Kitchen=Community, Ananda=Bliss

It happened this way: a week or so into my first job in a kitchen, I was assigned to sort and wash beans.  Red kidney beans, five pounds worth.  I removed all the rocks, poured the hard little beans into a giant colander, and hosed them with cold water.  They changed from dull little bricks into brilliant red gems.  I put my face closer, so that their pattern filled my vision.  Thousands of identical shapes, with a clean white dot in the apex of each curve.

I felt a rush of real pleasure at the beauty of these beans. It took me by surprise.  I looked around me at my other co-workers, all bent to their tasks and grooving along with the kitchen stereo playing Yo La Tengo.  Who among them understood this feeling?  The Shift Leader passed by the sink on her way to the cooler.  She was a painter or something, I had heard. "Hey," I said.  "Look at this."   I was blushing.

"Yeah?"

"Isn't that a beautiful color?"

She looked down at the beans, then looked at me briefly.  "Amazing huh?  Now get 'em in the pot."

I received something from that experience that built gradually into love for the craft of cooking.

". . . (Our) lives don't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world," Bogart says in Casablanca.

Well, maybe not, but a hill of beans changed the course of my life.