** Revenge Of The Yellow Reading Group

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published April 9, 2015] © 2015 

When my friend’s 31- and 29-year-old sons want to disparage their 21-year-old sister’s intelligence, they’ll note, “Well, you were, after all, in the yellow reading group.” The brothers are quick to remind her that they were both in the blue reading group in grade school, the best readers. 
 

Honestly, the reading group you’re assigned to in first grade can haunt you for life. I’m 67 and I don’t remember what reading group I was in but I do know it wasn’t the bluebirds, the top one. Which brings us to ask: What is it about the color blue that they’re always the good readers?

True to form, when my sons were in first grade, the advanced readers basked in the blue group, middle readers were relegated to the yellow group, the sucky readers sentenced to red. Suffice to say the kids were clear which group was which (Brilliant/Average/Braindead), and more to the point, by day two of school, the parents were too. Much gnashing of teeth and calls to the teacher ensued with entreaties to move little Quentin to the blue reading group where he clearly belonged. Unsaid: Do we look like people who breed yellow reading group children??? A child of Quentin’s obvious talents needed to be challenged!  It was beneath his dignity to be associated with yellow – or God forbid red  - readers who would only pull him down to their level. (They probably didn’t wash either.)

 

 It was not like this just impacted the kid. You could already see the blue reading group parents getting chummy with each other and next thing you know they’ll have dinner parties and not invite you, and your child will be black, er, blue-listed from play dates. Day 2 of school and the wheat’s already been separated from the chaff.
 

I confess that I did have my moments of blue reading group angst. But I also reminded myself that neither Olof nor I were academic balls of fire in our early years. Olof, in fact, was labeled an “accelerated non-achiever” in grade school, a label that puzzled his parents for years. Did this mean he was gifted but not achieving? Or gifted AT non-achieving?  Regardless, he was not achieving. But somewhere along the way, he managed to up his game and ultimately achieved a degree in nuclear physics from Cal Tech. Sighed his mother (age 93) recently, “If only we could have known.”
 

I wasn’t exactly an academic barn burner either. I was the blond sheep in a family of brunette geniuses. My family has never let me forget coming home from the public library after researching my first term paper in seventh grade and announcing sagely, “Ibid sure wrote a lot of stuff!” My voraciously-reading siblings were definitely bluebirds. (I think I may have been a puffin.)

While I was never identified as having learning disabilities, I learned only recently that I had one. I wasn’t  good at learning things by hearing them; I always had to see it to remember it. In college, I would leave lectures without being able to tell you virtually a single thing the professor said but would then transcribe the notes I’d frantically scribbled and know the material cold. A few months ago, a friend was telling me that her granddaughter had been diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder: she was poor at processing what she heard. Lo these many years later, did I finally have an excuse for not being in the blue reading group?  OK, probably not, but it was worth a try.
 

For the record, my older son was in the red group, and my younger son was in the yellow. Despite concerns that failure to be in the blue reading group in first grade dooms a child’s adult options to a career in coal mining (or worse, a lesser state university)  both have been completely self-supporting (and not in coal mining) since graduating from college. Where was the crystal ball when you needed it?

My 21-year-old yellow reading group neighbor is slated to graduate from college in June. Both of her older brothers, despite being blue reading groupers, managed not to graduate on time due to some unfortunate miscalculation of required credits – information that both of them failed to determine until their folks were literally in their car en route to commencement ceremonies. Folks were not pleased. But the impending graduate swears to them that she is not going to follow in her brothers’ footsteps in this regard. The sibs may have been early readers, she notes, but she can actually add. The folks will not be driving to her graduation and getting the same phone call that they got two previous times. At this point, it’s personal, she said, and she’s already made it the theme of her graduation weekend: 
 

The Revenge of the Yellow Group Reader.

 

 

Winston Writes Home

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published March 26, 2015] © 2015 

Dear Mom and Dad –

As your first and most beloved child (OK, I realize the next three are actual humans), I wanted to update you on how I’m doing here at Camp Grammy and Grampy. Grandma has noted aloud that my sojourns here keep getting longer and longer. A kennel, however, would be unthinkable for a canine of my sensitive nature and exacting requirements.   

There's been plenty of sunshine here in La Jolla so I'm usually out baking somewhere - on the grass, on the bricks, or even my new favorite place, the nice warm dirt by the orange tree. Then I like to come in and rub my filthy body on the cream-colored leather sofa in the living room. Grandma thinks the leather cleaning people have me on their payroll.

Keeping grandma and grandpa’s house safe for democracy has, as always, been a full time job. It’s pretty much always DEFCON 3 here with the garbage trucks on Mondays, the lawn mowing guys on Wednesday, and the pool guy with that big scary pole on Thursdays. I exhaust myself with frenzied hysterical barking but still they persist in coming.
 

Now there are new threats to the household. Who knew that the toilet plunger in the guest bath could have been taken over by malevolent forces?  I snarl viciously at it to let it know that its behavior will not be tolerated. Grandma will finally come in and hide the plunger in a closet (vanquished!) I am sorry to report that grandma and grandpa continue to be clueless as to the dangers in their midst.

When I arrived this time, grandma had acquired a new feeding station with high sides. However, I still manage to hurl the occasional piece of kibble out on to the floor and then drag it into the carpet in grandma and grandpa's bedroom where they step on it in their bare feet and say bad words. But it's not nearly as easy as the old feeding tray where I could usually fling 30 pieces of kibble a day out onto the floor, never mind create a minor tsunami of water.
 

If there is one thing I don’t like about La Jolla, it is that it is the allergy capital of the world, infinitely worse than our house in L.A. I am constantly fighting infections. The folds in my face, never mind the inside of my silky ears, need to be cleaned daily, a process I cannot abide. Grandma and grandpa’s La Jolla doggie doc says they had a slogan when she was doing her training: Buy a bulldog: Support a vet. Worse, I overheard Grandpa muttering that for what they’ve spent on my care, they could buy a whole new dog.

 

A reader of grandma’s told her that there is a new miracle drug called Apoquel that works wonders for bulldogs of my allergic persuasion. Unfortunately, it is more expensive and harder to get than heroin. I’m on a waiting list for it (hopefully October?) which cannot come too soon. Grandma has been fantasizing about breaking into a local veterinary office that is rumored to have some.
 

The number of pills they stuff into me daily is positively ridiculous. I do NOT like taking pills – Benedryl, assorted antibiotics  - which don’t seem to work anyway. I no longer accept pills hidden in pet store pill treats, cheese, salami, tuna, and even hamburger. They’ve still been able to get me to take them wrapped in fresh sliced deli turkey breast. But don’t even think of trying the packaged stuff. I do NOT do cheap cold cuts.

 

I have developed a cunning system of swallowing the piece of turkey then spitting the pill out on the kitchen floor. I always leave it in a prominent place just to make a point.

 

 One of my favorite activities here is to stuff toys under the sofa and carry on until grandpa or grandma fetch them for me. (They are so trainable.) I also enjoy lying on their feet so they can’t get up. This is not an activity I get to do at your house since, with three kids under six, you never sit down.
 

Grandma and grandpa continue to be under the spell of my charms. I'm getting lots of rubs, toy tosses, and attention, which is, of course, my due. I'm an insanely attractive animal (regardless of the cruel things people say about my underbite), and have perfected all my laughingly adorable faces on them. When I tilt my head to one side and lift my paw, they are powerless against me. When I flatten my ears to my head and look up at them piteously, they think I am genuinely sorry for puking on the rug.

 

 Missing you and my “sibs,”

Yours in perpetual slobber,

Winston

 

 

Winston demonstrates his technique of swallowing the turkey slice but spitting out the pill

 

 

Winston shows the toilet plunger who's boss

 

**Torture By Password

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published March 12, 2015] © 2015 

I should have recognized it as the beginning of the end. When my university employer decided to make the transition from paper to computers some years back, each employee was emailed unchangeable personal passwords to do business with various departments, with the all-caps admonition: COMMIT THESE TO MEMORY! DO NOT WRITE THEM DOWN!

The passwords were all along the lines of *jwqY@7.  Well, I didn’t really want to contact the travel office anyway.

Lo these many years later, I have 12 PAGES of passwords. The irony, of course, is that I actually have a phenomenal memory for numbers. I still remember all of my childhood friends’ birthdays, addresses, and even phone numbers. But that, of course, is because they were all in my native English and I actually wanted to remember them.

Now, of course, we are all subjected to Torture by Password. The requirements are getting more onerous by the day. There usually have to be a minimum of 8 characters and include a capital letter, number, and “special character.” I can see that for financial accounts, but your local photo developing place? Please! Go ahead and steal my photos! My kids would thank you for it!

Personally, I would never willingly choose a password with a capital letter. I have hurled epithets at a lot of login sites over this, and I mean really really bad words. (I KNOW THAT’S MY PASSWORD YOU effing #$^&*#@#s! WHY DOESN’T IT WORK?????) Ultimately, I have to have them send me a link to re-set my password to a new one that I won’t remember either.

Let’s talk about those security questions for a moment. Almost all of our accounts are joint so when the question pops up about the name of the high school you graduated from, does it mean Olof’s or mine? His first car or my first car? Whenever there’s a choice (and there usually isn’t), we try to go for the unequivocal ones like, “Name of the city in which you got married.” Of course, even that assumes our second marriages, not the first ones.  Neither of us can remember our maternal grandmothers’ maiden names so we just never buying anything from that site.

I realize on-line hacking is a serious problem but when warned to be sure that the “personal phrase” or the “personal security image” I selected appears before typing my password, I can only think, “Hmm, does that look like an image I’d choose?” I tried to always go for a bird but avians aren’t always one of the options. Note to security programmers: There should always be a bird pick!

But it’s not even enough anymore that you have an email address, a user name, a password, a personal phrase, a personal security image, a display name, and three useless security questions. Several of our financial sites now require a 4-digit pin as well. This crosses the line into cruel.

My husband’s former employer made them change their payroll passwords every six months but you could never use one you’d used before. He worked there 17 years.

I’m truly reaching the end of the line on all this. There’s the Google and social media passwords, never mind your cell phone password and iTunes password and your Locate My Lost iPhone password, and your computer login and email accounts.  There are passwords for your virus software and your blog site, the seven airlines, 11 financial institutions, the ATM, the bill paying, six healthcare portals, retiree benefits, 27 assorted vendors, Staples, the pet meds place, your 1-800-Flowers account, the toy sites for the grandkids, the newspaper and magazine subscriptions, your Neighborhood Watch, your college alumni link, PayPal, the guest login on your home WiFi, assorted software renewal logins, TurboTax, Skype, Amazon, YouTube, your husband’s Droid, never mind Social Security and Medicare for us oldies. What’s my password? I HAVE NO FRIGGING IDEA! I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH BRAIN CELLS LEFT!

And on top of all that, my Amazon and Kindle book sales accounts and my Press Club interactions only work on Mozilla Firefox and not Internet Explorer. My bank insists on regularly hitting me up for security questions even though I’ve told them 8 billion times that THIS IS A COMPUTER I REGULARLY USE. The idea may have been to make it all easier but it seems like the only people who are finding it so are hackers. Maybe that’s the job of the future, the personal hacker. You just forget all about that password list and the security images and have someone on call to hack into your sites as needed. Since every day someone seems to steal my information from one of the conglomerates I deal with, I wouldn’t even be putting my data at risk since everyone but me seems to have access to it anyway.

The swelling in my brain is going down already.

A Trip Back To The Early 1950s

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published February 26, 2015] © 2015 

April 12, 2015 will be the 60^th anniversary of the announcement of the Salk vaccine’s ability to prevent polio. Had it been available at your local CVS like flu shots are today, they would have had to call out the National Guard to handle the stampede. In the early 1950’s, there was no diagnosis more terrifying to parents than polio. In the 1952 epidemic, nearly 58,000 cases were reported, 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with varying degrees of paralysis. There wasn’t a parent in America who would have requested a “personal belief waiver” to exempt their child from that shot.

 

In truly unlucky timing, mere months before the vaccine became available in my community that fall, my siblings and I contracted polio during a trip to the family homestead in rural Ohio. (Likely cause: swimming in a contaminated creek with polio cases upstream.

My parents were, of course, beside themselves. The little boy who had been in the bed next to my sister in the polio ward was in an iron lung the next. Anything bought to the hospital could not come home again so there was not even the comfort of a favorite toy or blanket.

 As with all such cases at the time, we kids were quarantined. Reading about the cases of people who suffered a similar fate after Ebola exposure a few months ago, I had a sudden flashback to the summer of 1955. It is so not fun being the local pariahs.

Oddly enough, my parents weren’t quarantined although my mother might as well have been. Her “help wanted” ad would have read today like: “Sitter for three kids recovering from Ebola. Probably not still contagious?” 

Polio aside, in my childhood, there was no hope of avoiding measles, mumps, chicken pox and rubella (German measles) – miserable afflictions that I would never have wanted to inflict on my kids. (All but chicken pox had vaccines by the time they were born.) There could also be serious lasting repercussions to these illnesses: our pregnant neighbor who contracted rubella (German measles) whose baby was born with severe birth defects; cases of deafness following mumps; encephalitis from measles. The curvature in my spine (and decades of back pain that has gone with it) is likely from polio. When rubella came around again, my mother sent me to the home of a friend who had it to be sure I’d contracted it well before my child bearing years.

 

A new generation of young parents have never personally experienced diseases now preventable by vaccines. That’s both the good and the bad news. I guess for some, it’s easier to fear the autism spectrum they actually see.

 

But I wish every parent who doesn’t vaccinate their child could travel back to a 1950s polio ward full of kids in iron lungs, or watch children suffer horribly – and sometimes permanently – from  now-avoidable afflictions. I recently read an interview of a woman who said that in lieu of vaccinations, she was feeding her children a totally organic regimen so their immune systems would be able to resist infection. Seriously? As my parents knew too well, a healthy diet and wishful thinking just aren’t going to do it.

 

 

 

 

 Polio epidemic, 1952 [not me or sibs]

**Uber Overboard

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published February 12, 2015] © 2015 

In my previous column, I wrote about what a boon Uber cars could be to the elderly, especially in San Diego where buses are unreliable (and frequently don’t run at night) and many taxi companies, which are expensive, won’t do short runs. Uber has given me a whole new outlook on life. They’ll go anywhere! Anytime! On a moment’s notice! For fairly cheap! In fact, I should probably sell my car right now and just use Uber!

OK, getting a little carried away there. But I’ve also been thinking of all the other applications Uber might be used for with the elderly. On your 65^th birthday – as soon as that Medicare card is laminated and tucked into your wallet, the dementia anxiety attacks – and jokes – begin. We laugh, of course, to hide the fact that we’re completely terrified. Watching the 11 o’clock news about the elderly person who has wandered off from his facility truly puts fear in your heart. You can’t help but super-impose your face on the screen. And you just know your hair would look like hell.
 

I read an article a while back that said if you can’t find your car keys, that’s getting older. If you don’t remember you have a car, it’s dementia. Every time I’m searching in my mind for a word for a column or crossword, I find myself muttering a refrain in the background, “I have a car, I have a car.” Probably if I stopped doing that, I’d remember the word a lot sooner.

It didn’t help that soon after my 65^th birthday, my older son, the perpetual prankster Rory, saw an ad on TV for a placement service for the severely memory-impaired. Several days later, a very sympathetic woman called and asked for my husband Olof, and when told he was at work, was dismayed to learn that I had been left unattended. She seemed to have a great deal of information about me and when I adamantly insisted “I do not need institutional care!” soothed, “You seem to be having one of your good days, dear.”

But back to Uber. I think Uber has huge possibilities for the senility set. It could have your address installed in the app so that if you got lost and couldn’t remember where you lived, you just press the Uber app and the driver shows up and takes you home. That, of course, is assuming you can remember to push the Uber button but that seems inherently easier than remembering your address.

But I had some even better ideas after my younger son, the nice one, told me that over the holidays, in the process of extricating themselves from three tiny kids, he and his wife arrived at a dinner party without the chocolate soufflé they’d promised to bring for dessert. Dismayed at the prospect of going all the way home to get it, my son had the brilliant idea of sending an Uber car to his home where the sitter handed off the soufflé to the Uber driver, who delivered it to the party. It was automatically charged to the credit card without their ever getting in the car themselves. (For the record, the soufflé rated the driver very highly.)

So, I’m thinking, if soufflés, why not Mom?

Letting my ever-overamped imagination run wild, I was thinking that Uber could develop a sub-application called “Find My Mother.” Mom wanders away from The Home and son is alerted by the Escape Alarm on his phone that she is no longer tied to her bed. Son presses his new Uber-GoGetHer app which immediately gives a GPS location on Mom who presumably has her phone in a little velvet carrying case around her neck. (OK, you may have to microchip her.) The Uber driver swoops in, puts mom in the car (hopefully she goes quietly) and returns me, er, her to The Facility, courtesy of the “If found, please return to” app on Mom’s phone. Avoids that whole embarrassing evening news thing. Never mind that son didn’t even have to blink during his Power Point presentation.

Now, as a senior, I think these Uber applications should go both ways. Don’t like the nursing home your kids have stashed you in? Before you make a break for it, you install an override app on your phone with special instructions to the Uber driver: DON’T TAKE ME BACK TO THAT PLACE. LEAVE ME AT THE DOWNTOWN RAILROAD STATION AND CHARGE A ONE-WAY TICKET TO SAN FRANCISCO ON MY CREDIT CARD. THEN THROW THE PHONE IN THE BAY. Like, we have rights too.

Now that I’m on Medicare, issues of aging occupy a lot of my brain cells. Olof thinks they would probably be better spent on memory exercises. The important thing is, I’m pretty sure I have a car.

 

*A Wild And Crazy Technology Frenzy

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published January 29, 2015] © 2015 

Over the Christmas holidays, I went into a wild and crazy technology frenzy and had the kids install both Instagram and Uber on my iPhone. I’m not actually interested in posting photos on Instagram myself but my daughter-in-law posts lots of adorable grandtot photos on hers which I was eager to see. Of course, I tried to install it first and messed it up beyond all belief. The kids used to encourage me to try software installs myself (teach a person to fish) but they’ve come to realize that some people simply cannot be taught to fish and will be a drain on society for life. I have many talents, but technology is not one of them.

I confess that part of my motivation was that now that I’ve had a smartphone for two years, I thought it was time to add an app. I didn’t want to rush into anything. I know people who say they have maxed out the number of apps their phone will allow. I’m agog. How do they even remember what all of them do? Every icon on my phone came with the phone and fits on one screen. Or did anyway. I felt bad for that Instagram app all by itself on the second screen so I decided that as long as I had tech support available, I’d add Uber as well. So now the Instagram app has a friend.

I truly think Uber is the best invention ever. As one who has lived in San Diego for decades, my opinion of certain local taxi services is withering at best. I don’t want to mention any names but the ones I’m talking about are often associated with citrus colors. Ever since flat rate transportation companies entered the field, these are the only ones Olof and I will use to go to the airport, having been stood up by the citrus folks one too many times. (Once, my lawn guys took me to the airport in their truck – my suitcase and their mower rolling around in the back - when the citrus service announced it would be an hour late.) 

While taxis regularly circulate around the bars in Pacific Beach, my son and friends, then college students, stood on Prospect Street in downtown La Jolla late one night for an hour and a half for a citrus cab that repeatedly said it was en route but never showed.

A friend who lives in University City waited endlessly for a citrus cab after each of a series of oral surgery appointments in downtown La Jolla. One time, a driver showed up after an hour announcing he was taking pity on her because all the citrus drivers were hoping for airport runs and were simply ignoring her call, despite insisting they were on their way. He expected a generous tip for this.

Worst of all, I can’t even count the number of times I gave rides home to elderly women supermarket patrons waiting with their defrosting groceries for the cab that was called for them but which, 60 minutes later, had still not arrived. Fortunately, I don’t look dangerous so these women were willing to get in my car. Or, kidnapping sounded more appealing than continuing to wait for the cab. I get that cab companies want longer hauls. But saying you’re coming when you’re not? There should be a special place in hackney hell for you guys.

Those ladies waiting outside the supermarket put the Fear of Being a Non-Driving Senior in the Land of Crappy Public Transit squarely in my heart. Buses, alas, aren’t reliable either and often don’t run at night. But Uber happily does short hauls. And comes immediately! Any time! When they say they’re coming, they actually come! On top of that, they’re half the cost! And no I don’t have stock in Uber!

One teeny weeny problem with Uber, at least as far as senior citizens are concerned:  You currently need a smartphone. Fortunately, once your techno savvy kids have installed it for you, the app is almost frightening easy to use. You push the Uber icon and the driver knows where you are because of the GPS on your phone, and comes and gets you. Your credit card is already on file with them so you don’t even have to have cash. Tip is included!

The people who manufacture those large-print totally basic Jitterbug cell phones for the elderly would be wise to immediately make standard an Uber app on it. Advice for 18-year-old techno geek app designers: It should be a button with a CAR on it, okay? You’re dealing with a population who isn’t getting either younger or more techno savvy.

Truly, I think if we could get the smartphone thing worked out, Uber will be the biggest boon to seniors since knee replacements.

Sorry, citrus guys. It’s the juicer for you.

 

 

50 Years of Inga and Olof

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published January 15, 2015] © 2015 

January 20, 2015 will be the 50^th anniversary of the day Olof and I met. As he likes to tell people, we were four days old.

Actually, we were 17. And we were two of a group of 40 exchange students from all over the U.S. boarding a Varig flight at JFK en route to Brazil for the Southern Hemisphere school year that started in March. It was below freezing in New York City when we took off, and a massively humid 95 degrees in Brazil’s deep-summer heat when we landed. My hair in the attached photo (at a stopover in Bahia, Brazil) tells the whole story.

 

Once we arrived in Brazil, we would be dispersing to all parts of the country. While my then-adventure-seeking self hadn’t had a nanosecond’s hesitation about this venture, the reality that I wasn’t going to see or talk to my family for a full year was starting to sink in. I had only turned 17 six weeks before.

An hour into our flight, I had ascertained that three guys, but no other girls, were headed to the same town just a few degrees off the equator as I was. Tim, Bill, and Olof instantly became my new best friends. At the time, there was no transatlantic phone service to our new home, and even mail often required a six week turnaround time – if it got there at all.

We would be living with local families and going to Brazilian schools. Since I’d had only two weeks’ notice that I was going, I spoke about 10 words of Portuguese. My host family spoke exactly three words of English: “hello,” “party,” and “Coca-Cola.” Language acquisition was strictly the immersion method. Learning enough Portuguese in the six weeks before school started was a fazer-it-yourself project.

I knew within weeks that Olof and I would be friends for life. He and his Brazilian “brothers” (from the family he lived with) were frequent visitors to my home. Olof and I were the only people in our then-world who could appreciate the profound overnight changes in our lives.

All-American teen Olof found himself in a world with a lot more freedom than he’d had before. That midnight curfew he railed about at home? A quaint and puzzling concept in his new town. On his first night there, his Brazilian brothers took him out to celebrate with a lot of cachaça drinking followed by the local whorehouse. (He swears to this day he didn’t partake of the latter.) The town was unpredictable enough that his family required him to carry a weapon, preferably a gun or a knife. Fearing he’d only hurt himself, he talked them into letting him carry brass knuckles instead.

Meanwhile, I experienced a time warp to the Victorian era. I couldn’t leave the house without a chaperone, required not only for my reputation (and the family’s) but for my own safety. I attended the local convent school where we dropped to our knees and prayed between classes. Olof and his Brazilian brothers would hang out across the street in their car waiting for me to come out of school, even though I wasn’t allowed to speak to unrelated males while in convent uniform.

Not that it mattered. I was usually too busy doling out cruzeiros to the lepers who waited for me outside the convent gates. My Brazilian family had warned, “Don’t give money to the lepers or they’ll be there every day!” Definitely not advice I was used to hearing on the first day of school. But I was so distressed by these heartbreaking people missing parts of fingers and noses that I couldn’t help myself. Treatment for Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) hadn’t yet made it to this impoverished area of Brazil. Mere weeks before, my biggest preoccupations were college applications and how my hair looked in my yearbook photo. Leprosy, not so much. As I noted in my new book, Olof’s and my early history was not one of A&W Root Beer dates. 

I didn’t have any choice of curriculum as all the seniors in my school took the same classes. I had fortunately already studied French and Latin; translating them into Portuguese was problematical, since I had to get there via English. A lot got lost in the process.

As I also detailed in my book, Olof and I married other people the first time around but we stayed in touch in the pre-internet era via letter*. (* (noun, archaic): communication on paper requiring envelope, stamp, and physical address.) While both of our first marriages had ended in divorce, a fortuitous business meeting in San Diego for Olof in early 1987 brought us together in person again. After eight years of a commuter relationship, we married in 1995, 30 years after this photo was taken. At our wedding, a friend said she was glad to see we weren’t rushing into anything.

 

 

L-R Bill, Inga, and Olof, Bahia, Brazil airport, January 20, 1965