The Date From Hell

["Let Inga Tell You", La Jolla Light, published June 2, 2011] © 2011 (Note:  The Light version removed references to the guy being a lawyer.)

I was interested to read in a recent Union-Tribune article about a web site where people can vent about disastrous dates.  Where were these people twenty-eight years ago when I needed them?

 I was engaged to my first husband at nineteen and totally clueless about dating when I was divorced at thirty-five.  But I can say with some certainty that I learned more from my first date as a newly single woman than I did from the next thirty:

  A woman lawyer friend invites me to a cocktail party at her downtown law firm. Well, midway through, a good-looking attorney (Mistake 1), who in retrospect was already a bit sloshed (Mistake 2) invites me to go to a “fundraiser” with him after the party.  This sounds innocent enough (Mistake 3) and I accept (Mistakes 4-7).

  So off we go in his car (Mistake 8) and I wonder when we get there why there are three police cars out in front of this house.  When we go in (Mistake 9), I discover that this is a fundraiser for an organization that was trying to legalize marijuana.  My date was a criminal lawyer (which actually may describe him more than the type of law he practiced) and kept disappearing into a bedroom with some other people, from which he would emerge incredibly bright-eyed and cheery.  I also couldn’t help but notice that he consumed incredible quantities of alcohol –some fifteen drinks.  Several times I suggested that I was ready to go home but he said he wasn’t ready yet and I didn’t want to be rude.  (I have long since concluded that if we treated our spouses even a quarter as nicely as the jerks we subsequently date, divorce would be virtually unheard of in America.)  It never occurred to me to just call a cab and leave (Inexplicably Idiotic Mistake 10). 

At 2 a.m., I finally insisted that we leave. In my opinion, he’s far too drunk to drive so I insist on driving his incredibly expensive sports car even though I was never too good on stick shifts. He’s so out of it he lets me. Fortunately, there’s not a lot of traffic at 2 a.m. and I finally maneuver this vehicle into my driveway.  I invite him in for coffee (Mega-mistake 11) since he’s in no shape to drive while I ponder what to do with him. 

While I’m making coffee, I glance into the living room and there he is, snorting what I am sure must be cocaine off my coffee table – right next to The Runaway Bunny!  I tell him I am calling a cab and he is to vacate himself from my home immediately.  I suddenly realize that he is going to have no idea where he left his car, so I thoughtfully put a note in his shirt pocket saying “You left your car at…”  (Mistake 13; I should have had it towed to Tijuana.)  On his way out the door, he stops by my refrigerator and grabs an open bottle of wine which he drinks on the curb in front of my house until the cab comes.

He doesn’t come to pick up his car for three days.  When he does, I am polite (Mistake 14) and say, “I see you’ve recovered.”  He looks at me blankly and says, “Who are you?” 

A Husband Trades an Appendage for Pasta

[“Let Inga Tell You”, La Jolla Light, published May 19, 2011] © 2011

For three brief days, my husband was the happiest gout sufferer in America.

He’d still be, except he didn’t actually have gout.

Why, one might reasonably ask, would one be thrilled to be afflicted with such a painful arthritic condition?

A few weeks ago, Olof woke up one morning with a seriously swollen ankle on which he could barely walk.  He didn’t remember injuring it which he thought he would have since he hasn’t been able to exercise much. Since May of 2010, he has pretty much worked seven days a week.

“We just have a lot of business right now,” said Olof.  “But that’s good.”

“Only if you live to tell about it,” I said.

I have had words with Olof about this, because in addition to not getting as much exercise as his wife would like, Olof has cancelled every appointment I’ve made for his annual physical.

“Just to be clear, Olof,” I’d said for months.  “If something happens to you, I am putting you in the cheapest nursing home I can find.  One of those ones you see on Sixty Minutes.”

But despite being totally crippled, Olof, the ultimate Anti-Patient, continued to refuse all medical care and limp off to work.   Five days later, as I was arranging an ice bag around his ankle (the extent of treatment to which he would concede), I noticed that his ankle seemed more swollen than ever.

“OK, Olof.” I said.  “You’re seeing Dr. No first thing tomorrow morning.  I am willing to make a massive scene at your office if you cancel.”

I’ve written about our primary care physician, Dr. No, before.  As in no alcohol, no sugar, no coffee, no starches and even only teeny weeny bits of whole grains.  She has a particular vendetta against pasta.

Dr. No sent Olof for x-rays and labs, citing a preliminary diagnosis of gout.  If so, she informed Olof, he would have to start eating a diet rich in low purine foods, like coffee, bread, rice, and …pasta.

Olof could barely believe his ears.  Did the “p” word actually cross Dr. No’s lips?  And the “c” word (coffee) too?

He called me as soon as he got back to his office, because despite not being able to walk, Olof was still working eighty hours a week.  Just in case she changes her mind, he said, could I start making pasta every night?  Which, by the way, only he can have?

“You want pasta,” he added, “you’ve got to have your own gout.”

That night over dinner, we began to wonder if Dr. No’s draconian dietary standards could have, in fact, caused gout in the first place.  But Olof was one happy guy.  Olof thinks this isn’t a bad trade-off:  he loses a foot but gains pasta.   The only downside would be that it could make his upcoming  business trip to the UK problematical at best.  As a former Air Force pilot, Olof would sooner crawl on all fours to the departure gate than request a wheelchair.

Meanwhile, Dr. No puts Olof on a two day Shock-And-Awe dose of prednisone.  He did a little better but the ankle was still seriously swollen.

The labs took three days to come back.  Definitely not gout.  All arthritic markers were well within normal limits.  Devastated, Olof asked: can we pretend we didn’t hear the lab results?  At least through Monday, or linguine with white clam sauce, whichever comes first?

Meanwhile, Olof’s ankle gradually got better, but not before Dr. No wisely subjected him to an ultrasound for blood clots.  It may have been a blood clot but by the time Olof was successfully bludgeoned into going in, it could well have died of old age and/or boredom.  Olof, meanwhile, maintains that his medical philosophy has once again been vindicated:   If you just leave things long enough, they will either get better or kill you.  Either of which is preferable to seeing a doctor.

Pinnipeds vs. The People

["Let Inga Tell You", La Jolla Light, published May 5, 2011]  © 2011

I have to confess my husband implored me not to write about the seals.  He works hard enough, he says, without having to come home to crosses burning on the front lawn. 

So let me start out by saying that it was incredibly generous of Ellen Browning Scripps to have donated the money for a breakwater at Seal Rock Point some eighty years ago as “a gratuity to children”. 

But in more recent years, WHAT children?

Maybe I just walked by at all the wrong times, but I rarely – pre-seals - saw many children at the Children’s Pool.  In fact, most of the habitués in the last few decades seem to have been teenagers with group death wishes hanging out on the sea wall during storm surf.  (They’re actually still there, same death wish, going for up-close-and-personal photo-ops with the seals.)

I’m sorry, Ellen, because I know you were very well-intentioned.  And because in 1931, I’ll bet there weren’t that many back yard pools.  Heck, there weren’t that many people (less than a tenth of what there are now.)   And you could probably even park in downtown La Jolla since there weren’t that many cars either.  But the times I took my now-30-something kids to the Children’s Pool, I had to schlep a two-year-old and a four-year-old and all their beach stuff a number of  blocks from my parking place across traffic then navigate down three slippery sets of steps to the beach.  The teeny weeny beach.  The beach that had about fifty feet of water front and if I recall, a rather nasty drop off.

This wasn’t exactly the beach of this toddler parent’s dreams.  As a nice enclosed space where it was fun to wade, it was good.  But if the kids actually wanted to get wet, I found La Jolla Shores or Pacific Beach at low tide preferable and a lot more accessible.

Now, of course, the entire infrastructure of the Children’s Pool is disintegrating. Even the bathrooms have succumbed to decay, replaced by five totally rank view-busting Porta Potties  (a.k.a. The Restrooms of Last Resort) on the street level three flights up. 

But during its heyday, the Children’s Pool enjoyed a definite success.  People in my age group  who grew up here would attest to many happy memories there.  Probably not coincidentally, a number of such acquaintances are among the most vocal members of the Nuke The Seals (as one insists she’d happily do) faction. 

But in my observation, over the last three decades, the Children’s Pool has been pretty much abandoned.   If Ellen had had a crystal ball along with her desire to promote water safety, she would have left a second bequest to the Murray Callan Swim School.  It was there, the Y, the Back Yard Swim program, the Beach and Tennis Club, the family pool or a host of other  swimming locations that kids in the last thirty or so years have been hanging out.

As for the shared use proposal, however appealing the concept is, I’m not seeing tiny kids, tiny beach, wild animals, and coliform bacteria as a winning combination. 

I don’t remember precisely when our controversial Pinnipeds first moved from the adjoining rocks to the sand but I am fairly certain that the seals didn’t stage a Normandy-style invasion against a beachlet of terrified tots.  The beach was pretty much there for the taking.

So what’s going on here?  For some, is this a case of nostalgia run amok?  For others, I have no clue.  Hate marine mammals if you will, but deliberately crossing the rope barrier to torment baby seals in the name of “children” has a logic that I don’t get. 

Assuming the seals are driven from the beach in Ellen’s honor by continued marine mammal mayhem, is this suddenly going to be become a Shangri-La full of frolicking kids again?  Maybe, but not likely.  It will still be a massively decaying structure with impossible parking and a residual seal poop problem akin to Chernobyl. 

There is now a security guard at the Children’s Pool to mediate warfare between the Seal Sadists and the pro-animal Sealots.  The adults in our otherwise-wonderful internationally-renowned community have been polarized by a legal and verbal fight to the death over the exclusive rights of use of a tiny beach that the exclusees abandoned years ago. 

 The kids, meanwhile, are adoring the seals.

Loo-less In La Jolla

["Let Inga Tell You", La Jolla Light, published April 21, 2011] © 2011

There are certain things you never really appreciate until you don’t have them.  Like water, for example.

Now I know there are folks out there who go camping in the wilderness and bathe in streams and do all that nature-y stuff.  But Olof and I are not among them.  We are strictly running-water people. 

So it was with no little dismay that I returned home from errands recently to find a bevy of San Diego Water Department trucks on my street and our house without water.  Turns out a section of the street just north of us had caved in.  But this was not what broke the water main.  It was the Bobcat that they’d sent out to investigate the sagging street that fell through it that broke the water main.

Most optimistic guess for water:  seven hours. 

But sure enough, at 5 p.m., after a certain amount of sputtering, water once again coursed through our pipes. 

A mere ten minutes later, I turned on the kitchen faucet, basking in renewed thanks that we live in a land of potable water.  Nothing.  Nada.  Not so much as a drip. This was not a good sign.  I wandered out to chat it up with the water department guys who were by this time my new best friends.  Terrible thing, they said.  The fittings on the pipes in my neighborhood are so old that it didn’t take much pressure to blow the main again a few hundred feet south of the first break as soon as they turned the water back on.  No idea when the water will be back up again. 

Olof wandered in a little after 7:00.  He’d been gone since 4:30 a.m., and he’s not terribly excited about going out.  He wanted a Scotch and dinner and a prone surface, in that order.  And water for a shower.   As if by magic, we hear rumblings in the water heater.  Is Olof the Water Whisperer?  The water has come back on!

For exactly two minutes. 

NOOOOOOOO!!!! I’m just kicking myself.  Why didn’t I use that time to run around and flush toilets, rinse dishes, wash salad greens?  After a whole day without water, the house is starting to smell like an F-rated restaurant.

I chat it up with the water guys again.  Another ancient fitting has blown yet further down the line.  But this one looks really really bad.  Gotta dig up the street.  He hopes we’ll have water by morning. 

I improvise a water-free dinner.  Olof plotzes.  An hour later, those dinner dishes and pots are smelling particularly ripe in the unseasonably warm weather.  I’m tempted to put them outside in trash bags (we don’t have a garage) but fear hosting a rodent bacchanalia. 

All night long we are serenaded by the sounds of jack hammers, beeping trucks and lots of clunking.  Of course, we’re massively grateful they’re out there.  But the person who could make a soundless jack hammer would get our vote for the Nobel Prize. 

Olof has left several faucets in the “on” position.  Because this time we have A Plan.  We also have No Confidence.  We envision the water mains on our street being repaired ten feet at a time, while we go waterless for weeks. 

At 5:11 a.m. we awake to the sound of water gushing from the faucets.  We bolt from bed and by predetermined arrangement, race around flushing toilets, speed washing rancid dishes, filling up buckets, leaping into showers.  We have no idea how many minutes, or even seconds, we will have water.  But we will not be fooled again!

At 5:16 a.m. we’re finished.  We did it!  Our own little Quadrathlon.  It occurs to us that this is more cardio than we’ve had in years. 

This time, the water actually stays on.  But we are no longer naïfs.  We have peered into the holes in the street and now know just how decrepit the infrastructure really is.  We have seen the future, and it is seriously rusty and corroded. 

But for the moment, we have showers.  And more appreciation of water than we have had in years. 

Why Internet Posters Don't Spell Too Good

["Let Inga Tell You", La Jolla Light, published April 7, 2011]  © 2011

There’s probably nothing I enjoy more than misspelled moral outrage. 

Years ago, before the Internet, I used to walk on WindanSea beach where surfers had spray painted “Turist Go Home!” on a sea wall.  They might have succeeded in ways they never envisioned.  That sign was a terrific incentive for visitors not to consider staying here and raising their kids in the same public school system that produced the writers. 

The Internet has brought moral outrage to a whole new level.  Now you don’t even need the spray paint.  Or even the literacy level of a third grader.  Reading the commentary on an article about protests being banned in Saudi Arabia (a place my engineer husband goes often), a reader had posted:  “I dont see Obama and Hilery criticising the Saudi gov like they did with the Iranain gov. HOPOCRISY IS OUR MATTO.”  Um, OK.  Phonetically, it’s not bad.  But I don’t think even Spell Check is going to save this guy on a job application.

During their careers in La Jolla’s public schools, my sons had some terrific and inspiring English teachers but also a few who pretty much abdicated the position.  Rory’s eighth grade English teacher at Muirlands, for example, never corrected spelling or grammar on assignments, maintaining the important thing was to “get your message across”.  One day I looked at a paper Rory was about to hand in and observed, “Unfortunately, the message here is that you’re illiterate.”  I tried to convey to both kids that poor grammar, spelling and punctuation totally distract from the message, never mind undermine your credibility.  Unfortunately, by the end of the year, the teacher was allowing – nay, encouraging - students to do a video or art project in lieu of writing.

Obviously, Twitter, texting, and Internet comment posts have changed the entire scope of the English language, eliminating that pesky punctuation and reducing spelling to a modern day Morse code.  And where once those public comments had to pass through the filter of a newspaper editor, misspelled vitriol goes straight from brain to public post without passing through reflection and/or on-line thesaurus (which would probably throw up its digital hands in despair anyway).  One can’t help but notice that there is an inverse correlation between vehemence and grammatical skills. 

In my worst nightmares, my grandchildren are getting foreign language credit for Late 20th Century English.

It isn’t so far-fetched.  When my kids were growing up here, virtually all of their teachers –elementary, middle school, high school - would say, "You did good”.  It made me crazy – especially when the kids said it themselves. 

“Kids,” I said, “while I’m alive you have to say, ‘I did well.’  You did not ‘do good’.  Once I’m dead, you can say anything you want, although I promise to rise up out of my grave and haunt you.”

Henri looked at his brother.  “Sounds like we better have her cremated.”

Endlessly I went over about ‘good’ being an adjective which had to modify a noun, as in ‘the good boy’.  Actually, their eyes had usually glazed over by the word “adjective”, already in their era a charmingly antiquated concept. Not long ago, one of them sent me an article on evolving language (and I admit, it IS always evolving) noting that ‘you did good’ is in such popular usage that it can be considered ‘correct’.  The attached note read: “Mom - sorry this had to happen in your life time.”

So given that, maybe the Turist Go Home message wasn’t so bad.  Two out of the three words were correctly spelled.  Pretty good percentage by today’s standards. 

Still, it  made my heart sink even if my lips smiled to read a recent Internet post:  “Yuo peepl ar so igmorent yuo down no ENNYTHIN!!!!!!”  I should ask Rory if he remembers this guy from eighth grade English.

**On Meeting My Son's Mother for the First Time

["Let Inga Tell You", La Jolla Light, published March 24, 2011]  © 2011

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting my son’s mother for the first time. 

You have no idea how long I’ve waited to use that line.  (OK, 33 years.)   My older son, Rory - the blond blue-eyed one who looks like me as opposed to my biological son who bears no resemblance to me at all  -  was finally able to meet his birth mother, Erika, and introduced her to the rest of the family soon after. 

This was definitely a Locator moment.  Erika cried, I cried.  Erika is a lovely warm sweet person, the long-awaited missing link.  She also comes with a duplicate in the form of an identical twin.   Our grandson, Elliott, is trying to sort out this Guinness Book of World Records of grandmas:   me, Nana (his maternal grandmother), Grandma Jean (my former husband’s wife), and now Oma Erika and Oma Twin.  Even Rory says he is going into hiding on Mother’s Day in May.  Hopefully, 1-800-Flowers has a multi-mother discount.

I know this was closure for Rory to finally meet Erika but it was for me as well.  I’ve always felt a strong connection to Erika, my forever-16-year-old silent partner and sine qua non co-mom.  I’ve thought about her thousands of times, although I have to confess that the first 950 were in the form of “Who spawned this child?????”  From his earliest days, Rory was a handful, quite possibly the most diabolically creative child (and prankster) ever to be unleashed on this planet. 

The Rory stories are so plentiful and varied – like a terrorist, he never repeated anything twice – that they are just referred to in family shorthand:   “The Cleveland Airport crisis” (he was just faking the seizure), “the Mom’s office fiasco” (the campus police dropped charges) , “the Chinese restaurant disaster” (we felt compelled to leave a 70% tip),  and yes, even “the Bomb Squad debacle” (in Rory’s defense, the HazMat guys should have realized right away it wasn’t a real bomb BEFORE they cordoned off the area).  

 As Olof always said, “Rory looks for excitement.  And finds it.” 

I actually chronicled many of these incidents which now have considerable entertainment value but which at the time I was planning to use as my defense.  Because there were at least 200 occasions when the 20 years in prison would have been worth bludgeoning that kid to death.  

Of course, I didn’t tell Erika that. Or that if I sent Rory to his room, he’d open up both his windows and whack on his bed with a tennis racket shrieking “Please don’t beat me, Mommy!”  Or worse:  “No, no, don’t touch me there!”  (Those stranger awareness classes in grade school were perfect fodder for someone of Rory’s creativity.)

His handmade Mother’s Day card the year he was 10 read:  “You’ve been like a mother to me.” 

So among my burning questions to Erika were:  “Were you into practical jokes?  Embarrassing your family in public?  Siccing social services on your parents?”

No, she said, puzzled.  Why?  She did admit, however, to being a “total handful”, the despair of her mother.  OK, so there’s definitely a “handful” gene going on here.

Rory is now a happily married successful professional and a total love.  He still likes to keep his hand in the pranks just for old time’s sake, most recently appropriating the library card number taped to my computer and ordering me up a long list of books including a guide to coping with hemorrhoids and colitis and another on the intricacies (graphically illustrated) of lesbian sex.  Another, The Book of the Penis, sported its own convenient eight inch ruler on the binding.  Actually, they all turned out to be really educational reading; I sent him a book report on every one. 

I made it one of my life goals to live long enough for Rory to have a son.  And he does.  But Elliott, at four (an age by which Rory had long exhibited holy terror tendencies) is the sweetest easiest kid imaginable. It is so totally unfair.  But Rory recently had a daughter.  I’m trying to imagine a female Rory.  And the possibilities are totally delicious.

Talking To The Tomatoes At Vons

["Let Inga Tell You", La Jolla Light, published March 10, 2011]  © 2011

It’s a phenomenon I call “Talking to the Tomatoes at Vons”. 

You’ve seen it yourself:  A well-dressed La Jolla matron is poised over the tomato station in rapt conversation with the produce.

Several possibilities immediately come to mind, none of which are mutually exclusive:

(1) She is certifiably nuts.

(2) Her conversational companion has fallen into the tomato display and is awaiting assistance by the next available associate.

 (3) There is a Bluetooth ear piece hidden by a perfectly coiffed blond head.

The social dilemma of determining whether people are off their meds or just oblivious cell phone users has been widely documented.  But People Who Talk to Produce is a newer phenomenon. 

Of course, People Who Talk To Produce often talk to canned goods, hard cheeses, and pasta sauces as well. Once you get going talking to food, it’s pretty hard to stop.  I’m finding this an alarming development.

Pretty soon it will need a DSM-IV classification.  Drugs will be used to treat it, including Paxil used off-label.

Since Vons is pretty much the cradle of civilization in La Jolla, it’s pretty hard to go there and not encounter someone you know.  More problematical is encountering someone you know who is not carrying on a conversation with an invisible someone else. 

There is a woman I see there frequently whose son grew up with mine.  She walks toward me smiling brightly, gesturing with her hands.  She appears to be waving.  I push my cart in her direction, smiling and waving back.   “Hi!” I exclaim as she approaches.  She points at her ear, and keeps on walking. 

Minutes later I see her Communing with the Cauliflower.   

Obviously, Customers Who Commune with Cauliflower and Chat With Cantaloupes are a direct result of hands-free phones.  Pushing a cart and holding a phone to your ear just didn’t allow you to adequately squeeze the squashes, handle the honeydews, palpate the papayas, or even fondle the foccaccia. 

But freeing the hands seems to have had a curious effect on the mind as well.  There seems to be some mechanism in those ear pieces that transports people to another dimension where they become the Anointed One in a private universe of dispensable deaf mutes.

If I knew how to set up a web site, I’d create one called StuffIHeardinLaJollaToday.com.  Not just Vons, but in bank lines, restaurants, sidewalks.  OK, so 95% of cell phone conversations border on the criminally inane.  But mixed in to all that oral vomitus are Social Security numbers, nasty gossip, addresses, alarm codes, more nasty gossip,  intimately personal medical information, financial details,  really really vicious gossip, and travel plans including dates people WILL NOT BE HOME.  The kumquats are pretty good about keeping secrets, but can the rest of the world be trusted?

If I could figure out how to use the camera part of my phone, I could even include a photo of the speaker.  Or a video clip.  But I would probably have to worry about hearing from someone’s lawyer.  Because even though the person said something in full earshot of a bin of Idahos, there is probably a law on the books protecting privileged communication between a person and a potato.

None of this really helps to answer my original questions, however.  I confess that what I really want to do when I see people talking to the tomatoes at Vons is tap them on the shoulder and ask:  are the tomatoes answering back?