Growing up in the 1940s, I knew my mother declined to reveal the makings of her salad dressing to admiring guests because its base was olive oil, which almost everyone we knew in northern New Jersey considered "disgusting." Garlic was even worse, and my interest in it would surely have come much later in my life if I hadn't settled in Europe after my college years and naval service. The move had been all but fated by reading novels set there and chafing all the more under the restrictions of American Puritanism. Clichéd as it sounds, decades of adventure followed, interspersed with writing, as much as anything because I didn't know what else to do-certainly not spend my days in a disciplined office. While the goal is still to write a decent sentence in English, it's now diluted by visions of a delicious supper.