Syracuse, N.Y. — Donna Cook not only bought tickets to see the Savannah Bananas at NBT Bank Stadium on Thursday, she brought gifts.
Cook, a 46-year-old nurse practitioner from Syracuse, arrived at Thursday’s game more than five hours before the opening pitch donning banana earrings, banana fingernails, a banana sweatshirt and carrying a pair of bags.
One of them held 200 orange plastic wristbands that read “Cuse loves to party with the bananas.” She planned to give them to the Bananas and the other fans dedicated enough to join her in the event plaza hours before the game.
In the other bag she had birthday gifts for her favorite banana, Jackson Olson, the team’s third baseman.
Cook hoped to find him before the game and deliver a sweatshirt that read “This is my human costume. I’m really a banana,” a card to say both thank you and congratulations, sunflower seeds and a Syracuse staple — a jar of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que sauce.
“I’m a giver,” Cook said. “Obviously he doesn’t know me from a blade of grass, but I hope I get a chance to give it to him and that it gives him a smile.”
The Bananas, Cook said, have been responsible for providing her many smiles, and at times when she needed them most.
Cook found both Olson and the Bananas in early 2021, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, when it seemed like there was little to do for entertainment besides scan social media.
Cook, who was working as a traveling nurse, was pressed into duty during the pandemic in intensive care units in Phoenix and San Francisco. She watched over patients on respirators as the virus did some of its worst damage. She turned patients over so they didn’t develop bedsores. She said she believes she closed more bodybags than in the rest of her career combined.
Cook, now working at Unity Hospital in Rochester, didn’t know anyone in those cities when she visited. She had no social life, no way of meeting anyone outside of work.
She found her joy online, where Olson had…
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