Why Is Something Always Broken?

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published January 20, 2025] c. 2025

Is it my imagination or do I spend waaay more of my waking hours trying to fix stuff than I did three decades ago?

Nope, it s not my imagination. There's just so many more things to break than there used to be. And by "break", I mean all the glitchy things that one's stable of smart electronics and appliances and cars seem to be programmed to annoy us with on a daily basis.

Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself, "so what's going to thwart me today?"   I seem to be dealing with multiple things in need of annoying attention at any given time. It s like a continuous game of modern-life whack-a-mole.

I don't remember that it used to be that way.

Obviously, my appliances used to be waaaaay simpler. I think longingly of the stoves I had in my early marriage that had exactly two dials: one that read Off-Bake-Broil. (The preheat button consisted of waiting 15 minutes which it turns out is incredibly easy to do.) The other dial had temperature settings. Pretty much the only thing that could go wrong with it was the bake igniter in the bottom which appliance guys routinely kept on their trucks. They came, it got fixed, and they went away.

Now when one teeny-weeny component out of the five zillion teeny weeny components on the electronic panel of my gee-whiz stove decides to go south, the whole panel fails, resulting in a month-long wait (with no working stove) while the $500 replacement panel comes in. I just don't think this is progress.

Every single day, it seems, I seem to be researching how to fix some issue or other that will crop up with malicious frequency on my iPhone. It just sucks up so much mental bandwidth which frankly is getting in ever shorter supply.

For example, all of a sudden the phone screen got really dark. Why? Not so dark that you couldn't read it at all but really annoyingly dark so you could only read the screen in bright light. So I had to Google it and see what the solution was to restore it to normal brightness. I deeply resent the time 

As for upgrading to the next version of IOS, I would rather sign up for a root canal. Nothing that worked before will work the same. It's a guaranteed time suck.

When I ask my husband for electronic help (he has an Android phone), he will inquire patiently, "So what did you do just before this problem happened?"   Like I actually did anything. I NEVER TOUCHED IT! I snarl back. IT JUST DID IT ALL ON ITS OWN! Smart phones are malevolent creatures that go wonky when you so much as breathe on them. I remember when the working of a phone required in its entirety: picking up the receiver.

I am hoping that my 2005 Corolla lasts as long as I do because the thought of figuring out how a new car works is too depressing to even contemplate. I know I'd be trapped inside the thing and be unable to figure out how to get out of it, or even in it, never mind drive it. There s only so many times the fire department will be willing to come and extricate me from it.

We noticed that our new-ish refrigerator now has filters that are supposed to be replaced every six months. It's been a year. We're not sure what happens if you don't do it, because we have no idea HOW to do it. Appliances (and electronics) no longer come with nice easy to read manuals. We're even puzzled why refrigerators even need filters since every refrigerator we've ever had before didn't have one. But we've agreed that if the inside of the refrigerator suddenly starts smelling like a dead rodent, we will probably have to figure this out. But we'll be annoyed as shit about it.

Some of our outside Edison bulbs have gone out. I have spent hours looking at more than a hundred Edison bulbs on line and none of them are the same. Lightbulbs are definitely going to be an upcoming column.

Every time I get the remote messed up, I ponder the days when the most you had to do with a TV set was wiggle the rabbit ear antennas on the top. I was even able to embrace the subsequent rooftop antenna which I knew how to turn to either San Diego or L.A. to increase my viewing options. The worst that could happen was a windstorm blew it down.

Instead, it seems that at least once a week, I am rebooting my cable box when something glitchy mysteriously makes the TV malfunction. It's kind of amazing how often that fixes it but why do all these glitches even happen in the first place? Inquiring minds want to know. Actually, they don't want to know. They just want the stupid cable box to work in the first place.

I mean, how many streaming shows can anyone watch in one lifetime anyway?

I guess this is truly the pitfall of all the smart devices and fancy cars and wowie-zowie appliances. But if one thing is abundantly clear: the more parts, the more things to break. Digital definitely has a downside.

Every day, I personally thank all the stuff that is actually working including and especially my ever-more-decrepit body. It's probably pretty amazing that as much stuff in both me and my home are working on any given day as there are. I try not to even contemplate all the possibilities for equipment failure, both me and the electronics.

It would be waaaay too scary.

 

Being Shaped Like a T-Rex (BRI Replaces BMI)

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published January 6, 2025] ©2025

Good health news always seems in short supply as you get older.  So I was willing to take it as a win when my primary care doctor commented a while back, “Well, at least you’ve aged out of early-onset dementia!”

If it’s New Years, every magazine cover will be featuring articles about diets.  So it seems a particularly appropriate time to redefine one’s fat. I was intrigued to read an article recently that the dreaded BMI (Body Mass Index) that has declared me a porker for some years now is being replaced by a new index called the Body Roundness Index (BRI). 

Criticisms about the BMI maintain that it was developed on data only from men, most of them white, and doesn’t account for racial, ethnic, age, sex, and gender diversity.  Even Olympic athletes can be classified as borderline obese using its metrics.  The BMI can apparently not differentiate body fat from muscle mass. 

But this new BRI focuses on body roundness with the roundest bodies having the highest risk of dying from cancer, heart disease and other afflictions. 

I was greatly encouraged at the thought of dumping the dreaded BMI which always seems to be staring me in the face whenever I go onto my doctor’s web portal.  That BMI number is like being greeted with “Welcome, Chubs!  And how is our adiposely-amplified self today?”

But after reading more, this roundness thing gave me pause. 

This is because I have a really oddly constructed body. Back when my mother was pregnant with me, women could drink and smoke as much as they wanted.  And probably did.  I can only assume she was hitting the cocktails pretty hard at certain points of my development.

For example, I recently saw a beautiful choker necklace in a catalog and knew I had to have it.  But when it arrived, I discovered that the model had one thing I didn’t have: a neck.  This part of me isn’t really a weight issue so much as anatomy.  Unlike the swan-throated model, my head seems to sit directly on my shoulders making choker wearing problematical at best. 

As it turns out, I’m also missing a waist.  Of course, I make up for it by having multiples of other parts, like chins.  And thighs. 

I also have really short arms for my height. Anything that otherwise fits me is going to have a sleeve length that makes me look like an orangutan.  I could always solve the sleeve thing by ordering a petite size, but I wouldn’t be able to take a deep breath in a garment that is cutting off circulation to my internal organs.

Women’s clothes are measured on fit models who are assumed to have standard parts.  They are not designed for those of us with three thighs and no waist and little T-Rexy arms. Which I think we’ll all agree is good news.  But it makes acquiring apparel a significant problem.

If there is one downside of being overweight, other than the potential of an early death, it would be clothes shopping. I would chat it up with the personal shopper at Nordstrom who would inform me that they usually only order one size 16 in any particular style and those are so in demand that she immediately pulls them for her regular customers.  Now, I’m not in retail, but if I had a size that was instantly selling out, I’d order, well, more. But I’d be missing the point. Once you get past a certain size, department stores don’t want you waddling around in there among the osteoporotic svelte. 

Chunker departments, where they even exist, are invariably hidden in a corner of the third floor which you can spot from fifty yards: racks of nasty brown, navy, and black polyester slacks, and skirts with hideous floral prints in colors not found in nature. We chunkies just hate wearing this stuff – a point that I routinely note in the feedback box at Nordstrom Oinker. (It’s actually Nordstrom Encore, but if you say it fast it comes out sounding like Oinker, which, in fact, I am convinced is the subliminal meaning in that choice of word. What, after all, does “encore” have to do with fat people?)

I wasn’t always fat.  Prior to my divorce many many years ago, I always wore a size 4, which in today’s deflationary size market is probably a 2, or even a 0. (Personally, I think size 0 is what you should be after you’ve been dead a while.) Afterwards, I packed on 40 pounds eating the Post-Divorce Mrs. Fields Cookie and Chardonnay Depression Diet. Alas, I’ve been heifering, er, hovering around a size 16 ever since.

With no little trepidation, I decided to calculate my BRI.  I feared my lack of a waist could skew my score given that the BRI is designed to be a “calculation of combining height and waist circumference measurements to evaluate the ‘roundness’ of the human body.” Did I need to be abused by yet another metric when I’m already pretty clear what the answer is using more low-tech methods? (It’s called a ‘mirror’.) 

The BMI categorizes me as “Overweight.” (The category above that is a brutal “Obese” followed by an even more soul-crushing “Extremely Obese.”) As it turns out, the BRI is kinder.  It concluded I have “above average body roundness, with a waist circumference larger than most people.”  So a nicer way of saying, “Sorry, sweet pea.  But you’re fat.”  It politely suggests that I “consider consulting a doctor or nutritionist to develop an appropriate health improvement plan.” 

Or maybe I can just do as I always do on January 1 and put “Lose weight!” at the top of my resolutions list and then lose the list.  Works for me!

Meanwhile, sometimes I think this T-Rex’s body looks waaaay too familiar…

 

 

Please Vaccinate Your Child - Especially For Polio

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published January 2, 2025] ©2025 

I’ve written about polio several times before, but as one who was afflicted with his devastating disease in August of 1955, I can’t express my horror that there is any conversation going on regarding the limitation of the vaccine in the new administration.

Poliomyelitis, a warm weather virus especially targeting children, was the second greatest fear in post-WWII America after nuclear war. In the 1952 outbreak, 57,628 cases were reported, 3,145 died, and 21,269 experienced paralysis.

Actually, the people I wish could be writing this column are my poor parents who suddenly found all three of their children suffering from polio after a trip to the family homestead in Ohio to say goodbye to my dying grandfather.  There was a polio outbreak there at the time which they were unaware of.  But even if they had been, the home was in a rural area well away from other homes. Nobody really knew for sure how polio was transmitted.

It is highly likely that we kids contracted it spending our days cooling off from the oppressive summer heat in the creek behind the house in Ohio. Sewage in that era fed into the creek and (unknown at the time) polio is frequently caused by fecal contamination.   My parents later learned there had been cases of polio upstream. 

Upon return from that trip, all three of us became seriously ill, the dread polio diagnosis clinched by a painful spinal tap.  There had been no cases of polio in our area, and wishing to keep it that way, the local Board of Health quickly quarantined us.  

Probably we kids recovered better than our poor terrified parents. The little boy in the polio ward bed next to my sister’s was suddenly, the next day, in an iron lung, a behemoth prison of a ventilator of the era used when the polio had impacted the respiratory muscles causing respiratory paralysis.  My poor mother couldn’t stop crying.

If you look at photos from that area, you see whole rooms of people – particularly children – imprisoned in iron lungs. Fortunately, the iron lung has long since been replaced with modern non-invasive ventilators. But still, we’re talking ventilators.

Ironically, when we contracted polio in August, 1955, it was four months after Jonas Salk’s triumphant announcement of a successful vaccine. But vaccinating a whole country is not a quick process any more than it was for the Covid vaccine.  The vast majority of Americans couldn’t line up fast enough to get the vaccine for their kids in the mid-1950’s.

While polio particularly targeted children, adults could contract the virus as well.  When teens and young adults remained woefully under-vaccinated, Elvis Presley agreed to be vaccinated on the Ed Sullivan show in 1956 after which vaccination rates in those age groups sky rocketed. Never underestimate a celebrity endorsement.

For a long time afterwards, none of the neighbors wanted their kids to play at our house. As noted, it wasn’t clear at that time how polio was transmitted (even bananas and mosquitos were suspect), and no one was taking any chances.   

Vaccine naysayers aren’t new.  Even in the early 50’s, the vaccine had a vocal opponent in the form of a cosmetics magnate, Duon H. Miller, who made his fortune on a first-ever cream shampoo called Vita-fluff. Mr. Miller was convinced the vaccine was dangerous, and more to the point, that polio could be prevented by avoiding soft drink consumption.  He wasn’t too keen on bleached flour either.

As far as Duon H. Miller was concerned, polio was not an infectious disease (it’s a highly contagious virus) but a state of malnutrition.  Ironically, he wasn’t totally wrong about the perils of a high sugar, refined food diet. It just wasn’t applicable to polio.

There was no internet then so he was forced to use the U.S. Postal Service to get the word out, ultimately getting shut down by the federal government.  But he still railed against sugar, “processed bread,” and even pasteurized milk for years to come. Is the “pasteurized milk” thing sounding familiar?

Not surprisingly, I can’t be civil to anti-vaxxers. Not even minimally polite. I think they are ignorant idiots. 

I wish every parent who doesn’t vaccinate their child could time travel back to the 1950s to see how children suffered from now-preventable diseases. I don’t remember mumps, measles, chicken pox and rubella being any picnic either.

No child should ever have polio again.  The vaccine, exhaustively tested for safety, is 99-100% effective. It is not a coincidence that there have been no more polio outbreaks in this country since the advent of the vaccine. 

So here’s a message from my parents who are screaming from their graves:  GET YOUR CHILD VACCINATED AGAINST POLIO!  AND EVERYTHING ELSE TOO!!!

 

To Yield Or Not To Yield

[“Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published December 23, 2024] ©2024

Back in October, I published a column about all the things that annoyed me in life. It was so successful that I invited readers to contribute their own lists of what really exasperated them about their fellow humans which I then published. It turns out that other people are incredibly annoying!  Submissions are still coming in!  I am already amassing content for WhineFest III.  

Some themes were contributed multiple times. One that showed up more than once involved the five Bird Rock roundabouts, specifically:  

Idiots who can’t figure out the traffic circles in Bird Rock!!! Accidents waiting to happen and seriously annoying. Not that difficult to figure out the system!

One does agree that these people have a point given how long these traffic improvements have now been in place.  In 2007, La Jolla’s southern suburb of Bird Rock completed a series of five roundabouts designed to calm traffic and even more, to increase the survival rate for crossing La Jolla Boulevard. 

The latter has definitely been achieved.  Businesses on the east and west sides of the street are no longer separated by an asphalt obstacle course of kamikaze motorists.  Like never before, Bird Rock cohesed into a happy little village with attractive new landscaping and blinky crosswalks so eager to serve that they frequently blink even when no one is crossing.  You have to love the crosswalks’ enthusiasm although they could probably use a little voltaic Valium. 

The traffic calming aspect has been a little more problematical. In fairness, Americans are not all that familiar with roundabouts as evidenced by the pickup trucks that routinely drove over the center of them until the landscaping was planted.  And sometimes still do run over them proving the classic geometric principle that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line over the sprinkler heads. 

Larger emergency vehicles and bigger delivery trucks have such difficulty navigating these  roundabouts that they are known to avoid them altogether and take the parallel residential streets.  Somebody in the city engineer’s office appears to have graduated in the bottom half of their class.

The biggest problem with the traffic calming aspect, however, is a basic failure of understanding of the word “yield”, one of those adorably antiquarian traffic concepts that disappeared from usage around the same time as “signaling.” 

What the Yield signs are supposed to indicate, of course, is that vehicles already in the roundabout have the right of way and you have to (all together now) YIELD.  It’s counterintuitive for some of us to believe that a car turning left in front of us has the right of way.  And for others, over their cold dead body are they conceding the right of way no matter what the d**n sign says.

The Bird Rock roundabouts are actually roundaboutlets, embryonic versions of the big scary British variety, so you have about .2 nanoseconds to figure out if the vehicle already in the roundabout is coming around it or proceeding straight ahead. 

There are some who would conclude that one should SLOW DOWN just in case one is going to have to YIELD.    It would, of course, help if the vehicle in the roundabout would signal its intention of going left but that is somewhere in the same statistical likelihood as SLOW DOWN.

The whole excitement level ratchets up even a few more notches with the advent of summer visitors who have no experience of roundaboutlets and/or who come from places where they don’t yield either.

Now I can understand why Bird Rock would not want to despoil the esthetics of the community with excessive signage.  But the Yield thing remains a problem.  If it were up to me, I would implement a crash (you should excuse the expression) course, Roundabouts 101, a series of Burma Shave-inspired educational signs starting at Nautilus Street.  For example: 

Nautilus St:  ROUNDABOUTS AHEAD, 1 MILE!

Bonair St:  A ROUNDABOUT IS A TRAFFIC CIRCLE.  YOU HAVE TO GO AROUND IT.

Playa Del Norte:  NO, WE’RE SERIOUS.

Playa Del Sur:  YOU MUST YIELD TO OTHER CARS ALREADY IN THE ROUNDABOUT WHEN YOU GET THERE.

Gravilla: ‘YIELD’ MEANS THE OTHER PERSON GETS TO GO FIRST. 

Kolmar:  WHY?

Rosemont:  BECAUSE THEY GOT THERE BEFORE YOU DID.

Palomar:  YEAH, WE KNOW IT’S NOT FAIR 

Winamar:  IGNORE THE GLASS THAT IS ALREADY THERE.  THOSE PEOPLE DIDN’T YIELD.

Mesa:  IF YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE A LEFT TURN, YOU STILL NEED TO MAKE A RIGHT TURN AROUND THE ROUNDABOUT.   CRAZY, BUT TRUE.

Via Del Norte:  SIGNALING A LEFT TURN TO THE OTHER DRIVERS COMING TOWARD YOU WOULD BE A NICE GESTURE.  BUT YOU’LL HAVE TO PUT DOWN YOUR CELL PHONE FIRST.

Mira Monte:  THE FIRST OF THE (COUNT ‘EM) FIVE ROUNDABOUTS IS NOW APPROACHING. 

La Canada: PREPARE TO Y-I-E-L-D.   YES, WE MEAN AT ALL OF THEM.

Bird Rock Avenue:  WE SAW YOU GIVE THE BIRD [NO, NOT A PELICAN] TO THAT NUMNUT WHO CUT YOU OFF.

Forward:  NOPE, IT WAS YOU. 

Midway:  LEAVING BIRD ROCK.  C’MON, ADMIT IT, IT WASN’T ALL THAT HAR….

Colima:  ACK!  YOU TOTALLY DID NOT YIELD!!

Sea Ridge:  TOW TRUCK IS ON ITS WAY.  (Oy.)

 

 

 

 

 

How (Not) To Be A Mother-in-Law

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published December 9, 2024] ©2024

I was thinking about writing a guide on how to be a good mother-in-law but truthfully it can all be summed up in two words: “Shut. Up.” 

My long-time motto, to which I have, alas, faithfully failed to adhere, has always been “A closed mouth gathers no feet.”  As anyone who has read my column for a while might guess, letting an opinion go unvoiced is not my strong suit. 

But I really try hard with my two daughters-in-law who are truly the daughters I never had and whose good opinion is my utmost priority.  Having been a daughter-in-law twice myself, I vowed I would be a dream mother-in-law.  A friend of mine insists that’s an oxymoron.  But then, this is a woman whose bedroom sports a throw pillow embroidered “The only good in-law is a dead in-law.”  A tad harsh, I think.

I’ve learned a lot from both of my mothers-in-law.

My first mother-in-law only ever referred to me in the third person, even when I was there, and preferably without conjunctions, as in: “Ask the shiksa she wants dessert.”  These in-laws escaped from Russia in the dead of night with the clothes on their backs, enduring incredible hardships in their new land all so that their son the doctor, their phoenix rising out of immigrant ashes, could marry…me?    SO not part of the plan. 

Ironically, with the passage of time (and the raising of two sons), I have tremendous empathy for her position.  Now that I have adult sons, I know I would be devastated if either of them married someone I truly thought was wrong for him, regardless of the reason.  I wish she were alive today so I could tell her.   (She’d still probably tell me to drop dead, but I’d feel better saying it.)

My second mother-in-law (Olof’s mother) actually liked me.  And I adored her. My own mother died when I was 25 so Olof’s mother was truly a second mother to me.  Although fond of her son’s first wife, I think she wishes Olof and I had married the first time around. (So do my former in-laws.) 

The one thing I told both of my daughters-in-law from the get-go was that I was trying to learn their tastes so that if I got them a gift they didn’t like, they needed to say so. As a cautionary tale, I relayed the saga of a friend who, as a new bride, politely gushed over a hideous china tchotchke her mother-in-law gave her. She has continued to receive another one for every birthday and Christmas for the last 34 years.  Two years ago, her mother-in-law surprised her with a display case for them. 

Honestly, I knock myself out to stay on my daughters-in-laws’ good sides, and fortunately they are such sweethearts that they make it easy for me.  But occasionally, despite my best efforts, I’ve just screwed it up.  When my young grandkids were down visiting one time, I thought it would be really fun to take a bunch of cheapo on-sale hotdog buns down to our favorite sunset spot to feed the seagulls.  Now at the time of the year, the sun was setting at around 5:00, so it was just before dinner.  Neither of my daughters-in-laws are food fanatics but they quite reasonably prefer to maximize the nutritional value of whatever they happen to be feeding their kids.  So as you might guess, not a lot of white bread.

But as soon as we got down to the sunset place and each kid had a bag of hotdog buns in hand, they started eating them instead of tearing off pieces for the birds.  It was like, “Whoa! You don’t even have to chew this stuff! It’s nothing like the 12-grain cement blocks Mom feeds us!”

Mom quickly confiscated the buns and handed them pieces to throw but these went into mouths just as quickly, despite admonishments to the contrary. I could see my daughter-in-law’s jaw tightening.  This well-intentioned happy activity was tanking fast.  It was such a good idea!  Which so totally failed!  The kids were, of course, way too full of nutritionally-bankrupt processed flour product to eat dinner.  My daughter-in-law was totally nice about it.  But in my mind’s eye, I feared becoming fodder for her next dinner party. 

Sadly, I know women who really don’t like their daughters-in-law and have even engaged in the ultimate mother-in-law act of aggression, i.e. sending the grandchildren drum sets for Christmas.  I’m going to continue to be phenomenally grateful that I ended up with the daughters-in-law that I did.  But next time:  whole wheat buns.  After dinner.

 

Living In A "Dog House"

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published December 2, 2024] ©2024

After our beloved English bulldog Winston died suddenly of a heart attack in our living room in 2016, Olof and I were so flattened that we swore we'd never have another dog. It's too depressing when they die plus so insanely expensive when they get sick. Never mind we're getting old.

But a few months later, a local rescue agency with radar for mushballs asked us to foster a dog just for "one week,"  and before we knew it, we were suddenly the adoptive parents of Lily, a then-7-year-old 15-pound bichon-poodle with rotten teeth and breath so bad it could scorch your eyebrows. Lily has now been an essential member of the household for eight years.

Dogs, even perpetually sick ones, give you the relationships you can only dream of having with people. For example, they would never roll their eyes at you, especially knowing how totally annoyed it makes you.

Keeping our house safe for democracy has always been Lily's full-time job. It's pretty much always DEFCON 3 here with the garbage trucks on Mondays, the lawn mowing guy on Wednesday, and the pool guy with that big scary pole on Thursdays.

While Lily ultimately became fast friends with our treat-toting pool guy, she regards our lawn maintenance man as her mortal enemy. The second he shows up with his lawn mower, 17 pounds of enraged white fluff is hurling itself at our French doors. "He's stealing our grass! Again! And you let him!"   She is eager to sink her three remaining teeth into the side of his mower.

Like many dogs, Lily considers it her personal duty to defend us from faunish peril as well, including and especially tiny lizards. Our back doors are open pretty much year-round to let air in and Lily out, so it is not surprising that occasionally a small reptile makes a wrong turn and ends up in the house. Recently Lily saw one scurry from the hallway into the guest bath. An alien life form had breached the barricades and invaded her personal territory! Totally unacceptable! When I came to investigate her frantic barking, I found her standing at alert just outside the open bathroom door, one foot up in pointer position. This would make more sense if she were actually a pointer, rather than a bichon-poodle mix. But she wanted me to be clear that the intruder was still in there. "You will not go in there on my watch!"  she seemed to be saying. 

But go in there and rout it out herself? Heck no.

And while we're on the subject of bathrooms, it is not surprising that dogs would consider bathroom activities to be social events. From Lily's perspective, every time she makes a shadoobie, we're always standing right there, opaque bag at the ready. The fact that we don't seem to need bags ourselves is irrelevant; it's still a communal activity. If the bathroom door is not closed tightly, Lily will nose it open and join the occupant. In fact, she's fairly annoyed if you exclude her and will park herself just outside the door where you can easily trip over her and do a face plant into the armoire which would serve you right for being so anti-social.

Once inside the bathroom, she will join Olof as he stands in front of the commode. She assesses the proceedings with the laser focus of an Olympic figure skating judge. Artistic presentation? Meh. But given the added difficulty elements inherent in Olof s age, she is more than willing to bump up the score for technical merit.

If you're a dog, there are always new threats to the household. Who knew that the toilet plunger in the guest bath could have been taken over by malevolent forces? She snarls viciously at it to let it know that its behavior will not be tolerated. I will finally come in and hide the plunger in a closet (vanquished!) Lily is genuinely baffled that we seem to be clueless as to the dangers in our midst.

When Lily arrived, we acquired a new feeding station with high sides. However, she still manages to hurl the occasional piece of kibble out on to the floor and then drag it into the carpet in our bedroom where we step on it in our bare feet and say bad words.

One of her favorite activities is to stuff toys under the sofa and carry on until we fetch them for her.  (We are so trainable.)

As an older dog, she will suddenly need to go outside at 3 a.m. As in, this instant. I barely have time to slip on my shoes and get the door open. Given the coyote situation, I don't dare have her outside in the front yard without me. Sometimes our newspaper delivery guy will pull up and see me running around my front yard in my nightgown in the middle of the night. I'm not sure he realizes I'm with the dog. I tip him well at Christmas.

We, of course, continue to be under the spell of Lily's charms. She gets lots of rubs, toy tosses, and attention, which is, of course, her due. In her view, she is an insanely attractive animal (regardless of the cruel things people say about her prominent snaggle tooth), and she has perfected all manner of adorable faces on us. When she tilts her head to one side and lifts her paw, we are powerless against her. It makes us think she is genuinely sorry for puking on the rug.

But for all that, this is her house. She s running the show. And we're so appreciative she lets us live here.

 Lily, guard dog extraordinaire 

What I'm Thankful For This Thanksgiving

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published, November 25, 2024]  ©2024

My long-deceased parents were their own flawed people and certainly products of their times. My mother, a smoker, died at 54 from lung cancer. She never knew her grandchildren which was a huge loss for everyone, including and especially her.

My father, an ad executive in New York City (think "Mad Men"  although not Don Draper) probably would have lived longer were it not for the nightly dry martinis that were the norm in our commuter town as I was growing up. (There was a saying in the neighborhood: "The vermouth is just a formality.")

But as I have gotten older and had children and grandchildren of my own, I have had the opportunity to appreciate some of the incredible gifts my parents gave us. Top among them: they didn't hate. Whatever their prejudices might have been, we never heard them. They never referred to anyone by race or religion, and to this day, when I hear gratuitous (or even flat-out biased) references to people like this, it immediately stands out to me in a very sad way.

My father was a conservative Republican Catholic, my mother a third-generation feminist Protestant and a Democrat. (They met in an Honors Shakespeare class in college.) It made for a lot of lively dinner table conversation. It was up to you to make your case.

Interestingly, I am a fourth-generation feminist and Democrat married to a life-long Republican, although Olof and I have both voted across party lines on many occasions. My husband is still fervently hoping the Republican party will return to what he thinks of as its former glory. I, of course, think it never had one. But conversations are pretty lively at our dinner table too.

Both of my parents were avid community volunteers. My father ran the United Fund campaign in our area and we referred to ourselves as "United Fund orphans"  during the major fundraising season.

My mother s occupations, meanwhile, included teaching convicts at an area penitentiary, substitute teaching junior high (is there a parallel there?) and leading Brownies and Girl Scouts. But the one she was most passionate about was not only teaching ESL (English as a second language) but tutoring, on her own time, many of her students to pass the written driver s exam which in that era had to be taken in English. Given the lack of public transit in our area, a driver's license was essential to getting any kind of good job. Her efforts included teaching them to drive in our car. I think my mother could yell STOP! in eight languages.

Having immigrants regularly in our house meant that we kids got to learn about other cultures, and how differently, for example, other nationalities celebrated even the same holidays that we celebrated, never mind ones that we didn't. As thanks from her students, we were often gifted with delectable food from other lands.

It was largely from this immigrant influence that I was inspired to apply for a student exchange program to spend my senior year of high school in a foreign country which is, in fact, where I met my now-husband, Olof, who was a fellow student on the same program in Brazil.

Both Olof and I married people from different backgrounds the first time around, and while neither of those marriages lasted, he still misses his Indonesian wife s amazing cooking (except for kimchee, a word he doesn't want to hear out loud). I, meanwhile, can counsel people on how to make a Seder dinner for 20 and I still know all the holiday blessings by heart in Hebrew. Many favorite memories are associated with both.

In the early 1950s when my siblings and I were children, the second biggest fear in the U.S. after nuclear war was polio and with good reason. My siblings and I all contracted it in August of 1955, four months after the Salk vaccine was announced. (It took a year for the vaccine to get to our small town.) I can still remember my parents absolute terror during this time, especially after the little boy in the hospital bed next to my sister suddenly ended up in an iron lung. (This is a cylindrical prison that simulates breathing when polio has affected respiratory muscles.) I wish everyone could take a brief trip back in time to the jammed polio wards of that era.

As one who has dealt with the repercussions of polio, I feel entitled to say that if you are an anti-vaxxer, you are a moron. There is no reason for one single child to ever contract polio again.

Even what people now like to think of as normal (in that there was no way to prevent them then) childhood illnesses like measles, mumps, rubella ("German measles") and chicken pox are not without potentially permanent consequences. Like most of my generation, I had all of these illnesses. Even when there aren't long-term effects, these diseases inflict a lot of suffering.

And would it be OK to mention that while my mouth is more fillings than actual teeth, my kids have never had a cavity? My mother ended up with painful dentures, not even having the benefit of all the dentistry I had.

It s going to be a different world going forward. As the song goes, "You can t always get what you want."  The process is the process but I am often reminded of my own parents' philosophy, best summed up as: What you accept, you teach, not just regarding treatment toward yourself but toward the greater world.

So thanks, Mom and Dad. On this Thanksgiving Day, I'm truly grateful to you.

                                    My siblings and I all had polio in the 1950's. 

Iron lungs kept polio patients alive when the virus affected respiratory muscles.