The Black Bean

There she sat, eyeballing some Newman’s Own Salsa, the kind with the black beans and corn in it. Loves it on just about anything, which is what we were eating that evening. I saw her eyes move to the last one on her plate...A big bean he was, standing out among the corn and tomatoes and begging to be eaten. Her eyes got that glazed over look and I knew she was probably having one of those epiphanies that usually lead to me doing something around the house. “This color would look great on our shutters” she muttered, moving him around the plate. “Sure would, I said, save it.” She likes the stuff so much I knew there was no way big guy was going to make it into a plastic bag. I figured I’d be safe when she finally finished him off because as they say, “in the tummy, out of mind”. It makes me shutter to think about it because all our shutters are fifteen feet off the ground and the ladder I use every ten years to paint stops at ten. After that it’s me, a gallon of paint, and a brush, balancing on rung number one. Around the neighborhood they refer to me as “Mr. Wallenda”. Not that I mind painting understand, in fact I used to paint for money…now I just paint for love. It seems the sight of me holding a paint brush does wonders for the wife’s libido… that and the weedwacker. I try to weedwack once a day whether the place needs it or not. Our yard looks like the Sahara Desert but with gas at $4.00 a gallon, I may have to cut back to every other day. But I digress…again.

She ate him … but he had left one of those indelible marks on her brain, or maybe her taste buds, and so she still wanted to paint. So we developed the project sans bean, which was a real gamble, considering the value of our house is dropping like cow manure on its way to becoming a paddy. So I said, “You know, I think I remember that thing having a little red in it.” She picked her teeth and said, “Yep, I think you’re right”. “But that could have been the tomatoes in the salsa”, I said. “Could have” she nodded. I’m feeling like that little guy with the flower, “she’ll love me, she’ll love me not”, but we’re having the longest conversation we’ve had in days and I’m rather enjoying it. We finally settled on something that had the color of one of the dogs’ collars, reddish/black/maroon. The guy at the paint store didn’t like salsa but said “black bean is a color you know.” I thought I might find it somewhere near an illegal immigrant poster but went with the dog collar color.

Our shutters are currently green, so we’re looking at two coats for optimum coverage. I’m the idiot who put the green on there and I regret it. We could have gotten by with one coat, my painting philosophy being, if they can’t see it from the road, why bother. But ol’ “Beana Reena” wanted green so…So I called a good friend, who is a great painter and claims to be the guy who came up with the, “it ain’t the fall that hurts, it’s the sudden stop” adage and he convinced me we could get the shutters painted in record time if I would pay him a decent wage, buy him a ‘cuttin’ brush and put gas in his Lincoln, which he can drive to Myrtle Beach and half way back on a tank of gas. So I agreed to pay him something less than what is fair, being he’s my friend. We spent the next day painting shutters and talking basketball. He was just one shot short of the NBA in the eighties and I was thirty dollars short of being able to watch it on cable.

We finished the shutters with no mishaps and Mrs. “Mona Lisa” appears to be happy. Well, gotta get to the store for some gas. Time to fire up the ol’ weed wacker.