Banana Ramma

Perhaps the title of this post should be, “My Wife is Going Bananas”.

I’d be willing to bet that after reading that first line, the majority of you are wondering what on earth did I do this time to make Lisa nuts. Surely that could be a whole story in itself, but that’s not what I’m referring to this time.

No, today I want to examine why my darling bride has decided to take it upon herself to single handedly ensure the banana farmers of the world are secure in their profession. Not once in the nearly twenty-one years since our first date (and maybe even earlier) has anyone in the banana belt worried. “I wonder if we’re going to sell enough of our crop this year to make ends meet?”

OK, it’s time for the mathematics portion of this post. I’ll wait for a minute while you gather up your calculator, ten key, or abacas or, if you prefer, the removal of your shoes for extra digits to count . . . . . . Everybody ready? Good. We are each (Lisa and I) forty-two years old. We’ve been married for close to sixteen years and dated for another five years before that. For the slow ones that means we’ve been together for twenty-one years, or exactly half of our lives. (Betcha didn’t know this was going to be a learning experience too.)

So let’s see what we have so far, 21 years of blissful togetherness with 52 weeks in each one, which gives us a running total of…anybody…Bueller…PING! We have a winner. 1092 weeks. All right, pens down, time for a break.

Each week and every week that I can remember Lisa goes to the store and feels compelled to purchase yet another bunch of bananas. There is no choice in the matter; she must do this because the previous week’s victims have now turned into a brownish-black, semi recognizable, fruit fly encouraging specimen resting on our kitchen counter.

Not all of the ones purchased make it to this final resting place, where only a pietri-dish and microscope would be of any real use. Some of them actually do get consumed during the course of their seven-day stay on death row. “DEAD BANANA WALKING” On average however, in the neighborhood of 2-4 of these doomed cylindrical fruits remain just where they were a mere seven days prior. Right there in the kitchen, on the counter, next to the apples in sort of their own private little gas chamber. (FYI apples naturally give off a gas that accelerates the ripening of other fruits in close proximity) This seems particularly effective with bananas.

OK, recess is over. Time for some more math, and this is where it gets tricky. We’ve already established that there have been approximately 1092 weeks of our “togetherness”. Let’s use the conservative number of three, which represents the amount of bananas that have met their untimely demise on a weekly basis.

I offer the following equation: 1092 (glorious weeks) times 3 (dead, rotting bananas per week) for a grand total of… 3276 (poor, petrified, potassium packages)

But wait, “I’ll make banana bread with them,” she says. Great! Do you know how many stinking loaves of bread that is? No math required here; TOO MANY is the answer! Come to think of it, had I of saved all of those loaves; I could have mortared them together like bricks and added a significant amount of square footage to our house by now. What was I thinking?

This is not to say that her baking skills are lacking in any way. Quite the contrary, she is an excellent cook, but after the 200th loaf I figured I’d eaten ten lifetimes worth of banana bread.

What I’m waiting for now is a letter from the Ecuadorian government, thanking Lisa for her years of financial support for their country as well as many other neighboring jurisdictions. That or a note from some farmer in perhaps Costa Rica, showing his gratitude for her continual influx of dollars into his coffers, enabling three generations of his family to be able to purchase houses, all thanks to her banana bucks.



All in all though, I suppose if she has to have a habit, a three banana a week habit is far better that some of the other choices out there. Just one last question, “Does anybody know where BA meets?”