A couple of weeks back, we were in the kitchen, making dinner, as one does. The Black Keys were playing on the kitchen JBL. I went to get a can of chickpeas out of the pantry.
“Ugh,” I said, looking at the can in my hand. “’Garbanzo bean’. What a foolish name for a bean. Just awful, especially when ‘chickpea’ is right there.”
M didn’t look up from the green leafy shit she was chopping, but I could see her smiling.
“A chickpea is elegant, cultured. Garbanzo sounds like a Muppet name that Jim Henson rejected. Who even came up with that shit?” A quick google search. “Of course it was the Spanish,” I said, like I possessed some long-held grudge against the people of Spain.
M set the knife down. “It’s a chickpea,” she said. “We only get this one life, so we won’t use the dumb, goofy name. We must romanticize the bean.”
“Romanticize the bean,” I repeated, rolling the phrase around in my head.
And thus, a new house rule was born.
Romanticize the bean. It can apply to more than just chickpeas.