["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published February 23, 2026] 2026
Packing up some grandchildren books to donate to the library, I came across one on dinosaurs. The T-Rex on the cover seemed somehow familiar to me. And then it struck me. "It's me! That's my body!
No joke, virtually all my body proportions are the same.
OK, I may be exaggerating a teeny bit. But let me make my case.
It may not be obvious when you look at me, but, like my reptilian antecedent, I have a really big head. I mean way up there in the percentile of large craniums. Hats have always been problematical, and even pony tails. You'll never find a picture of me with either. Fortunately for T-Rexes, this wasn't a big issue but they would have found it as much of a pain as I do.
Then there's the overbite. OK, mine isn't as bad as the T-Rex in the picture but if I were a child now, I d definitely be sending an orthodontist's child to Bishops. Perfect teeth just weren't as big a deal in my youth as they are now. A little (or lot) of overbite? Meh.
Like the T-Rex, I'm also missing a waist. My proportions are very...disproportionate. As in heavily weighted on the bottom. This is why I never wear dresses, only separates when you can buy the components in different sizes.
And then there's my tiny little T-Rexy arms. Seriously, my arms are waaay short. It's like they took all those percentiles off my arms and added them to my head. Even buying long-sleeved blouses in a petite size (I am most definitely not a petite person), the sleeve length will be too long.
By the way, just looking at the T-Rex s feet, I'm betting they had plantar fasciitis too. And good luck finding orthotics in the Mesozoic era.
Of course, the one proportion the T-Rex has that I don't is a long neck. It's not like my head sits right on top of my shoulders but let's just say I stopped buying choker necklaces decades ago.
Women's clothes are measured on fit models who are assumed to have standard parts. They are not designed for those of us with my configuration. Which I think we'll all agree is good news. But it makes acquiring apparel a significant problem.
I have long been aware that I seem to be composed of multiple different body parts that don't belong together proportionally on the same person.
How did this happen? One theory, of course, is that back when my mother was pregnant with me, women could drink and smoke as much as they wanted. And probably did.
Of course now, a single drink during pregnancy will get Social Services at your door. If you ever watched the show "Mad Men" which took place in the 1960s, pregnant women were actively knocking back alcoholic beverages, never mind smoking. This was certainly the case in my suburban neighborhood growing up. There were no restrictions whatsoever.
Maybe my Mom was hitting the cocktails pretty hard at certain points of my development. That margarita week must have been quite a party. It's certainly one explanation for the tiny little arms.
There s obviously another explanation. It could all be DNA run amok.
I should note that my oddly configured body wasn't as obvious back when I was thin. (I can hear people who have known me for a while saying, "You were ever thin?" Get lost, OK?) 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.) But after my first marriage ended, 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.
Alas, this added weight only seemed to exaggerate my unusual proportions. It quickly became apparent to me that for any reasonable clothing selection, I would be relegated to catalogs from the Talbots Butterball Collection or Lands End-Porcine. Logging on to Lands End in search of attire for the adiposely-amplified, I was happy to discover a feature called Virtual Model. You type in your assorted measurements, hair color, age, and voila, there is a virtual you standing there in your undies ready to try on clothes.
You can fine-tune the virtual you to a certain extent, but I did notice that "modify My Model" did not include such accuracy-enhancing features as add cellulite or increase sag . In fact, the My Model of me with my alleged weight and measurements wasn't half bad because of course, I had the flabless thighs of an Olympic speed skater. Given this, I enjoyed trying on bikinis and even making myself different races.
Alas, clothes that looked great on the virtual me rarely looked good on the real me because it didn't really create a facsimile of me that accurately reflected the data I gave them. I'm guessing the algorithm thought, "No way. If these were her measurements, she'd be built like a T-Rex." So it fudged them a bit (more than a bit) knowing I wouldn't buy any clothes otherwise.
Fortunately, at this point I know exactly what size black slacks and white tops fit me on Lands End. My older granddaughter has observed that I dress like a barista from a lesser trattoria.
She, of course, has the svelte perfectly-proportioned figure of her mother. I hope her daughter inherits this body type as well. Hence, I have been too polite to mention the word "genetics." Because somewhere in there, lurking where she least suspects it, could be dinosaur DNA.
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