Waiting For the Lima Bean

Waiting for something to happen is the running theme in Hell on Earth, a love story. Hank was sent down to become a newspaper writer and in the end no amount of waiting was going to see that goal reached. On the subject of waiting, this story was written a quarter of a century ago and has also been waiting to see the light of day.

This story could easily be called, “The lima bean that never came” but that title hints at a rather sad ending and besides we don’t know that it never came. No this is simply a story about waiting and although waiting never comes easily “Waiting for the Lima Bean” is a much better title and a much nicer thought.

People wait for all kind of things to happen. They wait impatiently everyday for their mail to arrive—anticipating that special letter that will somehow make that day special. Of course, that letter rarely shows up. That is the definition of ordinary. Ordinary is what happens while we are waiting for the extraordinary. It can’t be any other way but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. The hardest thing to wait for is results.

Danielle’s kindergarten project was to plant a lima bean, place it on the windowsill where it would receive plenty of light, and record it’s growth over a two-week period. This is what the record showed—written in large block letters on fourteen lines of elementary school writing paper:

Day One - Nothing
Day Two - Nothing
Day Three - Nothing
Day Four - Nothing
Day Five - Nothing
Day Six - Nothing
Day Seven - Nothing
Day Eight - Nothing
Day Nine - Nothing
Day Ten - Nothing
Day Eleven - Nothing
Day Twelve - Nothing
Day Thirteen - Nothing
Day Fourteen - Nothing

As records go this one obviously didn’t go far enough—or maybe it went further than it had to. The surface story is pretty straightforward but the sub story, as read between the lines, tells a completely different tale of woe. It is a story of going to bed filled with anticipation that the arrival of morning light will bring with it that very first sign of a bud—a bud that crawled and scratched its way through the night and through the earth, while she slept, to hook up with her to share that first ray of sunshine. It is an expectation, as the record shows that would go unfulfilled for two weeks.

A watched pot never boils, so the saying goes. Maybe that is what was at play here. Maybe she was following the seed’s journey too closely. But if that was the case, then what about the weekends? Surely two days with no one around—no poking, no staring—surely one would expect something to happen over a weekend—two days without distraction. Two days to grow just a little bit, to pop out of the dirt just the slightest, teeniest, tiniest, little bit. But alas, the record shows nothing—nothing for the weekend, nothing for the week, nothing for the two weeks.

Of course, this is often the way life is and many a parent or teacher would say, the sooner our children learn it, the better.

Hope for little, expect less, and be thankful for what you get. That is the way a lot of adults think. We even get upset with our kids, sometimes, when they expect too much. We do not arrive at this point easily. We offer them the voice of experience and the voice of experience had seen many a pipe dream go down the drain.

But that’s not the way a child thinks. With no failures in their past there is no reason to expect failures in their future. With the same determination and spunk of the boy who traded his mother’s only cow for a handful of beans, Danielle, brought the well hidden and not since seen seed home and planted it in the garden.

She covered it over with new dirt and then—and then, in spite of 14 days of nothing, she stuck a stick into the ground to support the future lima bean when it finally did make it’s move.

That was four months ago and the stick is still there. I’m sure she no longer expects to see a lima bean plant. Nevertheless, she hasn’t taken the stick out.

Optimism can best be defined through the eyes of a child or those rare adults who can dream like a child and think that everything is going to be as good or better than it has ever been.