Not even a lucky bean tree could save my marriage…

Our first date was at a restaurant called the Lucky Bean. There at the bottom of Seventh Street Melville. She said, “Let’s go to your hood”, and that was the closest I could get to a hood.

I had lived in Melville when I first came to Joburg. So I guess that was my hood. I fetched her at her flat in Bryanston and we drove out to the Lucky Bean.

I was on fairly decent form, and flush enough to cover dinner and drinks, so that Lucky Bean date was followed by another one.

And another. And another ten or twelve. And then a weekend away in Clarens. And then a holiday in St Lucia to meet my parents.

By the time I met her parents, I was hatching plans for a marriage proposal. I compelled myself to purchase a ring.

Then I was so low on ideas, I basically handed her a brown paper bag and said, “It’s a engagement ring. D’you wanna get married?”

Somehow, that worked, and a wedding was scheduled.

It was on the beach in Cape St Francis, and instead of confetti, there were lucky beans. I’m not sure if it was the planner’s idea, but there were hundreds of lucky beans on the ground by the end of it.

Where do you even get that many lucky beans?

One of our guests, Tiffany it was, with her kids.

They collected a bunch of lucky beans, and then when we met up in Joburg again, they had germinated a lucky bean, and they were able to give us a potplant with a tiny seedling emerging from the soil.

The beginnings of a coral tree.

Back when I was making my way in the world, the first house I had rented with my own money had a coral tree out front. So I took it as a sign.

Meanwhile, in Joburg, we commenced our marriage in my upstairs unit. We had no access to soil where I might transfer the lucky bean plant and watch it grow into a robust, towering coral tree.

I looked forward to a life of deepening love, in parallel with the healthy tree, as it sunk its roots, spread its branches and opened its leaves to the sun.

In time, it would flower and drop lucky beans of its own, just as we began raising children. With any luck.

The best soil I could access was back home in the Eastern Cape, where I was able to plant the lucky bean sapling – now about shin height – on the lawn outside my parents’ block of flats.

The site was on the edge of a cliff, though, and exposed to the elements. The howling south-easter came off the sea. There was not a scrap of shade, and the soil was of a sandy type, starved of nutrients.

The lucky-bean plant refused to grow. Every time I returned home, I was disappointed to see it had grown not a centimetre taller.

In the meantime, we began raising a lovely daughter, but the lucky-bean tree was hardly keeping pace.

Sadly, the birth coincided with a deterioration in our relationship. We tried to make it work. For the child, as you do.

“As a family”, as the little girl was so fond of saying.

By the time she was five, we were divorced.

And the lucky bean tree had withered and died. On the site where it once grew, the desperate lawn reclaimed the space, leaving only a lighter patch of grass where that little sapling had once defiantly, briefly lived.  

Like a scar healing.