Hill of Beans

In my last post I mentioned that after college I lived for a while in an apartment building in Burlington, North Carolina. I lived on the second floor and another single man lived across the hall from me. He appeared to be around 30 or 35 years old, and he made his living as a contract engineer. His job sent him from city to city. He would work at a company for a year or two until his contract job was completed and then he would move on to another job in another city or state.

I didn’t really know him. He was a quiet fellow and kept mostly to himself. He never said much, but he always seemed happy; he always had a little smile on his face, as if he was slightly amused at the world, as if he was “in on” some fantastic secret that no one else knew. Sometimes he would bring a woman home to spend the night, but it was always a different woman. Once I asked him about one of his overnight guests and he replied that she was “just some floozy” he had picked up.

Eventually his contract in Burlington was finished and he moved out of his apartment. I came home from work one evening and he had his door open. He was giving his apartment a final cleaning. I looked in and saw him standing in the middle of his kitchen with a broom. He was sweeping the ceiling.

This was a remarkable sight to me. I had never seen anyone sweep their ceiling. Curious, I entered his apartment and looked at the kitchen ceiling. It was covered with brown spots.

“What are those brown spots on the ceiling?” I asked.

“Beans,” he replied. I looked again and then I recognized them: yes, they were dried beans. Then he explained.

One night he had come home late and slightly intoxicated. Feeling a need to put food in his stomach, he put water into a saucepan on the gas stove and placed a large can of pork and beans in the saucepan – unopened. Then he lit the gas burner and went into his living room to lie on the sofa while the water got hot and heated the beans in the can. And he fell sound asleep.

Time passed, and the water in the saucepan boiled away. The liquid inside the can of beans began turning to steam and building up to an enormous pressure. Finally, the can could no longer withstand the steam pressure. The sound of the explosion woke him up.

What had happened in the kitchen was this: the top blew out of the can and the beans shot straight up to hit the ceiling as if fired from a scattergun. Sitting over the burner had been a heavy, round cast iron grate on which the saucepan had been sitting. He showed me the remnants of the grate: it was now in three pieces.

Being a practical man, he had left the beans on the ceiling. They weren’t in his way and besides, “out of sight, out of mind”. If he cleaned them off the ceiling and then had the misfortune of dying before he moved out, he would have cleaned up the mess for nothing. But now that he was moving out he wanted to get his deposit back, and it wouldn’t do to have dried beans plastering the kitchen ceiling.

I said goodbye and good luck, and I left his apartment. The last time I saw him he was at work with his broom, sweeping the kitchen ceiling.