How many of you as parents have stuffed spinach and other disagreeables down your children's throats while pleading, "Try it, you'll like it!"

The slogan rarely worked with my two, whether it was spinach, going to bed on time in summer or picking up debris on the lawn after a hurricane.

And it didn't work for me when Raleigh city officials several months ago promised that I would like the once weekly curbside garbage collection imposed on some neighborhoods, including ours, on a trial basis.

In this column, I howled like a coyote caught in a steel trap, coming awfully close to ranting without reasoning. I felt about curbside collection the same way Dr. Seuss' little hero felt about his breakfast menu: "I do not like green eggs and ham! I do not like them, Sam I am."

But when I recently picked up the morning paper to learn that the City Council had voted to cancel curbside collection, I felt betrayed.

"Oh, no!" I wailed to my wife at breakfast. "They can't do that!"

You see, I had tried it, and I liked it. I liked having everything -- the recycling, the trash and the garbage -- picked up in a single swoop. Every Tuesday. I even became user-friendly with the brown, bearish 90-gallon container, so roomy it can accommodate not only the big pizza containers, the parcel post cartons, the numerous bags of kitchen refuse, but also the additional output when my 1-year-old grandson comes to town. And there is no strewn trash left in the wake of the sanitation workers who formerly passed through.

I put off calling the mayor to tell him I was wrong in fighting the new system. I didn't think it necessary after the city's survey showed that 80 percent of us approved the new system. I assumed that the "will of the people" would prevail.

Say! I like green eggs and ham!

I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!

And I would eat them in a boat.

And I would eat them with a goat...

Anyway, City Hall, thanks for the reprieve; now let's make it permanent. I promise you Raleighites who haven't tried it, "You'll like it!"

Inflation? Practically nil. Holding its own. That's what we're told by the government gurus.

Try telling that to the guy ahead of me in the supermarket checkout line as his one white onion was being weighed and found wanting -- in cents and sensibility.

"Seventy-eight cents! For one onion? Why when I was a boy, my daddy was lucky if he could sell a whole peck of onions for 78 cents!"

Yeah, we got inflation right here in River City when a golf-ball-sized tomato cost 83 cents, then turns out to be practically tasteless.

Do we dare to eat a peach? Or a Gala apple -- at $1.89 a pound?

And we thought all along that the big brouhaha was over a football stadium for St. Augustine's College, a stadium college officials desperately wanted and the adjacent neighborhood desperately didn't want.

But, according to press reports, the issue was over a "venue." After the City Council voted to reduce the "venue" by half, St. Augustine President Dianne Boardley Suber was quoted as saying, "We had hoped for a larger venue, but we are not displeased with the outcome. ... Our goal was always to have a venue on campus."

I don't know what happened to the stadium, but at least the college came away from the fracas with a venue, or at least half a venue. I suppose half a venue is better than no venue at all.

When the 2,500-seat venue is completed, I hope college officials will provide fans with ample signs reading, "This way to the venue."

Stuart Sechriest, my UNC j-school prof, recently reached his 90th; he is as mentally agile as many men half his age.

One of the best anecdotes he has shared over our long student-prof friendship has to do with the time he and his wife visited Niagara Falls. As they checked into their hotel, the desk clerk asked, "Would you like the honeymoon suite? It's available."

"No, I guess not," chuckled Stuart, "We've been married 43 years."

"Well, you don't have to play baseball to rent Yankee Stadium," the clerk snorted.

He was right. Billy Graham has rented it numerous times.

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