardly at the remaining chairs. Those in the room picked our separate silos of conversation back up, pretending as if we had heard no dispute.
Any thoughts of abandoning the table before the final plate was served were dashed; we had unwittingly become captives to our hosts unwavering commitment to socialization us over coffee and pastries.
Now that everyone was seated in the same location, our host made a brief announcement, introducing our personal chef for the morning while highlighting the courses. She exited the room, and at this point we could no longer continue to pretend the strangers at the table did not exist.
It was only appropriate that the lone traveler, Tanya, would be the one to break the third wall of conversation.
“Oh I love that restaurant,” she said, doing her best to make eye contact with Emily who had been in deep conversation with Amazon Tech Bro. “I was just there last night.”
Tanya had masterfully plucked a private conversation out of thin air and laid it out to bare for the entire table to feast on.
“Ah, uh, yes, we were out for drinks last night and they had live music,” Emily stumbled through a sentence, unsure of where Tanya’s comment had come from.
Tanya plowed onwards, taking charge of getting everyone honed into a shared conversation. “Where are you from?” she scanned over Amazon Tech Bro and the Honeymooners and myself, indicating that this question was for the table to respond to.
Amazon Tech Bro and Emily were the most local, hailing from Annapolis. The Honeymooners had just moved into a townhome on Capital Hill in D.C. We staked our claim on Arlington, and Tanya herself lived just a few miles from us, in Pentagon City.
The Anti Socials grunted some incoherent syllable. They were not happy to be at this table.
The conversation haughtily jumped from one subject to the next, the smallest of small talk. Amazon Tech Bro and Emily had vacationed frequently to the coastal town, but had never stayed in this particular B&B. Tanya had stayed before, and could confirm the french toast was worth the wait.
Guests shared the shallowest details of their lives over hot coffee. We discussed our plans for the day, when we would split up from our joined union and tackle varying restaurants, local shops, kayaking trips and sailing tours.
As the mimosa refills were dolled out, we landed on the topic of occupation. This is where you learn the origin of Amazon Tech Bro’s name, who of course worked remotely as an engineer for Amazon. The rest of the occupations are lost to time and my poor memory, but those details remain unimportant to the subject that overtook the remainder of our breakfast.
“Oh oh oh!” Tanya exclaimed, “I know you people. You are the banana truck people.”
Sentences trailed off into hanging ellipses.
Amazon Tech Bro had been stupefied, “We are the what now?”
“The banana truck people,” Tanya responded, a bit louder and with a firm nod to confirm she had gotten the details right.
When Amazon Tech Bro and his wife looked back with a questioning head tilt and eyebrow raise, Tanya further explained “You pass out bananas every morning from a truck in Pentagon city. I’ve gotten bananas from you dozens of times.”
Amazon Tech Bro gave an intelligent, calm chuckle “Oh, have you?” and patronizingly quipped “I didn’t know one of the largest technology companies in the world was in the business of passing out free bananas.” He glanced at Emily, who gave him a look that said we know this lady is likely out of her mind, but be nice to her.
“Are you sure it’s Amazon’s banana truck?” he added, to not totally sound like an ass.
“Oh yes,” another firm nod from Tanya. “It’s right outside your office and anyone from the community can just grab a banana and go.”
The back and forth dance to debate the reality of the Amazon food truck had began.
As Amazon Tech Bro pretentiously scuffed the ridiculous idea of one of the largest, most profitable cutthroat companies in the planet’s history owning a single truck to pass out bananas to wandering pedestrians, I could almost begin to hear the restless drums of the White Lotus theme song beating in the back of my head.
This was the train wreck you can’t look away from on TV shows, and the same feeling applies in real life. A pragmatic force of nature had met the real-life version of Tanya McQuoid, it would be calculated logic verse detached irrational thought.
The honeymooners and our party moved our heads between the engineer and the crone, as if watching a live tennis match. We were hopeless bystanders, a seemingly neutral party to what was clearly becoming a topic we would have to take a side on, whether through a small smirk aimed in one direction or a reassuring nod in the other.
You could tell Tanya was becoming slightly bothered by the lack of faith Amazon Tech Bro had in her claim. “I’ll have to take this one to the office next week and find out for myself,” he said in a conclusive tone with a small smirk.
You could tell Tanya just wanted to give Amazon Tech Bro a piece of her mind.
Finally our plates were cleared and we departed the table, going our separate ways until the following morning, when we would gather again for our final round of breakfast.
The remainder of the weekend was uneventful in the sense that the wedding was perfection, and exceeded our expectations beyond every measure. We returned home late Saturday night after the after party to a quiet home. Waking up Sunday, a touch of a lingering hangover reminding us of the dancing and drinks from the night before, we packed up and headed down for our morning communion.
The banana truck story was lightly brought up, all of the tension around the subject had seemingly been deflated over the course of a Saturday spent in paradise. We said our goodbyes, shuttled our luggage into the trunk of our car, and made the long, traffic-filled journey back to the city.
Our minds racing with tasks for the upcoming week, the inverse of our trip to the coast occurred as we made our way back to reality.
As days and weeks passed, we looked back at the weekend fondly, and have praised the wedding as one of the most elaborate we are likely to ever attend.
The banana truck story had grown fuzzy, and eventually was almost entirely forgotten in our minds.
In revisiting my memories and the Inn we stayed at during our weekend away, I learned that the bed and breakfast is now permanently closed. Likely bought by some modern aristocrat looking to fill half of these rooms during a few warm summer months and then hibernate to their more permanent mansion in Florida or Arizona.
No more strangers will gather at the community table at 9am, forced to travel back in time to when delicate and polite conversation must be held at all costs. Where glances at an electronic device for distraction are strongly desired but understood as rude. This experience is a frozen slice of time shoved into a bottle and tossed out to sea.
Fast forward several mentally lived lifetimes later, and rewind to a few realtime months after the events in our vacation bubble. My wife and I scooped up our entire life up and moved a nautical 1.5 miles east into Pentagon City. Over the course of our first month at the new location, we explored the city on foot, looking for what would become our regular coffee shops, hair salons and grocery stores.
Tucked away in some corner of my mind was the foggy awareness that I had moved into the walkable radius of the mythical Amazon banana truck. I was not actively seeking it, but surely I would know it when I saw it. How many banana trucks could there be, especially one that I imagined looked exactly like an Amazon delivery box truck with bananas painted all over it?
It was just a few short weeks ago when fate played her card. While out on a short morning run, I rounded a corner into a small metro park and almost ran into a teal, retro styled truck with a large wooden tray hanging over it’s side stuffed full of ripe bananas.
I almost couldn’t believe my own eyes. My brain didn’t have time to process the image before my legs kept carrying me away. About twenty feet past the truck, I slowed down to a walk. I then proceeded to backtrack to confirm I had not just suffered from a cruel hallucination.
Indeed, sitting in front of me was the Amazon banana food truck.
A short, chalk sign stood in front of it reading “A Banana a Day Keeps the Doctor Away. Take One. Not Just for Amazonians. But for Anyone in the Community. Enjoy.”
I hesitantly went up to the young man sitting behind the tray.
“Could I have a banana?” I ask, still half expecting all of this to fade away in the light of the morning sunrise.
“Sure!” he responds enthusiastically, “Take as many as you like.”
So I stretch out my hand to grab a banana, and sure enough it’s real. Not only is it real, it’s also the perfect ripeness for eating. I take a few steps away from the truck, and continue my run home, holding the banana in my right hand as it pumps up and down in sync with my stride. I sprint down the crosswalk of a busy street, imagining I look like some urban monkey to the cars waiting at the light.
The banana truck is real.
I recently read that Amazon is requiring it’s employees to return to the office, including the H2Q building in Arlington.
In my mind, there exists a universe where Amazon Tech Bro, living in Annapolis who has been dreading the call back to office, makes a long commute down to the Virginia-based Amazon location for the first time in over a year. I imagine him parking his car in the underground garage, surfacing in the Metropolitan Park in Pentagon City. As he makes his way to the entrance, the muted blue of a retro truck sitting in the middle of the park catches his eye.
Curious, he walks over. As he slowly circles the truck, he notices the bright yellow bananas resting on a large wooden tray. He reads the same sign I saw resting in front of the truck.
The back of a woman is facing him as she chats with the banana truck boy, grabbing a few fruits as she tells an aimless story. The boy looks puzzled, clearly not on the same conversational plain as the not-Amazon-employee in front of him.
With a meandering lack of purpose, Tanya turns around, making direct eye contact with Amazon Tech Bro. She smiles knowingly, and continues walking past him through the park.
Amazon Tech Bro follows her with his eyes for a moment, then turns back to the Amazon banana truck. He’s decided to grab a morning snack before work begins.
The Bel
I am bananas over this story!
I’ve seen the banana truck. It is real and not a CGI. And the bananas are delicious. Who would have thought?