I always know when Hal has a new tica girlfriend. He’s so obvious. Take this BIG bunch of bananas for instance. BIG clue. Hal doesn’t eat bananas. He doesn’t even like them unless they are fried in buddah and served hot with ice cream and melted Bribri chocolate. Which he only makes when we have people to dinner…

So yesterday morning when he came home from the farmer’s market with this huge bunch of bananas and no dinner party in our immediate future, I knew another beautiful tica – and 99% of young ticas are breathtakingly, traffic-stoppingly beautiful –  had stolen his heart.

The sad thing is he thinks the feeling is mutual. You know, because of his wit and (mature) good looks. Silly goose, that’s why I love him. This morning, I mentioned the whole "rich gringo" thing in relationship to the reciprocal flirting thing. Bad move. He stared at me blankly. Denial ain’t a river in Egypt… it’s sitting across from me right now.

"No," he chuckles, recovering nicely. "Señorita Monica [he knows all their names] is in love with me."

Uh huh. As long as all this mutual love is at arms’ length, I can live with it. Besides, he also came home with a bunch of half-dead flowers, bought from doña Carmen. Doña Carmen, who is neither young nor particularly beautiful, is his regular Saturday morning flower girlfriend. Seems all her flowers were pretty pathetic yesterday, but Hal bought some anyway, proving his heart is in the right place. Even though Feng Shui dictates not having dead flowers in your house, surely flowers steeped in so much love can only bring good energy.

So… I guess I’ll go have a banana. Or two. And get used to having more of them around the house as long as Miss Monica is selling at the farmer’s market.

If you have bananas fried in butter with ice cream and chocolate for breakfast, all those calories are burned off during the day and won’t make you fat, right? Especially bananas steeped in all that love.