Saturday, February 1, 2025

Fires And More Fires

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published February 3, 2025] 2025

The recent fires in Los Angeles became especially personal when our younger son, daughter-in-law, three grandchildren and two dogs were forced to evacuate their home, their neighborhood surviving thanks to the incredible efforts of fire fighters. Prior to their evacuation, our son had sent us videos of tanker planes dropping red fire retardant overhead. Waaaay (waaaay) too close.

An unexpected bonus of the evacuation, however, was a shopping excursion with my 15-year-old granddaughter for a belated birthday gift. At a boutique in downtown La Jolla, the young sales woman overhead us talking about the fires and the family's evacuation.

"So,"  queried the young sales woman, "what was the first thing you took?"

My granddaughter didn't hesitate. "The Dyson."

The young salesgirl nodded. "That's what I would have taken too."

I was puzzled. "The vacuum cleaner?"  I said.

They both looked at me like I was from another planet.

For those of us who are truly are from a different generational planet, a Dyson (same company as the vacs) is the Lamborghini of hair dryers, and it was my granddaughter's most coveted Christmas gift only two weeks earlier. Not gonna let that go up in flames! Definitely not an item you'd find on the hair care aisle at CVS where I bought my hair dryer.

I queried my hair stylist on this and she reported that the one she was using on me at that very moment was, in fact, a Dyson. (They come in different price ranges, from "really expensive"  to "even more expensive.") Among other features, they're apparently very light weight, quiet, and dry hair much more quickly and with less damage. Definitely worth the money for a hair stylist, or a 15-year-old with lots of beautiful long hair.

Over a beverage at Peets, my granddaughter gave me her fire zone code so that I could keep up with the status of the fire in her neighborhood. Apparently all the kids know the fire zone codes of their friends. I guess this is a reality if you live in Southern California. And now I even know mine! And have Watch Duty and Genasys installed on my phone.

Feeling utterly helpless about the whole fire situation with my son's house, I was motivated to bring out my collection of rosary beads (gifts from my Catholic grandparents) both generic and saint-specific which I only press into service in cases of dire emergency. Catholic saints have been an integral part of my Judeo-Catholic-Protestant family. (I brought my menorah up to LA in December since Christmas Day was also the first night of Hannukah.) If it looks like a saint can help, well, I'm all for it.

Some years ago, as I agonized about a family member's impending cancer surgery, a Catholic co-worker mentioned that in her hometown, when one needed divine assistance, one would hang rosary beads on the clothesline and invoke the saints' help. I wasn't sure why a clothesline but who was I to argue how saints like to work? The surgery went better than could possibly be expected.

So presumably, if saints can do health, they can do houses? As I've done before, I had to sub in my orange tree since we're zoned against clothes lines. The lawn maintenance guys who were just arriving looked at me a little nervously. But they did adhere to my admonitions to please watch the leaf blowers!

My son's house is still standing. And OK, I'm willing to give the heroic fire fighters the credit. But sometimes you need all the help you can get.

The recent Gilman fire here in La Jolla in some ways afforded the community the gift of a trial run of a much-worse fire. A+++++ for the fire fighters. F minus (add 5 minuses) for traffic control. It seemed clear after this event that La Jolla's evacuation plan is "Die in place."  (Select one: (a) house (b) car.) Telling people to evacuate with no plan or even actual route to leave seems pretty futile. Given La Jolla's significant elderly population (of which we are two), the Pacific Palisades exhortation to L.A. people who were stuck in their vehicles to "run for your life" is not going to be very workable. We're not sure we'd even try to get out of La Jolla in any direction in our car. 

Olof and I have been pondering our own escape plan. Not to give too many details, but it involves life jackets. And preferably low tide and daylight. And if luck were shining upon us, a leftover panga boat.

Now here's an idea. What if the panga boat guys were alerted when there was a fire here? If they thought there was money smuggling people in, imagine what they could make taking people out. This could usher in a new mutually-beneficial era of international relations. I'm just thinking outside the box. And if I had a wildfire right behind me, there is no box I wouldn't be willing to think outside of.

Of course, in any urban area such as La Jolla that already has major traffic issues under the best of circumstances, one has to ask the deeply worrisome question: is there realistically any way to evacuate people? Even if you could get them out to I-5 (and good luck with that), the freeway would be gridlocked as well.

But it would nice to at least have an actual community plan for which the default is not being cremated in your car. I am (really really) hoping recent events will inspire one.

 

Monday, January 27, 2025

Inga Explains Aging To A 27-Year-Old

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published January 27, 2025] ©2025

Sometimes you have to wonder if the generations will truly ever be able to understand each other.  As one who writes a lot of letters (and saves them), I recently had occasion to revisit a communication of some years ago from my younger son, Henry, who was 27 at the time. He wrote:

Dear Mom - I truly don’t understand the backwards logic of the elderly.  Your recent comment to me that you are “too old for near-death experiences” (i.e. things that scare you) is paradoxical to me.  Since you are already old [his opinion, anyway], it seems to me that you should be more willing to risk death since you have less to lose?  I, on the other hand, have forty to fifty great years ahead of me, so I shouldn’t ever risk death.  If I were really old, I would be in a rush to try to get in as many things as I could since time is running out.  Go figure. 

Dear Henry:

Go figure indeed.  You do raise some intriguing questions.  But I think the simple answer as to why old people are not willing to risk death is that we are not, unlike a core group of people your age (but fortunately not you), judgment-challenged idiots.  Your mother was definitely one in her earlier years.  While we ossifying oldies remember well the sense of invulnerability that characterizes youth, the reason we are still here is that we have recovered from it.  Or at least lived to tell about it.  Olof, as you know, was an Air Force pilot in his younger years and did some very high-risk flying.  When asked why he didn’t remain a pilot, he likes to quote the saying, “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots.” 

I must also take issue with your suggestion that we in the senectitude set have “less to lose.” I’d like to live long enough so that my currently-infant grandchildren could pick me out of a lineup.  (Well, hopefully not literally, but that all depends on how Social Security holds up.)  Never having them know me and remember me would be a lot to lose indeed. 

As for you kids, when Olof and I were on work assignment in Europe in 2005-2006, I concluded that the key to a loving relationship between a mother and her adult sons was 7,000 miles.   I’ve worked hard since then to continue the close bond I have with you and Rory, and enjoy basking in the warm glow of my efforts, a plan which would be seriously thwarted by my untimely death.  

I also cannot imagine being separated from the much-adored Olof.  And not just because it would irk the hell out of me to crump and have Olof – and my estate – succumb to the charms of a twenty-two-year-old pole dancer.

 As for “rushing to get as many things in as I could,” I am rushed out. I spent my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s rushing. If I haven’t gone there and done that, I’m either not interested, or will rent the video. 

I know you think it’s a little early for me to be hanging around smelling the roses.  But I’m just happy that most of my senses and a quorum of my body parts are still in operation.  In the last issue of my college alumni news, it seemed like everyone had had a knee replacement.  Except for the ones who had a double knee replacement. 

While your mother is hardly a financial genius, she does recognize that when one has a shorter term to invest, the return has to be better.  So I’m fairly picky about what I want to invest my time in.  It had better be really fun.  And not involve the 405, O’Hare, or anything made with Jell-O.  I don’t want to have my life be a to-do list, a bucket list, or in fact, ANY kind of list.

At your age, I wanted the 19 countries in 21 days see-it-all, do-it-all trip.  I now aspire to the Italian philosophy of l’arte di far niente – the art of doing nothing.  And preferably, as slowly as possible. 

Love,

Mom


 

Saturday, January 18, 2025

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.


 

Saturday, January 4, 2025

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…


 

 

Sunday, December 29, 2024

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!!!

 

Friday, December 27, 2024

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.)

 


 

 

 

 

Saturday, December 7, 2024

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.