So last night I dreamed that I was going, very early in the morning, to catch a bus. This in itself is obviously a very whimsical notion….

Anyway, it was early enough to still be chilly, and there was dew in the shady places, but you could tell it would be hot by ten. I was cutting through somebody’s yard. They had tall garden plants – vegetables and things – growing along a fence on the street side. I could hear somebody on the street singing, so I went over and peeked through the bean vines to see what was up.
The song was a well-known tune from the popular light comic opera, “The Judge of Twopenny.” The title character is a comically corrupt judge with a problematically beautiful daughter, and the tune is quite catchy. I can’t figure out how to indicate the tune in this post, but if you ask me sometime I can probably sing it to you.
The chorus goes:

I am the Judge of Twopenny
So called by those who mock at me:
Out on the street they point and say,
“There goes the Judge of Twopenny!”

I know it doesn’t look like it rhymes, but it does – if you sing it with a sort of operatic flair, and as loud as possible: “There goooooooooes the Judge of TOOOOO—PEHNNNNN—AAAAAAAAAY!
Which is what the man on the bicycle was doing. He was an old man with a grey beard, but not at all frail: he seemed pretty sturdy. He was riding as slowly as possible, in long swerves, almost in circles, and bellowing out the chorus over and over. He seemed very happy. I thought about joining in, and the tune certainly caught in my head, but just then I noticed the giant peas growing on the vine.

It looked like the gardener had only picked the ones in the yard, and had ignored the ones growing through the fence on the sidewalk side. So I reached over to pick some because they looked delicious. They were sweet pod-peas, but at least as long as my hand and bigger around than my thumb. I collected as many as I could hold, and as I was walking to the bus stop, I was eating them, only they turned out to be butterbeans, and then they turned out to be black beans, and then I wondered if maybe black beans were actually just a riper version of other beans, like black olives and green olives, and then they were olives. And then the bus came and I woke up.

After I woke up, I remembered that in my dream, I could taste the different beans with my fingers.