I am such a know-it-all;  we all are sometimes. And of course, we don’t know everything….

Neil and I were in Tuscany. The scenery was magnificent: narrow medieval streets, beautiful vistas visible from walled cities, history so alive I could feel the ancients walking the cobbled roads with us. Despite all this, the most remarkable part of the trip was my discovery of arugula.

We were seated at an outdoor café in the tiny village of Cortona (home to Betty Mayes and “Under the Tuscan Sun”). Before the waiter even took our order, he brought bread and salads. The bread was warm and fragrant, but the salad got all my attention. Simple sliced pears arranged on a bed of green leaves, and drizzled with good Italian olive oil, it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. But it wasn’t the perfect pears or the fine olive oil that impressed me, it was those peppery leaves. “Neil, taste this salad! The greens are amazing!”

He raised his eyebrows with a questioning look. “You mean the arugula?”

Arugula. I had never heard of it. Because Neil was a restaurant owner I assumed it was some specialty Italian vegetable he knew of from work. “No,” he laughed. “It’s like lettuce and spinach.”

It was not like lettuce or spinach. It was not like anything else at all. From then on, I ordered it at every meal of our trip. On little flat bed pizzas; wrapped with prosciutto around ripe melons; or as a bed for those juicy pears, I couldn’t get enough of it. I rambled on about it so much that Neil finally pointed out there was plenty of arugula at home and perhaps I should concentrate on things that were more strictly Italian instead. “We can get arugula at home?” I marveled.

Sure enough, when we got home, arugula was everywhere.
“We have tons of it in our garden,” a doctor friend said.
“It’s right by the spinach,” the grocery clerk directed.

And for weeks after that vacation, I ate arugula every day. Even now, its taste is exotic and reminds me of things unknown. It amazes me that I had never even heard of this peppery leaf, that something so ordinary and delightful could exist without my knowledge. Which is good – because I am often subconsciously a know-it-all.

We all have the tendency to be too comfortable with our own ways of thinking, believing we know best and are therefore always right. How wrong! That kind of thinking makes me stubborn instead of flexible, self-righteous instead of merciful, closed off instead of open-minded.

So today I eat my arugula and pears. I remind myself how much I don’t know about this big beautiful world and how much God has yet to show me. Maybe we could all use a bit more arugula.