The Story of Bean Day
The Story of Bean Day
by Mollie Greenberg
It’s two days after Christmas. All you want to do is to relax and look at all the presents still piled under the tree, wondering where in the world you’re going to put them, and what you’re going to do with the hand-me-down socks from grandma that don’t fit. But winter break hasn’t even ended yet. Those thoughts can be pushed aside for another time, another place. For now, just sleep, watch movies, read, sleep some more, and eat. Oh no, we can’t forget eating!
I was sitting in a chair in front of the fire and right next to the tree. I was cuddled up in a blanket, and gladly obliged to let the green arms of the chair and folds of my blanket carry me away to dreamland. The veil of sleep was just drawing over me when –
Maybe I should stop for a moment and…explain a few things. Otherwise this story would be over before you know it. Yes, if you’re looking for a fast-paced, adventurous plot with so many events that they’re all crammed into your head at once like cheese in an enchilada, don’t look here. Put this paper down, close the word document or window that you’re reading this in, and go search for something else to do rather than hearing the story of how “Bean Day” began. But if you’re looking for a funny, family story that was fun and easy to write, and hopefully the same to read, then stay. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Ever heard of a pressure cooker? Probably not…I’ll tell you. It’s like a pot, really –a big pot that you can cook beans or rice and the like in, but quicker than usual. This is because it applies pressure (hence the name) on the thing inside, making the whole process of cooking faster. It applies a lot of pressure.
As my family and I were soon to witness.
My dad has a slight…obsession, I suppose you could say, with pressure cookers. He’s the kind of guy who will buy two extra bags of fresh greens at Kroger’s because they’re on a “manager’s special”, and the same goes for pretty much anything else that we get. Pressure cookers are no exception. He already had at least two, although I assume some of them broke or didn’t work to begin with, or maybe they weren’t the stainless steel that we all covet. No matter, he got a new one recently, and of course he had to put it to use right away.
Now imagine this: there are two pressure cookers on the stove, the new one and an old, which I believe to be exactly identical. There are beans in them, black beans, and the little knob on the top that contains the pressure is just whispering away, loudly of course. (I say whispering because I don’t really know any other way to describe it. It’s not whistling like a tea pot, nor is it sizzling like oil in a pan, and it’s not boiling. I suppose that boiling is the most similar sound to what is going on, however it is not the action. Just imagine pressure being exerted on a pot of beans, imagine there not being any room for air to escape, and imagine how you would feel if you didn’t have any air to breathe, if that kind of pressure was pressurizing on you. You’d probably start to wheeze and cough and choke and scream, but, not being able to get air in your lungs, it would all come out as a big and loud, obnoxious whisper that deserves the attention of a high-pitched scream. )
This sound, of course, this whispering, invades the space of the kitchen, which invades the space of half of our house, the half in which we all spend most of our days, particularly in the winter when we want to stay in close vicinity to the fire because all of our bedrooms are freezing cold. This invasion, however, is not very noticeable when you hear it a considerable amount, and so none of us pay much attention to it.
It’s hard to ignore, however, when it becomes a whisper so loud that that soft word doesn’t even belong in a mile radius of it.
Do you use an alarm clock? For the purpose of this narrative I’ll assume that you do, and I’ll assume that it isn’t your unemployed mother who wakes you up in the morning because she doesn’t have anything better to do than talk nonstop and delay the time of your waking moment. I’ll assume that you have an alarm clock that is loud and obnoxious and invasive, and that you absolutely hate it – therefore making it your best friend. I’ll also assume, however, that you’ve never heard the sound of beans bursting out of a pot and pounding pressure being released simultaneously on those beans, and that you can’t even begin to compare that to the sound of your alarm clock.
It is much worse.
It is especially worse when it wakes you up from an afternoon nap; it is especially worse when that nap was begun because your eyes could barely stay open and your feet could barely support you. It is especially worse, especially worse, I tell you, when you wake up to find black bean remains bombed on your ceiling and splattered on the kitchen wall and the microwave and the newly cleaned counters. It’s also especially worse when you have to clean it up, and it’s not simply unbelievable words that have been typed by an unknown person, or pixels on a TV screen. It’s worse when it’s real.
I had the unfortunate experience of experiencing this rare, unheard of, unfortunate event.
I was almost asleep, and nothing could have disturbed me except…what happened, or perhaps a bomb. But this seemed pretty equivalent at the time. Anyway, I was almost asleep, and then a sound so enveloping, unbearable, persistent, and downright frightening awakened me. That’s too simple a term though. This set my heart beating so fast I felt as if I had just run my fastest mile ever. This made my ears feel as if they would break (can ears do that?) and I’d never hear another sound again. This made me question whether I would live to taste another chocolate and vanilla, whipped cream covered cake in my life.
My first instinct was not to rise and investigate the trouble, but to cover my ears and bury my face in my soft blanket. I didn’t even open my eyes. All I wanted was for the sound to go away so I could go back to sleep.
In your dreams.
When I realized it wasn’t going to go away just like that, I opened my eyes just in time to see thick steam gushing out of the top of the pressure cooker on the stove and spouting in a hot, pressurized stream up to the ceiling. My dad was already standing by the area of destruction, turning off the stove and successfully making the horror stop. My mother quickly got up from her seat beside me and presently gasped in astonishment.
“Oh my God,” she said simply and wondrously.
At this point I figured I should take a look, so I raised myself up a bit. My sleepy eyes took a few moments to adjust, and the terror came in layers. First the stove itself, which my eyes sort of conjured up as being covered with a black and goopy sauce type of thing that I’ll just call “beanstuff”, as if it had boiled over. However, my eyes defied imagination and enlightened me to the fact that this beanstuff was not only on the stovetop but also on the control panel area. My eyelids extended higher and I saw that it was also spread across the front of the microwave above the stove, and also on the wall and cupboards near the stove. This all paled in comparison, though, to the black, beany mass that covered the area of ceiling above the culprit pot and slightly resembled the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb.
At this my heart sank and I groaned, indulging my facial features in the comforting fabric of my blanket. Something extraordinary and out-of-this-world pulled me from my almost-slumber to the kitchen to inspect the damage, however, and my tired legs obeyed reluctantly.
Trying unsuccessfully to avert my eyes from the beany mushroom cloud, I dragged myself the few feet from my chair to the kitchen, and I stopped right on the edge of it. I have to admit that I had a slight fear of being blasted to bits by beans if I stepped inside.
Standing on the barrier between the kitchen and the living room marked by the definite line between wood floor and red tile, I could see that the effects of the explosion had reached far greater barriers than just that of the vicinity of the stove. Splatters of beanstuff were on the floor (already being wiped up by my dad at the moment), on the refrigerator, the dishwasher, even the wall completely opposite the stove, which must have been more than ten feet away, and not a single appliance in the room had escaped devastation. The breadmaker, juicer, blender, toaster…all covered in splotches of black and beany glup.
Even though I had been thoroughly enjoying my almost-nap, and had been planning on doing a great many productive things afterwards, I felt that I simply could not skip out on this great event, and that I would have to help clean even if I wasn’t required to. Once again, my body began moving forward unwillingly and I asked where I should start cleaning, with my eye on the wall. That particular area was suggested, and I immediately pounced on the job, grabbing a rag and immersing it in cold water. I began to scrub.
A wall, you may think, is a strange thing to have to clean, to have to scrub, but it must be done. You’d never believe what a little water could do to improve one. Our wall was already in need of some scrubbing, and so I felt particularly accomplished as I removed beanstuff along with years-old grime that had probably been there since before we moved in. My father began experiencing similar pleasures as he mopped up the ceiling, reveling in the fact that it was made of some “laminated, non-permeable material”, and would not need a paint job to cover up. My mom began work on the counter and another side wall, along with starting to clear pictures and various awards off the fridge, which had not been spared from the spray, and each one bore at least one, if not faint, memorable mark of its participation.
The splotches of beanstuff on my wall were rare, at least in comparison to other areas in the kitchen, and so it was not a job in need of high energy levels. Good, because I didn’t have them. I actually sat down on the floor, letting my right arm scrub halfheartedly at one spot for minutes, my eyes closing and trying to return to sleep, but my determined mind and strangely willing body continuing to scrub with imagined vigor. I mentioned that I was still tired somewhere early in our conversations, and my parents both seemed very cordial to the idea of me temporarily quitting my job and going back to sleep, but I refused. I did not feel obliged to in any way, but I felt that it was a simple and assumed task that I would have to do, not something expected or encouraged, but rather an activity that might fall under “Family Experiences” – those things we all grudgingly accept as rewarding, but maybe not enjoyable. One of the biggest reasons I did get up and I did start scrubbing was because I wanted to be part of the experience, and I wanted to be proud of what we had done when we were finished, I wanted to be able to fantasize and plan, all the time I was working, about what exactly I was going to do when I finished, and I wanted to look forward to it with earned glee, and I wanted to gloat, and I wanted to be able to slump down, completely exhausted, in that chair, and have good reason to. I wanted the memory, and the story, of helping my parents clean up the beans.
And so I was there when Bean Day came into being.
Somewhere in our joking and rambling discussion of what our lives had become in the last twenty minutes, someone – I believe it was my father – mentioned that we should have a way of remembering this day. We should celebrate it, we should laugh at it, and we should cry about it. Presently the words “Bean Day” made their way into the conversation, and then we were already coming up with ways to celebrate it and what we would do in the coming years. Eating beans, of course, was obvious.
“We’ll make them in a pressure cooker. We can have lots of people over, and they can each make their own dish. The only requirement is, they have to be made in a pressure cooker,” my dad said, and after a few moments of shared laughter, he added, “And if they don’t have one, we’ll provide ‘em!”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “the main dish can be right in the middle of the table and we can just keep it in the pressure cooker.”
We also talked about how we would tell this story to our friends and relatives for years to come.
“It’ll go down in the annals of our family history,” my mom said, except she pronounced it “anals”, and my dad gave her a doubtful look and asked with a chuckle if she meant “annals” and she started laughing, and I started laughing, and soon we were all enveloped in an irresistible comedy that even the most distinguished and proper person would be overcome by. We were all laughing at the astounding strangeness of the English language, and how much difference one little “n” could make.
I’m also sure that whole scene will go down in the annals of our family history.
We spent a good two hours cleaning up that kitchen, and we shared many laughs in the process. I was able to complete cleaning the wall, the counter, several appliances, and wash the dishes. Quite impressive, in my opinion, for someone who was ready to enter the deepest chasms of sleep. After we had finished cleaning one thing, we would each step back and admire the amazing speed and intelligence we had put to work to embrace the job set upon us. I’d never even imagined what it would be like to clean up a mess of this magnitude. It was the kind of thing you only see in movies, and as an audience you never have to witness the process of disposing of the inexplicable mess. (“Disposing of”, in the case of a movie set, would probably mean throwing it out and never using it again, so they wouldn’t have to worry about the beans in the cracks between the stove, or those that had gotten on the plates inside the cupboard.)
When the counters and walls and appliances and the stove and microwave and refrigerator and floor had all been sufficiently cleaned, and we were ready to quit and never see that kitchen or those beans again in our entire lives, my dad decided to go to the library to pick up a movie he had requested. He was finished with his job, which I admit, and I believe my mother would agree, was probably the hardest and most disgusting of them all, considering he had to literally mop up the beans on the ceiling, which kept falling on his glasses as he was looking up, and those on the stove and the underside of the microwave, in all those little cracks….I honestly don’t know how he did it! Anyway, when he had fulfilled that task, and my mom and I were almost done with the last, finishing touches on what we were doing, and there wasn’t really anything else he could do without getting in the way, he, indeed, decided visit the library. (Actually, he probably could have cleaned the cupboards that were above the dishwasher, which had thin beanstuff splatters, but enough to be quite noticeable, but no matter, we won’t bother him about that. He cleaned them up later.)
When he got home we settled in with a simple dinner that required no cooking or heating up whatsoever, and we watched one of our favorite, coziest family movies. We each had had different plans for that night, but no one pursued them. I think we all felt that we deserved a break from our busy and productive lives for one night, which had already become much more busy and productive than we had intended. So no one felt as if they were being a couch potato, or could be doing better things at the time. For goodness’ sakes, we had earned it!
I think we all learned something from that experience, even if it was just to always keep the temperature particularly low when using a pressure cooker. That’s what my dad said, although he already had it very low, and there was no plausible or predictable reason for the pressure cooker to act so bluntly. My mom said she was going to be careful in the kitchen whenever a pressure cooker was in action. We were all inexorably grateful that no one was in the kitchen when the pot so nonchalantly “blew up”. If that circumstance had happened, I think the unlucky party’s face, and the clothes they were wearing, would have each bore a permanent scar of the event, though of different varieties, for the one on their clothes would be more beany, and that on their face would most likely be the normal image that comes to mind when you think of a scar. So there was that amount of thankfulness that came in, and I’m sure we won’t forget it for next Thanksgiving.
For me, however, I think the lesson learned was that family experiences really are the best, no matter what kind that experience may be. In this case, it was an extremely unwelcome, unfathomable, and absolutely awful event that has changed the course of my life, at least for one day – which really does affect my life, for it changes what I do the next day, and the day after, and so on. But we all got to experience it together, and I am very glad that I did decide to get up and help clean, even if it meant giving up what I’m sure would have been a positively wonderful nap, because otherwise I would have missed out on a great thing. Cleaning, certainly, is not enjoyable, but when you are with the right people, even at the wrong time, or the wrong place, it can still be bearable, even if not likeable. Family is fun, and family is wonderful, and whenever the opportunity arises, find a chance to embrace that fact, and to fully immerse yourself in the greatness of it. You won’t regret it. Even if it means missing out on something you are greatly looking forward to, something that will probably come again, unlike a really awesome family experience, of which each one alone is unique and rare and treasured, you still won’t regret it. You won’t. Just trust me.
Bean Day is an event that I’m sure I will never forget, and it will indeed go down in the “annals” of our family history, as a funny story and big clean-up, but also in my memory as a superb experience that will be treasured mostly because of the conversations and laughs that accompanied it, and not by the beans that we had to spend hours cleaning up. So mark your calendars everyone – December 27th: Bean Day!
