Have you ever felt like you were headed down the road in one direction only to see a number of signs luring you a different way?

 I’ve been reading a variety of things lately. As usual, a few of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. I gave up on Cokie Roberts’ Ladies of Liberty as too slow and polemical, but greatly enjoyed The Long Embrace (Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved) by Judith Freeman. (Chandler didn’t know Cissy was 17 years older than him when he married her; the description of Cissy’s life as a bohemian in turn of the century Harlem is fun, as is the depiction of Chandler in Los Angeles in the teens and twenties, and the story of how Chandler delivers the screenplay for The Blue Dahlia is flabbergasting.)

I’ve been reading a lot of Penelope Fitzgerald’s fiction, and very much admire her natural style, which renders extraordinary situations in such a plausible, economical way. So it’s in that milieu that several coincidences occurred.

 In the introduction to the Nero Wolfe trio of mysteries Death Times Three, Stout’s biographer, John McAleer, writes that Stout once told him he felt “men did everything better than women, but that was before I read Jane Austen. I don’t think any man ever wrote better than Jane Austen.” He goes on to say that he asked Stout, a few days before his death, what Wolfe was reading. “Rex confided, ‘He’s rereading Emma.’ Rex ranked Emma as Jane Austen’s masterpiece. In the last weeks of his life he also reread it. That a book could be reread was to him solid proof of its worth.”

 Increasingly intrigued by Penelope Fitzgerald as a writer, beyond her fiction, I also ordered The Afterlife, a series of her essays and book reviews. The very first one is on Jane Austen’s Emma. Fitzgerald also felt Emma was Austen’s best work. She likes the character of the meddling Emma, and comments on the morality behind her backfiring attempts at matchmaking, pointing out Emma’s “sin of thought.”

 After Rex Stout’s death, the publisher tried to keep the Wolfe franchise going via one Robert Goldsborough, who in the 1980s published a Wolfe mystery titled Murder in E Minor. Attempting to drum up interest, they published a few pages of the beginning in the back of a Stout book, and it has the laggardly Wolfe admonishing his dogsbody Archie, “desist using the word ‘retired.’ I prefer to say I have withdrawn from practice.’ And with that he would return to his book, which currently was a re-reading of Emma by Jane Austen.”

The day I read that during my commute I found they had a book sale in the lobby of our building for some worthy cause. I browsed and found an interesting title of two, before finding Emma all by itself. No other Austen. It might have been flanked by a cookbook and a travel guide, for all I can recall.

But it was obvious where this was going. It was simply time for me to buy the freaking thing. Although the college text (with intro by Lionel Trilling) was a heftier paperback than I like to lug up and down Market Street in my backpack, I recognize the cosmic signposts when faced with them—I shelled out a few bucks and bought the book.

This weekend Mrs. O and I went up to Inverness, on Tomales Bay (in part to deliver some firewood after our big blow). I hadn’t been there for a while, and after we had settled in was browsing their shelves again. I had The Afterlife with me (and had just recently read her review of  Emma), and there, on a shelf mostly of sci fi, biographies and popular fiction, was a copy of the book.

Clearly, merely by purchasing Emma I wasn’t heeding the messages enough. Although I’d left my newly purchased copy back at home, obviously I was supposed to begin reading it. Inverness is secluded and ideal for reading—quiet, far beyond the city and sheltered by mountain ridges, with poor cell phone reception and limited radio signals (our hosts do have cable TV—but that’s as limited as TV ever is).

So, in amongst the dogwalks, hauling the poplar firewood from our backyard windfall under their deck, enjoying the view over the bay, and eating whatever we wanted whenever we wanted to, I’ve now begun Emma.

You don’t have to hit me over the head.

The dogs and I were out recently, a pleasantly foggy dawn, enjoying the new day.  When we got out to the misty campground, looking over to the boat ramp, the sky looked like this:

I like the sunlight off the fence. Overall, feeling kind of mysterious, no? Where those low trees are, at right, I also found something for my friend up in the North Bay, La Puenta (as my real estate agent who lived in Point Richmond called it).  Lazy Buddhist had a spidery post and in honor of her arachnophilia (arachno-ambivalence?) I took these pictures at the park district’s kiosk, where I counted seven webs:

There’s nothing quite like  foggy morning to bring out the predatory details of an arachno-trap:

The funny thing is, in these pictures I don’t see a spider anywhere. Maybe it was too cool a morning?

I have to admit, in a gruseome sort of way, I like the overlapping web thing. I mean, come on little fly, you think you can get through one? We’ve got another right behind. And what happens when a fly is snared? Does the other spider come out and salivate?

Farther down the path I found a gaggle of geese on the sidewalk. I think they were aware of Edie before she saw them.

You see the heads go up, the pace quicken, and they begin honking a quiet warning to each other, then Edie realizes they are there, runs forward, and the plump young family takes off.

Wings beating the air, the stillness broken by honking grown more earnest.

How cold is it, to plonk your butt down in that water?

Oh c’mon, they’re used to it. Boooosh!!

Okay, everybody here? Come on, now, let’s all gaggle together.

Not sure what about this tickled me so much, but there was something in the sequence I liked, I guess in how they all gathered together once in the water.  Behind them, that lump on the end of the dock is a snoozing harbor seal, delaying its plunge into the water to begin the new day.

We had a little hassle with the SF Bay Bridge recently, closing it down. You may have heard about it.

It negated one of my routes to work (the casual carpool) and turned the other two (ferry and Bay Area Rapid Transit: BART) into sardine experiences. It wasn’t too inconvenient on the ferry for us regulars. And at SF’s ferry building they even set up cordon “chutes” to direct confused newbies onto the right boats to cross the bay. While boarding in the morning, the line to buy tickets for the new conscripts got incredibly long. (Regular commuters buy books of tickets, but these folks were buying a day’s round trip, hoping the bridge would get fixed.) The line formed down an aisle, wrapping around the cabin of the boat and, one morning, out the door and down the ramp to board, before they shooed everyone in so they could pull the ramp down and chug off toward the city.

With the added demand, they ran more trips including some new crew—one of the crew on the afternoon boats was a gregarious, chatty fellow.  On Monday afternoon the news came that they had finally re-opened the bridge. As we boarded, he exhorted us all to continue to take the ferry, that the boats would be there when the cars and bridge failed us. Worth a smile.

As we arrived in Alameda he opened the doors to let us off the boat, and as we began shuffling down to hand off our tickets and head home, he hollered, “and don’t you all get back in your cars tomorrow!”

A number of us broke up laughing. But we’ll see. I bet ridership soon goes back to what it was.

 I seem to have developed a thing for trying to save scrawny trees. When I had such a notion last spring, near where I work at SF’s Civic Center, it met an ignoble end. 

 Sometime earlier this summer there was a fire in the old campground out on the former naval air station, where I walk the pups. The kids sometimes party out there at night, and occasionally the homeless spend a night there; it isn’t hard to guess how it started. Most of the burn evidence is gone and green was sprouting again by autumn, but you can still see some evidence of the fire.

While some underbrush and a tree were burned out, I noticed that  one tree (with supporting poles), while scorched, seemed to have survived.

While Alameda is nothing like SF for homeless encampments, there’s still evidence people bunk down for the night out here, such as this windbreak devised in the old campground:

 The police presence is thin late at night. Last New Years, a few of us dog walkers noticed someone had rammed the campground’s fence. The new gap in the fence lines up with a straightaway approach from the main gate (you can just make out the approach under the branches below)—it’s not hard to imagine some revelers gunning it down the straightaway and, for whatever reason, not turning away at the last minute. On New Years Day the evidence included parts of the undercarriage strewn among the smashed branches, twigs, and leaves of the bush they took out—ten months later most of the debris is gone but the gap remains. (The deep ruts made clear they couldn’t extract their car–in desperation they must have gotten a friend to come and tow the car out.)

Btw, the skinny tower just beyond the car’s windshield (and behind the left edge of the tree) is a practice fire tower; those four T-shaped odd towers to the left were used by the Navy to test jet engines. One of the dog walkers who grew up here says they roared pretty loud when they fired those babies up. 

But at the burn site, a forlorn little tree had survived. Last July, August and September I brought buckets of water out about once a month and poured it into the ground around this little guy (hoping it didn’t need drought and dormancy in summer, and I was doing more good than harm).

 It did have green branches coming up from its base (the Mrs. calls them “suckers”) and I took them as a good sign—until I came back and someone had cut them all away. (Huh?) It may have been someone from the east bay park service for all I know, but still, wouldn’t a little tree like this need all the functioning greenery it can get? Look close and you can see the raw spots, below.

 Well, we’ve made it through the dry season, now comes our Mediterranean climate’s wet season. The tree looks to be the same species as one of its neighbors; hopefully they’ll both thrive this winter and have lots of new growth next spring.

I like the campground. It’s a pretty netherworld. It’s not hard to imagine what it once was, when the gates were manned by armed guards, and retired veterans came in their campers and used the hookups here to spend the night.  

It’s a huge political football here in Alameda, how the vast old naval air station will be reused. I’m sure much good will be done–if they also figure out a way to get all the extra people on and off the island. But for now, the old and abandoned remains beautiful to me, just as it is.

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Our Edie Girl – Mighty Squirrel Hunter

 Our dear Edie girl lives a good life—plenty of walks, lots of tummy rubs and affection, a couple days a week with her pals at doggie day care. Sure, she’d rather have more people food in her diet than doggie kibble, but until she starts bringing home a paycheck, chicken and lamb kibble is what she gets. Still, that’s not the biggest frustration for our girl. That would be the tantalizing closeness of jackrabbits springing from cover, the taunts of squirrels just out of reach. (And they do taunt her, pausing on lower branches to chatter insults, stopping on the fence, squirrel aroma perfuming the air, with teasing tail twitches as they jabber at her.)

 Edie will spend the day on our back deck, watching them down in the yard until the torment gets the best of her and sprints down to chase them up trees. She will lay down by the pear tree, hoping they will forget her until she makes her charge, missing again.

 Until last weekend. We were in our small front yard, Mrs. O tending her garden and me digging a hole for her to transplant a bush, with the dogs hanging out close by. I monitor them more closely in front, obviously, with traffic out on the street and passersby who might fear dogs. And they do push the envelope, moseying out to the sidewalk, but obey when I scold them. Out of the corner of my eye I was suddenly aware of an unusual commotion; the dogs rounded the fence into our neighbors’ yard. Preoccupied, I glanced around to see a squirrel tossed in the air. Those squeamish about such matters should skip the next paragraph.

 It startled me; then I told my wife that Edie had finally gotten a squirrel. Ernie knew it first, and his hunting instincts had kicked in, too, as he was close on Edie’s tail. I’m not sure what had gone on in that squirrel noggin—maybe it had wanted to cross the street and thought it could get past her. Anyway, what I saw was her tossing it in the air to break its spine. When I approached she backed off, deferring to the alpha, and I shooed the dogs back into our yard. The poor little rodent was trying to drag itself under a car. It’s not easy for me to feel sorry for any of them—given how they chew up our deck and the wiring for our deck lights, how they dig our yard into a checkerboard, how they uproot our planters, but you hate to see anything in pain. I took the shovel I had been using and gave it a quick jab at the curb to end its suffering.

 We threw it away in the trashbin in our sideyard, and Edie went to hang out there, near her inexplicably discarded trophy. It must have seemed so unfair. Finally she had gotten one, and rather than winning praise and adoration, we’d tossed it in that smelly old bin. Another example of the perplexing behavior of humans.

Mrs. Ombud and I were watching a movie (Little Fish, I think) when the phone rang. We don’t always pick up during a movie, figuring they’ll leave a message if it’s important, but when I heard my next door neighbor’s voice I hit pause and got the phone. He was talking about some large branch that fell in our yard, across the fence into his.

We talked for a bit, and then Mrs. O and I went out into the yard. This was after quite the big wind storm we had here, with gusty bursts of rain, on Tuesday October 13.  It was still very dark and wet out in the yard, so it was hard to see the damage. But the next morning the view from our back deck looked like this:

The limbs fell from the back of the yard toward our homes, straddling the fence line and falling on his sheds (notice dent). Our neighbor has a chainsaw, so we made plans to get out there the next day and chop up the branches. I clambered up into the old kid’s house a prior owner built in the back corner of our lot, and took a picture from our yard into our neighbor’s.

I also stood up by our house and took a picture of the tree. The point where the larger branch snapped off is obscured, but on its way down it took out another limb, and that’s what you can see here:

As you can see, it’s quite a way up there.

So my neighbor and I got together and cranked up the chainsaw, heaving branches away from the fence into the middle of our yard, until we had quite a pile, and I stacked all of the logs he sectioned off, wondering in the back of my head, who do we know who needs firewood?

Poplar probably isn’t the best, as it’s so light it’ll burn quickly. We’ll find out; I stacked it under the kid’s tree house. My wife’s cousin has a house up in Inverness with a fireplace,  a cozy retreat, so we’ll toss the wood into the back of our truck and drive it up to Inverness some weekend in the near future.

Another view from the kid’s house, sjhowing how much foliage came down. (Every week now, we fill the green waste bin–and I mean fill it. I’ve been trimming branches and packing it down to give the city as much compostable leafy matter each week as we possibly can.

Finally, the pears. The blessed pears I’ve been waiting to ripen since, oh, July. we’ve been harvesting like crazy here. most of them stay pretty green, but they do ripen sort of. And I have a coworker who likes some hard, unripened fruit (pears among them). He has a whole bin in our downstairs fridge now, full or pears. (“Put them in the fridge!” he tells me. “Don’t let them ripen any further!”)

We’ve had a very nice pear cobbler, and a pear pie, and we gave a lot of the pears to our neighbor with the chainsaw. A day or so after the big blow, when I took these pictures, I was trying to show the fallen trunk through the leaves, and you can’t see much, but you can see that in mid-October we still have fruit onthe tree.

And on this note, I’m going back upstairs to see if I can take a nap before getting up and going to work.

Despite the fact that  I’ve worked for a computer book publisher and a technical media organization (jobs I approached as editor and journalist, respectively), I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always grok the bells and whistles.

But I thought I had a pretty firm handle on email, and how it works, and a general sense of wordpress. Actually, it’s wordpress that seems to leave me in its dust all too often.

In the past, when I wanted to email a fellow blogger privately, without online publication, it was easy enough to simply respond to the email notification I got in my inbox. Hit reply, type away, and hit send. I did that on Sunday, logged off, and went about the rest of my day, involving cleaning up the equipment and putting it away after bottling 10 gallons of imperial stout Saturday, yardwork, televised sports, and making a dang good batch of Feijoada Incompleta (a Brazilian black bean soup I’ve modified) if I say so myself.

I logged on today to finally crop and post some pictures of the storm damage we sustained a couple weeks ago, and got quite the rude shock. The email I’d thought I’d sent personally to another blogger had been posted in the comments section of my last post. WTF?!?!

It was germane only to a recent post on that person’s blog, so it was a total non sequitur here–but it sure threw me for a loop. It’s 5 am here (insomnia, again) so I was already “feeling kind of ethereal” (Thank you, Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders) and I couldn’t figure out how it happened. How on earth did my email end up in my blog? I couldn’t possibly have been so far out of it that I wrote a private note in the comments section while on the web, could I? Maybe it’s time to call the funny farm …

But now I realize that wordpress has set it up so that, when a comment arrives in your inbox, if you hit reply (which used to send a message to your correspondent, I swear it) it now gets posted in the same blog post. Sheesh. Okay, it looks different in the inbox now, but still. The same Pretenders’ song, Precious, also references Howard the Duck (“Now howard the duck and mr stress both stayed“) and if you remember Howard, you know that his tagline was “trapped in a world that he never made.”

I can relate.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

This is probably as good a place as any to show what happened to the wayward sailboat I posted on earlier this month, floating home to the homeless guy and his dog. I tried to post these photos in my comment, after our big storm October 13, but don’t see a way to post photos in comments. (I’m not going to claim there isn’t a way to do it.)

Anyway, later that week, after the storm, on a very foggy, still morning, I went out with my camera and found the boat looking like this:

His bicycle is gone, so I know he wasn’t on board during the storm. And it was really rocking on the bay, so I can’t imagine he tried to ride the storm out–obviously, the waves swamped the boat. And now it’s the city’s problem …

Nor no e-mail, neither. (Triple negative there—whichever direction that ends.) 

Last Thursday I couldn’t access either email or the internet here at home. Oh, bother. This has happened before with Comcast, and internet access later comes back, so I gave the problem one of my favorite solutions—I ignored it, hoping it would go away.

 It didn’t. I was off last Friday and had a couple ideas for posts, but all day long—no internet. So Saturday morning I called Comcast and navigated the phone menu (doing my best to keep blood pressure in check) and finally was told there was a high volume of calls and I should opt for a callback later. Fine. So half an hour later they called me back and put me on hold for a bit anyway, promising I could speak to someone … soon. I got a very definitive young man who, upon realizing that I’d come into Comcast from Alamedanet (our local ISP and cable TV utility that Comcast swallowed, shanghaiing us, too) he identified my old Surfboard cable modem by model number and adamantly told me I had to replace it. Either rent one from Comcast or go buy a new one. He guaranteed, aggresively, that this would solve the problem.

I thought to myself that he probably deals with cranky customers all day long, and his emotional, high energy approach was probably both outlet and self-defense.

 I was preoccupied with a project last weekend, but Monday night, after Mrs. O picked me up from BART and our pups from Happy Hound, we went to Best Buy and forked over $90 plus, with tax, for a new Surfboard modem.

 Which I plugged in and didn’t work—but I expected that.

So I called Comcast and spoke to a very earnest young man, probably in Pakistan or The Punjab or The Philippines, who tried for a little over an hour to get me back on line. Much disconnecting and re-connecting of cords, with me reading long gibberishy serial numbers and MAC ID numbers, etc. into the phone, and him repeating it and unplugging cords and re-plugging cords and then him  coming back on and asking me to recite the same, dang, numbers, again. (Sadly, I’m not exaggerating.)

 It didn’t work. We needed a technician. So we scheduled a tech visit this morning, and it turned out my wireless router wasn’t talking the new modem’s language. Or so they claim.  He also said they had made changes to their system that rendered the other modem obsolete–do you think someone might have let us know this could happen? Rather than just cutting us off and leaving us to hang without access for almost a week? Anyway, I’m back, and newly enamored of the Internet.

 Really. Once you get used to finding crap online, it’s a nuisance when you can’t. Looking words up on Merriam-Webster, checking ESPN to see who won last night’s baseball game, looking up TV listings or arcane info on who some movie starred, all that stuff.

 I’ve got several items I’ve meant to post on, including finally posting honestly, per the Honest Scrap tags of my fellowbloggers. I’ll get there—honesty is just proving more elusive than I thought.

 *    *    *    *    *    *

In the meantime: my exploding Coke can. I’m not a big soft drink guy. But every so often I want the mild carbonated caffeine-sugar water buzz, usually to get some task done, with artificial flavoring and Latin-named chemical compounds and preservatives for pickling my internal organs. We have a bunch of sodas down in the basement left over from some party. So I got a Coke, and tried to open it, and the ring broke off. I took a fork and tried to punch open the can, and it exploded open with a bang!

Surprised the hell out of me. I stared at the flap blown outward for a couple seconds, wondering if it was safe to drink the explosive beverage:

  Aw, hell, I’m not a kid imperiling my whole lifetime any more. (Once past 50, you’re over the hump, right?) I drank the thing down. The twitching has mostly subsided now, and I don’t think any permanent damage was done.

The boat first appeared in late spring. With the battered economy, perhaps its owner had abandoned it, and it had drifted into the boat ramp harbor, and there it sat, mired in the mud. I thought the angle was kind of arresting, so I took a few pictures of it.

Over the next few weeks, with the tide coming in and out, it would re-float and move around. I ran into a few other guys on a regular basis, all of us exercising our dogs, and we wondered where it had come from.

Once, while walking the dogs on the rip rap outside the fence behind Encinal high school (above the water line in the photo, above) my dogs began growling and I was startled to find a homeless guy, wrapped in plastic, like that used as a bed liner in trucks, and holding on tight to his big dog. As we were practically on top of him, I said, “My dogs are friendly. Is yours?”

He had a brindle pit bull. “Sometimes,” he answered. Edie girl got close and his dog snapped and growled; I could see it took all his strength to hold his dog back as we passed by.

 Soon after that we noticed a dingy tied up to the abandoned boat on occasion. It appeared that he had set up housekeeping at night on the boat.

 His battered old bicycle would be chained to the fence and the dingy tied to the boat when he was there; otherwise the dingy would be tied up to the dock and the bike would be gone.

We avoided him after our one run-in, but I’d see him maybe a couple times a month this summer. I didn’t particularly like the way he yelled at his dog. But then, I don’t know if people yelled the same way at him, sometimes.

He appeared to be of Asian or Hispanic ancestry, and his hair was always matted and wild. He’d get on his bike, his dog on a chain, and ride off into the former naval air station.

The other dogwalkers and I wondered how long it would last–one of them felt the city of Alameda should send him packing.  Then we noticed a light on the boat one morning. By law, when out of their marina, all boats are to have a light on at night. So someone had apparently told him that, if he was going to spend the night on board, he had to keep the boat lit.

So it was home, with a dock provided by the city. A few times the boat had moved quite a distance; once this summer it was even up on the rip rap across the small harbor; we wondered how he had gotten it so far above the waterline.

 The rainy season is coming now, winter. During a storm, with the tide in, I’ve seen the dock above buckling in the waves until planks broke loose. I’m not sure what he intends, come wintertime.

 It makes me glad, though, to have a home, with a furnace, and electricity, and plumbing–and a wife with a pair of dogs and a sleepy cat all waiting for me, too. 

Then we noticed a little dingy

Our BART train stalled in the Tube down on the floor of San Francisco Bay today. It seemed to run into some trouble as we left Oakland and entered the Transbay Tube, stopping and starting a couple times. During a stall the driver came on and said they were having technical difficulties and we would be delayed. The next time he came on he said they had to turn off the power for 90 seconds to get the train running again. There would be no lights.  So there we were, down on the floor of San Francisco Bay, in complete darkness.

It felt  like being on a submarine.

As I’ve mentioned before, I really, really, really don’t want to be in the Tube for the next major earthquake.

 It was standing room only when I got on, with all the seats full and a few people already clustered by the doors. I always move to the middle of the compartment—it bugs me when people block the doors. The train pulls into the Oakland station, and these idiots stand on either side of the doorway so everyone has to exit single file. There’s plenty of room in the middle of the railcar, but they won’t clear the doorway. After everyone leaving has gotten off, they look around, see that seats are open, so then they move out of the doorway to go take the seats.

 So it was an SRO crowd, the Monday morning drowze, people sleeping and reading their papers, and  then we stopped. While I tried not to think of all that water over my head.

And then he warned us, and it went dark, very, very dark–just a crowd of complete strangers beginning their work week stranded down at the bottom of the bay in utter darkness. (Yoo hoo, I’ve changed my mind–could we go back so I can take the bus instead?)

I resisted the urge to make that submarine emergency sound: Aooooouuuwga!  Aooooouuuwga! Dive, dive!

People quickly got out their cell phones and PDAs, so we had a few splashes of that eerie blue-white light.  I counted off the seconds. It started to get warm. I got up over 100 (maybe I was fast) when some lights came back on, and then more, and then the fans started again, bringing cool air. After a few lurches, we got going.

 I bet that delayed a lot of schedules, as trains stacked up behind us. Nothing like beginning the day with a little commute stress.  Okay, a weekend’s worth of relaxation has already worn off and we haven’t even stepped in the office door yet …

I’ve done exhaustive research on this.

Okay, I scribbled some lists of the best, and then I saw an article in the newspaper on the top ten vegetables.  In a survey of 2,559 households conducted last January, the National Gardening Association listed their ten most popular garden vegetables, and in second place, 47% of them listed: cucumbers. Cucumbers.

Be serious. Cucumbers taste like what happens when grass gets too much water. 

It just so happens that I’ve doodled the list of the ten best vegetables in the world, and I’m prepared to share. (The list, if not the veggies.) Botanical note: the gardeners’ list includes tomatoes as a vegetable and so do I. I know, really a fruit, seeds on the inside, some controversy involving  reclassification pertaining to imports and exports with Mexico last century, yadda, yadda. I’m not only counting tomatoes as a vegetable, they’re toward the top of my list:

1. Corn.  Fresh corn, not over-cooked, with some butter and a little pepper and salt is almost religion, it’s so good. Boiling is okay, but grilling is better. Corn is so good it’s almost it’s own category: vege-sert or desser-getable.

2. Onions. Especially red onions. They make almost anything better. I even slice them crosswise, so the concentric circles all hold together, and put them on the grill. You have to be patient and just turn the slice over once (you can’t flip it a lot or it all falls apart), but they cook up wonderfully. Sweet! Just a bit of Italian dressing, and it’s a great side dish all by itself. Onions may have a potent reputation, but when you think about it, they go in lots of dishes and play nice with many other foods.

3. Tomatoes. They can be heavenly good. All kinds. It’s sad what’s happened to store-bought tomatoes over the years; they’ve lost their flavor. Growing your own reminds you how delicious tomatoes can be. Another vegetable that plays nice with others.

4. Asparagus. I don’t recall liking asparagus as a kid. Too strong and grassy a taste–but as an adult I’ve learned to love asparagus, especially braised (tho’ steaming al dente is fine), and splurging on some proscuitto too wrap around the spears is heavenly.

5. Peas.  Snap peas, snow peas, it’s all good. During the holidays there has to be a bowl of peas with pearl onions on the table, it’s a tradition.

6. Broccoli. Another one I don’t remember liking much as a kid, but in college I came to love broccoli. Probably because it was something I liked in university cafeteria salad bars. Like asparagus, over-cooking is a pity and a waste; al dente is wonderful.

7. Romaine lettuce.  Simply put, the backbone of a wonderful salad.

8.  Carrots. Another vegetable that’s great on the grill. They also get very sweet.

9. Spinach. Not a big fan of cooked spinach, but raw it’s wonderful as the base for salads.

10.  Ripe bell peppers. After tasting ripe yellow, orange, or red bell peps, and finding out that green bell peppers are just unripe versions of the same,  green peppers just tasted unripe to me. I love red bell peps–they can really add flavor and zing to a pasta sauce.

Honorable mention:  Celery, squash, zucchini, black beans. Butternut squash in particular can be blissful — but a top ten list means … choices must be made.

Have I forgotten anything?