How I Met Lampy the Bean

I have a friend named Lampy the Bean. Admittedly Lampy has not always been his name, it’s a nickname that my mom inadvertently gave to him, but that comes later. So here’s the story of how I met Lampy, and like any good story, it starts in Mexico. It was about five years past now when my family and I were on a vacation in Mexico for my grandparents’ anniversary, and thus it was a nice family vacation. One day, however, we decided to go looking for a “real” Mexican place (because apparently being located in Mexico isn’t enough to call it a “real” Mexican restaurant). Eventually we found a place that looked like it would have good food but was in a place that didn’t make us fear for our lives too much. We get in and we’re served dinner, the meal is winding down and I’m at the table with my oldest cousin Bob and there’s a pepper on my plate. So naturally, Bob tries to get me to eat the pepper and he offers me a one peso coin. At first this seemed like a good idea, but I decided I wasn’t that easy and I would hold out for more, plus after a quick conversion I realized it was only ten cents. A short while later he had doubled his offer to two pesos. I agreed, the terms were set, and we had a deal. I ate the pepper and shortly thereafter believed I had won out because it wasn’t too hot, when all of the sudden it started to burn. I quickly downed two or three waters because of course all the food was gone (meal winding down, remember) and had slightly lessened the degree of the burning at the cost of some spreading. Moments later as we were leaving, we found out that each glass of water had cost extra… oops. Naturally, years down the road my cousin remembers this and introduced me to my friend Lampy on, or very near to, my birthday I think. Last summer I felt an extra special connection to Lampy and consequently he was around a lot more often. When my mom saw Lampy she would always call him the bean plant. What about that bean plant over there? When are you going to take that to college? Then as we were traveling to drop me off at the airport to go to college while he was in the car, my mom again misnamed him and just called him Lampy. We already thought the bean plant was such a funny name when I said Lampy the bean, it just stuck. That’s how I met my magnificent ghost pepper plant, Lampy the Bean plant. And now I would like to issue a challenge to my cousin, Bob: once I have grown peppers, I want you to have one with me and write a review on your blog.

So Scott thought.