In retrospect I guess I could blame the whole lima bean incident on my husband, since it seems to be a "guy" thing. But it wouldn't be honest. Yes, I must admit it all started on my side of the family. In fact, my brother initiated the custom and, although the circumstances from the two were different, the spirit endures.
My brother's adventure unfolded when we were kids and my sister had a collection of pet turtles, some of which were a lot smaller than breadboxes. Our baby brother, still in diapers, coveted those turtles, although he never said anything about it since, of course, he couldn't talk.
But all holey-moley broke out one day when Elaine discovered two turtles were missing. The Family Disaster Response Team immediately went into panic mode (which was what we did best), ripping the house apart down to the studs in a futile search for the fugitives. During it all my brother Eddie sat placidly like a happy little Buddha, watching the frantic search, keeping his mouth shut and volunteering nothing. In fact, it was the closed mouth -- and puffed out cheeks -- that made the F.D.R.T. captain, also known as "Mom" or "Captain-Mom", suspicious enough to pry open his infant jaws and locate not one -- but two -- alive and very deeply distressed turtles stuffed inside. My sister, who still bears a grudge to this day, was forced to return the entire turtle collection to the lake from whence they were plucked.
Carrying on in his uncle's grand tradition, my eight-year-old had expressed displeasure for several days at having his ears cleaned -- nothing new really. He's hit a stage where he thinks grime is chic. But on Saturday I'd pretty much had it with Mr. Piggy, so I grabbed him and an ear swab and set about rectifying the situation.
"Ow!" he yelped as soon as the swab touched him. Well, it doesn't take Juan Valdez leaning on my doorbell to wake me up! So with a motherly show of concern, I threatened to clean his ears with a toilet plunger if he didn't tell me why he'd been avoiding ear-contact.
"Because there's a lima bean in my ear," he said. It had been there since Wednesday. "I was pretending it was a hearing aid," he continued, explaining this stroke of genius struck while involved in math computation with -- naturally -- dried lima beans. When my son, the John Belushi of third grade, went to remove it, the bean fell all the way in and he neglected to mention it because, as he put it, "I don't want surgery."
So his dad spent the morning at the doctor's office where the doctor apparently enjoyed my son's escapade so much that, after removing the bean, he took the boy out in back of his office and spent several moments demonstrating how a needleless syringe can double as a squirt gun. Then he gave him a demonstration in the fine, doctorly art of making water balloons out of surgical gloves. My husband, who snickered loudly throughout the entire legume episode, found a test tube in which to store the bean for posterity's sake. He plans to have it mounted and placed on the mantle right next to the bowling trophy.
So, to my son's teacher with my apologies, you are short a dried lima bean. As a side benefit, however, this incident has gone a long way toward explaining his recent math grades. And as for me, I'm just glad they were using beans that day instead of calculators.
