I truly believe that all of us are born with certain genes that control and influence our skills, activities, emotions, decisions and even our taste in foods throughout our entire lives.

In terms of emotions, for instance, I believe a kid of 5 or 6 years of age who looks at a glass as half full rather than half empty will carry that optimistic outlook with him through the rest of his life. Conversely, another kid who looks at a glass as half empty will carry that dour outlook with him all the days of his life.

I used to have discussions with my daughter when she was a student in high school on the subject of human behavior. Jean believed that environment and education played a large role in addition to our gene patterns, and I'd bring up a case in point. That was the Anastasia brothers in New York. One a Mafia crime boss shot and killed while getting a shave in a barber's chair at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel, the other brother a Monsignor adored by his parishioners. Brothers who shared the same environment and went to the same schools. Go figure?

But take my case, for instance. In elementary school I had no trouble with reading, writing and arithmetic -- straight A's like several other kids yet one day in fourth grade I met my Waterloo. (By the way, if our Napa schools no longer teach history, Waterloo in Belgium was the scene of Napoleon's defeat in 1815, that is if you ever heard of Napoleon.)

Boys were marched into a woodworking shop in a converted classroom in PS 77, and we fourth-graders, guided by Mr. Reagan, would make a jewel box for our moms for a Mother's Day just weeks away.

The truth was and is, building anything wasn't my strong card and if it hadn't been for the help given me by my boyhood friend Al Merkle, whose dad was a carpenter, that jewel box would have never been constructed.

One day the boxes were completed. Despite the fact that mine had a split in the wood, it was amazing what glue, sandpaper, a wood stain and shellac could do. Even the felt inside lining had been a botch job, but my mother cherished it -- or at least said she did.

If I learned one thing in that woodworking shop, it was that I'd never be a master carpenter. And that "All Thumbs" syndrome has followed me through life. I'm fine with people, but as my wife Jeanette shouts out if I'm trying to fix anything, "Don't touch it -- you'll break it or make it worse." Just gifted, I guess.

But there is something else in my gene pool that has stayed with me over all these years and that is the fact that in terms of food, I just can't bear or endure garlic. Out here in Napa that pungent bulb is worshipped and I'll never understand why. If you're like me and at a local restaurant, you better not order mashed potatoes unless you say "Without garlic, please," or you're in for awful shock. Why, even at the Giants ballpark I shake my head in wonder at the lines waiting for their garlic fries. No wonder they're in last place.

The subject of garlic has come up now and then in conversations with Napa friends, all intelligent and good people who worship the bulb in all of its forms. Fine people like Diane Lodigiani, Amanda Hawkins, Helga and Dan Lucas, Dr. Monroe Katz, Joan Handrich, Mary Zunt, Myrna Baldwin, and the list is endless. They're astonished when I tell them I can't abide the bulb. Only one Napan I've met to date, Joan Tillotson, a fine artist, is in my corner.

When asked my thoughts on the subject of garlic, memories return of riding on a crammed New York subway train, crushed together with strangers holding a vertical pole -- and some guy breathing his garlic fumes in my face while I endured, fighting to keep the breakfast down in my stomach from coming up. And that's the truth!

The other day, after picking up my grandson Robbie at school, over a snack the conversation got around to old black-and-white movies I've seen.

"What were the best old movies you ever saw, Grandpa?" was my pal's question.

So I dug into old memories and mentioned a few like "Gunga Din" and "Casablanca." Than Robbie asked what was the scariest movie I saw as a kid and I immediately said "Dracula." I quickly told him that the vampire was just a figment of a writer's imagination, and what crossed my mind was that the one thing that could stop this evil monster was garlic!

Later that evening, after Robbie went home, I chuckled thinking of Bram Stoker, who wrote that horror tale in 1897. I lifted my coffee cup in a salute to a long dead writer who no doubt in his lifetime knew the potency of a bulb that could stop a vampire in his evil pursuit and knock him cold.

Then the weekend came along and I was catching up on my reading. I was browsing through "The Week," a news magazine I enjoy, when I spotted a story with a title seemingly a gift from heaven. It read, "Is there such a thing as too much garlic?"

TV executive Carlo Rossella in the Roman publication "Il Foglio" opined that there's nothing worse than people breathing noxious garlic fumes in your face. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said he detested garlic and had handed out breath mints to any official of the Forza party who smelled of garlic.

So now, at least I know that Joan Tillotson and I are not alone in our stand on garlic. We have allies across the sea who also say, "Hold the garlic please!"

Ev Parker can be reached by e-mail at evjenpar@mailbug.com, telephone at 224-9956 or fax at 224-3963.