kind of proud of this.
DEAR COMPUTER GEEK,
For the first time since I met you, I was tempted to email you. I wanted to tell you how very, very impressed I was with your app. I almost couldn’t wait for my turn to write. Snail mail is no joke.
I know you said you had some help, but I got the feeling that it was informational help, and so I’m thinking you did this all yourself. I’m super impressed. I’m not lying.
What happens now?
Wow. You’re pretty demanding. I guess I’m glad I found this out now before our casual friendship deepened into close friends.
I’m kidding. Sorry. I think if we were talking, I’d be able to see your sense of humor better, and you mine.
Anyway, you asked me specifically about my favorite vegetable. I’m always a little sketchy about what constitutes a vegetable. Seriously. Because I like tomatoes, but tomatoes are a fruit. So are pumpkins.
And I think, technically, radishes are a root.
I’m not sure they qualify as a vegetable. But if we’re just including everything that you typically grow in a garden and calling it all vegetables, my favorite is spinach—cooked with butter and maybe a little garlic. And not cook cooked, just heated enough that the leaves are wilted. And it’s hot enough to melt the butter.
There’s nothing better.
In gardening, there are also not too many things that are harder because it takes so much raw spinach to make even one helping of cooked.
Maybe peas are harder. It takes a lot of work to get enough peas for one person to eat. Let alone to put on the table for a family.
I like spinach in everything. I also like cheese in everything. And garlic makes everything better too. Not to mention, it’s good for your health. Along with honey.
If I could do something really radical, I would like to have a beehive.
Pretty out there, isn’t it?
Are we still friends?
You know, you kinda have to stick with me. With the bees and everything. After all, you admitted you had more girlfriends than you could count, and you weren’t even sure how to count them. And I stuck with you. Just wanted to point that out. In case the bees were off-putting.
So there, that’s unique, isn’t it?
I can’t really think of anything else. I’m pretty boring. In fact, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who is less exciting than me.
Not unique,
The Healing Pen
DEAR HEALING PEN,
I think you’re far from boring. I think you’re right about the vegetables too. I happened to be making a grocery run on the day your letter came. I may or may not have been sitting in the driveway waiting for the mailman to deliver it before I left for my trip. And I may or may not have sat in my driveway after the mailman left, opened your letter, and read it before I went shopping.
You can read that however you want to.
I like the bee idea. I think I can get into that too. I like honey anyway. So no, you’re definitely not weird, and yeah, I definitely want to be friends.
Anyway, I added spinach to my grocery list, along with garlic. I already had butter.
It occurred to me when I got to the store and was looking at the vegetables that spinach grown in the garden might taste different than spinach grown in a grocery store.
(That was a joke.)
Strawberries at the U pick are much better than strawberries that you get in the store—the ones that came from California. Not that I have anything against California, but I assume that strawberries that have to travel across the country are bred for hardiness and not taste.
While strawberries you get from the U pick are bred for taste. I know that because one of my girlfriends (those numberless things that I’ve had in the past) dragged me to the U pick and made me pick strawberries. She called it a date.
At the time, I did not appreciate it.
That was probably eight years ago.
Isn’t it funny how much wiser we feel after eight years of life goes by?
Think I might actually enjoy a “date” like that at this point in my life.
Back then, I was definitely not impressed.
She wasn’t my girlfriend very long.
Actually, no one has ever been my girlfriend for very long. I can get ’em, but I just can’t keep ’em.
Up until not that long ago, I pretty much blamed the girls.
I’m rethinking that.
In fact, I’ve rethunk it. (Is rethunk a word?)
It’s me.
It was