Always Plant Asparagus - A Parable

Putting things off is sometimes not the best way.
Playing it safe doesn't always make things better.

I have always loved asparagus. It is probably my favorite vegetable. I try to eat as much of it as possible, but it is usually a little costly in the grocery stores, even in the spring and early summer when it is plentiful. One house I lived in in Ohio had a creek running along my property line. Every spring I could pick wild asparagus, so buying it wasn't a problem.

But planting asparagus involves patience because the crop can't be harvested for the first few years in order for it to esablish itself. First I would have to get some asparagus roots from someone who had a good crop. Then I would have to plant the roots and wait. The first two years I couldn't pick any of the spears; I would just have to let them go to seed. By the third year I would be able to pick a few, and after that I could harvest most of my crop because the roots would be established; although I have heard it is usually a good idea to let some of the plants go to seed so the asparagus patch will spread.

Therein lies the problem. When I moved back to Ohio, I rented a farmhouse where I planted a garden. However, I didn't plant asparagus because I didn't think I would stay at the house long enough to harvest any. I planted peas, zucchini, eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes, plus a few different vegetables every year, but no aparagus because it took too long. I didn't want to waste my time getting an asparagus patch established. Afterall, it was only a rental house and I planned to return to San Francisco in two years.

I lived in that house for more than seven years, and I never went back to live in San Francisco. I could have had aparagus if I had just planted some that first year!

Asparagus was the fist vegetable I planted when I moved to Michigan. I only planned to be here a year or two; then I was moving on to find a better teaching job, but I had learned my lesson. After fifteen years, I have a wonderful asparagus patch, and I eat lots of fresh asparagus every spring!

Undergraduate Adventures con't

A Brief Respite (a few years away from school)

After droppping out of Bowling Green and driving to San Francisco, my new husband and I presented ourselves on the doorstep of an old college friend who had been living in San Francisco for a few years. The couple with whom we had driven to California took the VW van and started back to Ohio. The plan was that they would sell the van when they got back and send us money.

When we arrived, we thought that Bill would be delighted to see us and that we could stay with him for a week or two while we found jobs and an apartment. Unfortunately, there were a few problems we hadn't thought about.

• San Francisco was going through a time of horrible unemployment. The dock workers were on strike, so all of the jobs around the ports were no longer available. Plus, the Vietnam War was ending and a lot of the men being discharged were landing in California and deciding to stay. Also, California was a heavily unionized state; there was even a ditch diggers' union! Finally, San Francisco was the place to be, and thousands of young people from across the country had left their homes and moved west. Even Bill's garbage collector had a master's degree! So finding a job was going to be a lot tougher than we had anticipated.
• The housing situation was a lot more expensive and harder to negotiate than it had been in the midwest. Most of the apartment rentals were not listed in the newspaper classifieds; potential renters had to go through rental agencies which charged a fee just to find out what places were available. Landlords also required a deposit, plus first and last months' rent and references on top of the agency fee. To make it even worse, San Francisco has limited housing available because of its location, making rentals some of the most expensive in the country.
• Bill had a girlfriend who paid the rent on their apartment, and she didn't want guests.

So instead of a happy reunion with our friend, we had to find a place to stay immediately. Since we had arrived on Sunday night, no rental agencies were open. Bill got the Sunday paper, said, "Here's a place you can rent by the week," packed us back into our VW and sent us to The Fellah Hotel.

We had a little trouble finding it because it wasn't on a street. It was on an alley off San Francisco's downtown in an area referred to as the Tendorloin, a charming collection of skid row hotels, hookers, bums, and runaway kids. For $25 we got a room with a sink in the corner, a nasty looking mattress on the floor, kitchen and bathroom priveledges to be shared with a lot of loonies, and a broom to sweep up the broken glass on the bedroom floor. Our friends dropped us off and drove the VW van towards Oregon, and we stayed behind, wondering what we had done. Welcome to San Francisco!

We were in the Fellah Hotel for two weeks before Bill decided to take us back to his place. He came to visit us, and after fighting off the panhandlers in the hall, he was sitting on our mattress sharing a cup of tea when something fell off the ceiling into his cup. That was too much even for him, so he helped us pack up our stuff and go back to his house. My husband and I both eventually found jobs, but no apartment. I managed a downtown photo store and he delivered sandwiches and sold Fuller Brush door-to-door. After a few months, Bill and his girlfriend decided to move down the coast and we inherited their apartment.

A year later we moved to an even better apartment in the Haight Ashbury near Golden Gate Park where we lived until we decided to move back to Ohio.

During our years in San Francisco, we met a lot of artists, musicians, and crazy people. We acquired a St. Bernard, a Chevy van, and a taste for exotic food. It wasn't easy, but it was certainly interesting. Eventualy, I decided to go back to school, so we packed up the Chevy van, loaded the St. Bernard, and drove back to Bowling Green where I finished my BA.

Post Script: The VW van never made it back to Ohio; it broke down attempting to cross the Rockies at Greybull, Wyoming, and as far as I know, it is still there.

Some Thoughts on Research & Writing - Part 2

Making a Thesis Work for You

A good initial thesis is a time saver. Once you have a thesis, like our example in Part 1, "The ironclad ships used by the North and South in the American Civil War represented a huge step forward in the Navy's wartime technology," you will know what you need to research. For example, this thesis eliminates the need to research anything about Civil War era politicians and issues, causes of the war, or even battles that didn't involve the Monitor or the Merrimac. This thesis allows you to narrow your field of research to ironclad ships used in the Civil War and how they changed the way naval battles were fought. It also gives you some keywords to begin your search.


If you started with the keywords "American Civil War" and did a search on ASK.com, you would get 9,518,000 hits. That may seem great at first, but you are going to have to spend a lot of time skimming through many of those potential sources before you know which ones will work for you.

However, by using your thesis, you can start with the keywords "ironclad ships in the American Civil War," which will give you fewer, but more targeted hits. Using those keywords on ASK.com lowers the number of hits to 13,300, somewhat easier to sort through, but probably still too many.

So since your thesis focuses on the technology of the ironclad ships, if you add that to your keywords and try "the improved technology of the ironclad ships in the American Civil War" on ASK.com, you can narrow it down to 2,050 hits. When you look at some of them, you find out that there were other ironclad ships used during the Civil War, including a submarine, and that wasn't really what you wanted to talk about in your paper.

So you can go back to ASK.com and revise your key words one more time to "the improved technology of the Monitor and the Merrimac in the American Civil War" which will give you only 216 hits. Now you've got an amount of infromation that is much easier to handle!

Unfortunately, now that you know the Monitor and the Merrimac weren't the only ironclads, your thesis doesn't quite work. So what do you do? You change the thesis to make it more specific. From "The ironclad ships used by the North and South in the American Civil War represented a huge step forward in the Navy's wartime technology," you can revise your thesis to "The ironclad ships the Monitor and the Merrimac used by the North and South in the American Civil War represented a huge step forward in the Navy's wartime technology." Now the thesis and the research match, and you can begin working with your sources.