We, the humble evangelists of the bean, are no more estranged from the grand pageant of humanity than the lentil is from the pulse, than the chickpea is from the falafel, than the soybean is from the inscrutable mysteries of tempeh.
And though some among us may be wedded to the carnivorous predilection, omnes homines sumus. Corporeality strikes a bean to dryness, myself to mucosus, and our friends in the coal mine—to black lung.
And so, it is with a sorrow that surpasses even the tragedy of an over-soaked chickpea, with a lamentation deeper than the cavernous abyss of a split pea sundered from its other half, that I must bear grim tidings: the eucharistic seed shall not be sown this weekend.
The fertile plot of our gathering, once poised to bring forth a bountiful harvest of mirth, must now lie fallow, abandoned to the ravages of misfortune. What cruel harvester has reaped our revelry before its time? What unseen weevil has burrowed into the granary of our plans? Oh, bitter harvest! A feast turned famine by the indifferent scythe of fate!
Though I longed to break bread (be it leavened or, in the ascetic purity of our calling, a gluten-free legume-based alternative) and raise a goblet of something fermented but ethically sound, I find myself instead cast adrift upon a sea most mucosal, my body wracked with affliction, my faculties dulled, my humors so unbalanced as to bring medieval physicians to their trembling knees.
But let us not despair, nor consign ourselves to the dust from which the lentil sprang! For though this season has failed us, the wheel of time turns, and another shall rise in its place. The soil of camaraderie remains rich, its loam dark with the promise of future feasting.
This is not the end—this is but a dormancy, a necessary winter before the spring of our next gathering, when laughter shall once more burst forth like a vine of heirloom legumes, when the air shall be thick with the fragrance of promise, and when the eucharistic seed, at last, shall find purchase in the sacred furrows of friendship.
Until then, may your legumes be tender, your pulses plump, your humors in celestial equilibrium, and your lungs—above all—unsullied by soot or sickness, as clear and vast as the clarion sky.
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