Favorite Column Leads, Part III: Life, Aging, Chocolate

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published April 18, 2022] ©2022

This fall will commence my fourteenth year of writing “Let Inga Tell You.”  It’s been the best retirement gig ever. I’ve covered a lot of topics, some of them repeatedly: technology, kids, husbands, rats, weight, parking, appliances, Covid, and a host of La Jolla-centric issues.  Over the last few columns, I re-capped some of my favorite leads from the time I started this column. [No, I’m not retiring.]  This week I’m covering my on-going issues with health, aging, my house, life, and, of course, chocolate.    

I’ve spent considerable time over the years pondering the mysteries of the universe, but the one I truly can’t solve is why it takes four La Jolla women eighty emails to find a mutually-agreed upon date for lunch.  [June 30, 2011] [This column has had more reprint requests - as far away as South Africa- than any other column I’ve written.]

There was definitely a selection factor about the people who attended my 50^th high school reunion in suburban New York a few weeks ago.  We were the people who weren’t dead. [Aug. 13, 2015] 

Everybody has a fantasy about what they’d do if they won the lottery. I’ve always been clear about mine: hire a live-in masseuse. I’d get a minimum of two massages a day of about four hours each. In fact, some days I wouldn’t even get off the table, especially if I could figure out a way to simultaneously get a straw into a glass of chardonnay.  [August 7, 2014]

Over the twelve years I’ve been writing this column, chocolate has been a frequent topic, most recently as a health food, which, by the way, it has finally been determined to be.  I was definitely born too soon.  [June 9, 2021]

Several years ago at a holiday lunch, I was seated next to a woman who had opened her own clothing boutique in North County. She thought it was a travesty that women’s clothes were mostly targeted toward the really slender. So in addition to carrying clothes for the emaciated svelte (my term), it was her plan to design clothing for her boutique for the “larger woman.” “What sizes?” I inquired, suddenly taking interest.  “8-12,” she says.  It was all I could do not to accidentally knock her Nicoise salad (dressing on the side) into her scrawny size two lap. [January 17, 2022] 

On January 1, I always vow – in writing - that this year I will lose the forty pounds I gained on the White Wine and Mrs. Fields Depression Diet during my divorce.  A minor detail, upon which we shall not dwell, was that the divorce was twenty-six years ago. Dec. 31, 2009]

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.  [July 14, 2011

It has not escaped my attention that all of my favorite TV shows are sponsored by antidepressants.  [Nov.17, 2011]

You know you’re getting older when you catch your adult kids walking around with a tape measure envisioning the remodel after you’re dead.  [May 3, 2012]

Last week I wrote about my husband Olof’s surprising heart attack after he’d just spent a year getting down to his ideal weight, eschewing alcohol and bad carbs, and walking two hours a day.  So much self-sacrifice and you STILL have a heart attack? Profoundly unfair. I could only wonder afterwards: should I just stick with chocolate and chardonnay, my food groups of choice? I would NOT want to risk a cardiac event. [Feb. 8, 2018]

It’s comforting to know that after I’m gone, I’ll live on through Post-it notes. [August 31, 2017]

I’m not the worst housekeeper in the world. But I am a contender. [April 20, 2016]

They don’t call me Orchid Death for nothing. [Oct. 6, 2021]

  You can hardly pick up a magazine these days without reading about the Japanese uber-organizer Marie Kondo whose best-selling book about tidying advises only keeping things that “spark joy.”  Does that include husbands and children? [Feb. 7, 2019]

A hazard of being a multi-ethnic household this time of year is that I’m always afraid the Menorah will set fire to the Nativity scene.  [Dec. 5, 2013]

Our dog, Lily, is definitely an emotional support animal even if she doesn’t have a diploma.  Fortunately, I also have an emotional support husband.  My kids, not so much.  But isn’t that why you have a dog? (And a husband?) June 3, 2020]

This time of year, we start hearing a rat family scurrying around our attic crawl space searching for warmth as San Diego’s version of winter begins. Honestly, these rats are such wusses. It’s San Diego you guys. It’s 60 degrees. They’d never make it as New York rats, let me tell you.  [November 20 2014] 

A mere month ago I conducted what I call a Preemptive Rodential Offensive, denuding my orange tree of 700+ oranges to avert our annual summer rat invasion. A rat accompli, the only fauna I’d now have to deal with was our visiting grand dog, Winston. That was until my husband remarked, “Do you hear quacking?”  [June 27, 2013]

Yup, we heard quacking.  And Winston wasn't happy about it. [2013].

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Favorite Column Leads, Part II: Kids And Grandkids

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published April 11, 2022] ©2022

This fall will commence my fourteenth year of writing “Let Inga Tell You.”  It’s been the best retirement gig ever. I’ve covered a lot of topics, some of them repeatedly: technology, kids, husbands, rats, weight, parking, appliances, Covid, and a host of La Jolla-centric issues.  Over the next few columns, I am going to re-cap some of my favorite leads from the time I started this column. Last week, I covered Husbands (particularly Olof). This week we’ll cover Kids (my older son (the irrepressible adopted Rory) and my younger son, Henry), single parenthood, grandkids and pets. 

When I became single after my divorce, it was a sobering thought that if I wasn’t murdered on any given night, it was only because no one felt like it.  [Sept. 29, 2021]

There are times when you just have to lie.  All right, I can hear my many lovely devout friends shaking their heads and saying, “No, it is NEVER okay to lie.”   So let this be my mea culpa:  I lied. But if I hadn’t lied, I’d probably still have a dead possum in my front yard.  [Dec. 2, 2010]

I still have the now-slightly-moldy handmade card my older son Rory gave me for Mother’s Day when he was 10:  You’ve been like a mother to me, it read. [May 11, 2017]

My husband has always maintained that I married him for his skills with a sewer augur, but that’s only partially true.  [March 11, 2010] (Rory loved flushing myriad objects down the toilet so he could watch it overflow.)

A few months ago, I wrote two columns regaling my readers with stories about how my older son, Rory, managed to terrorize me repeatedly by re-enacting scenes from horror movies he’d been allowed to watch at his father’s.  I personally think my ex hoped I would suffer a heart attack and die, thereby absolving him from further child support payments.  He denies this. [Nov. 18, 2020]

Every teenager at some point ponders the question, “Just how stupid ARE my parents?”  [June 6, 2013]

I get that teenager sons need to separate from their mothers. But do they have to be so mean about it?   [April 13, 2014]

Of all the fantasies one has as a new mom, one never imagines that some day that adorable blob will be assigned to write a paper for his abnormal psychology class analyzing the psychopathology of someone he knows well.  And choose you. [Nov.4, 2010]

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting my son’s mother for the first time.  [March 24, 2011] [I had to wait 32 years to use that line.]

Grandkids:

Over the holidays, it is always our hope to have the company of our four preschool grandchildren. And after they leave, it is always our hope to someday get all of our electronics working again.  [Jan. 24, 2013]

Recently, we spent four days in L.A. babysitting our grandchildren – 5, 4, and 14 months – paroling our son and daughter-in-law for a much-needed get-away.  Overall it went well. There were, however, three heart-stopping episodes but fortunately nothing that could not be resolved by either (1) acetone (2) phenobarbital or (3) the realization that the house wasn’t on fire after all. [Sept. 10, 2015] 

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.”  [May 9, 2013]

Preschool is a whole new world since my sons went. Two of my grandchildren go to a preschool in L.A. that is not only rabidly environmentally-conscious but also has a zero tolerance policy for sugar (bad for you) and nuts (someone could be allergic) on school grounds. (Knives would probably be OK.)   [May 11, 2016]

I’ve finally come to understand the basic connection between grandparents and tiny grandchildren: diapers. They really want to get out of them, and we fervently hope never to get into them.  [July 10, 2014]

At my granddaughter’s first birthday, her mother tore off a small piece of the baby-sized chocolate cake and gave it to her.  My granddaughter ignored it, picked up the cake itself, and buried her face in it. I knew absolutely at that moment that my genes had been thrown forward. [Oct. 11, 2018] 

Pets:

A few years back when I wrote about our birds, I cautioned that one should never let kids get a pet with a longer life expectancy than yours. I really, really mean it. [October 16, 2014]

Call me naïve, but I really thought neutering a dog was supposed to make him, well, uninterested.  But even after Winston went under the knife, there would be the odd occasion when we’d be having a dinner party on our patio and a guest would suddenly exhibit a certain telltale twitching indicating to us that Winston was under the table having a close encounter of the interspecies kind. [March 2, 2016]

I still have the hand-made card Rory made for me for Mother's Day when he was 10

 

Favorite Column Leads, Part I: Husbands

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published April 4, 2022] ©2022

 This fall will commence my fourteenth year of writing “Let Inga Tell You.”  It’s been the best retirement gig ever. I’ve covered a lot of topics, some of them repeatedly: technology, kids, husbands, aging, rats, weight, parking, appliances, Covid, and a host of La Jolla-centric issues.  Over the next few columns, I am going to re-cap some of my favorite leads (or ledes as they say in the newspaper biz) from the time I started this column. And no, this doesn’t mean I’m retiring.  (You should be so lucky.) This week we’ll start with: Husbands (particularly my engineer husband, Olof).

We know couples who contend they can talk to each other about “anything.”  My husband Olof agrees that’s the way relationships ought to be, so long as you never actually do it. [Sept. 26, 2013]

My husband is having an emotional affair with a cooking show lady.  There, I’ve said it.  [Feb. 6, 2014]

When Olof married me sixteen years ago after eight years of commuting from the Bay area, I knew it was important for him to have his own space in my house since he’d had to give up his own home.  Since Rory had just left for college, I told Olof that room was his to do what he wished. Who knew I married someone with no taste?   [Feb. 24, 2011]

A while back, I wrote about how Olof and I were engaged in dishwasher wars now that he had taken over this chore in retirement.  Three-plus years later, after considerable discussion and negotiation, I would like to report that…nothing has changed.  [April 18, 2019]

Now that Olof no longer requires a high security clearance for his job, I can safely divulge that all anyone ever needed to do to get him to spill every secret he knew was tie him to a chair in front of a continuous loop of feminine hygiene commercials.  [May 20, 2010]

What is it with men, anyway?  No, don’t even try to answer that. [Nov. 11, 2020]

When my husband, Olof, asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I didn’t hesitate to request a top-of-the-line sewer auger.   Now, this might suggest that the romance has gone out of the relationship or worse, could be considered a dismal metaphorical condemnation of our union.  [Nov. 7, 2013)

I wrote last week about finding the ideal Christmas gift for my engineer Olof:  a slide rule.  I’d like to report that it is being lovingly slid on a daily basis.  Who knew there were so many uses for a logarithmic scale? [Jan. 20, 2019] [It was a never-used personalized high school graduation gift from 1949 sold on eBay by the now-deceased recipient’s estate.]

I think I can sum up my husband, Olof’s, and my different styles by the funeral instructions our estate attorney had us write when he set up our trusts.  Mine went on for three pages.  Olof’s were all of six words: “I don’t care. I’ll be dead.”  [Jan. 10, 2013]

It’s been my observation over 11 years and nearly 400 columns that I always get the most response when I write about dogs or my husband, Olof. Olof is trying not take this personally. [Oct. 21, 2020]

Forget iPhones, iPods, iPads and Wii. My husband and I agree that no techno gismo ever invented compares to GPS.  But then, we’re not called the Bobbsey Twins of Directional Disability for nothing. [Feb.11, 2010 

Last year, my husband took a trip with four fellow-physics-major college roommates that as basically a geek fest tour of the Pacific Northwest.  They took in the Boeing factory, then Reactor B, and apparently got positively misty-eyed at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Hanford. The only people who had more fun than they did were their wives who didn't have to go.  [Sept. 5, 2019]

Before my engineer husband tries to explain anything technical to me, he says, “I think you might want to get the yellow pad.”  He, of course, means an 8x11 lined legal pad which we buy by the kilo, since he also asserts that when I die, he’s going to insert a multi-pack of them into my coffin for my use in the hereafter. In his dream of the hereafter, somebody else is helping me with my technical problems who is not him.  [Dec. 13, 2012] 

A now a favorite one about a different husband:  

My expat friend Julia had to go out of town for several weeks on a family emergency and was surprised to return and find a veritable mountain of laundry waiting for her. She'd expected laundry, of course, but commented that she had never realized that her husband Fred owned so many clothes. Turned out that when she left, he hadn't. But as he ran out of clean clothes, he just kept buying more.  Weeks of more. [May 31, 2012]

I loved that my husband was willing to take over the dishes after he retired, but he runs the machine a quarter full.  Makes me crazy! (Column April 18, 2019)

Bad Grandma

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published March 21, 2022] ©2022

The voice on the other end of the phone couldn’t have been more enthusiastic.  “Hi grandma!” said a late teen-early 20-ish voice.

It definitely wasn’t one of my grandsons who are all a lot younger.

“I’m sorry,” I said politely. “But I think you have the wrong number.” I was about to hang up when he said, “I knew you wouldn’t recognize my voice.  I’m sick. In fact that’s why I’m calling.”  He coughs for effect.

And in a flash I knew: grandma scam! While it would have been tempting to just hang up, this suddenly seemed a lot more interesting than paying the property tax bill on-line which I’d been doing at the time. 

“So which grandson are you?” I say, deciding to play along. 

“Geesh, grandma, you don’t know?”

“Timmy?” I say.

“Yes, Timmy,” he replies. “Here’s the problem. I went to Mexico for the weekend with some friends and got really sick. And now they won’t let me out of the hospital if I don’t pay the bill in cash. Mom and Dad didn’t know I was going and they would just kill me.  (Pause.) You’ve always been my favorite grandma.”

Woo-hoo! This script was right out of the AARP Scams-on-Seniors Playbook. Now I was intrigued.

“So how much do you need?” I said.

“$2,000,” says my fake grandson Timmy. “I know it’s a lot of money but I promise I’ll pay you back.”  Another pause, and a voice of contrition. “I’ve learned my lesson.” 

“Are you sure they won’t take your medical insurance?” I inquire.

Timmy starts to sound a tad annoyed. “I already asked. Cash or nothing.”  He decides to up the ante. “My friends are leaving this afternoon to drive back so if I can’t get out, they’ll leave me behind.”  Upping the ante some more: “I’ve heard they put people in jail who can’t pay their bills down here.”  Escalating to Defcon1: “I’m really scared.”

“Don’t worry, sweetie,” I say in best faux-caring grandma voice. “Just tell me how I get the money to you”

If one could hear a happy dance across optical fiber, this would have been it. “Can you wire it to me via Western Union?” he gushes, that rasp in his voice suddenly gone.  “Just go to WesternUnion.com. It’s really easy. Have you got something to write with?” (Pause.)  “You really are the best grandma ever.”

Oops! The property tax line is about to time me out. Don’t want to have to start all over again.  As much fun as this has been, it’s time to wrap up TimmyGate.

“You know, Timmy,” I say, “You’ve never been my favorite grandson. In fact, I’ve never really liked you at all.”  And I hung up.

Burning questions consumed me for the rest of the day after this phone call.  The first being: how does anyone actually fall for this scam?  There were dozens of specific questions I could have asked him that would have exposed him as a fake. I’ve read that the truly artful grandma scammers have done a little research, sometimes found out the names of the actual grandchildren, maybe even their birthdays, or their parents’ names. Maybe the family pet.

But this little dweeb hadn’t even bothered and was hoping to deflect questions with aspersions on grandma’s love for him. Get ME to come up with the right grandchild name. I have to say that as a grandma scammer, he wasn’t very good. My one shot at grandma scamdom and I get an amateur.

On-line research on the subject later in the day suggested that the reason the grandma scam works is that grandparents are desperate to hear from their deadbeat grandkids, regardless of the excuse.  Saying “I love you” is the closer.

That people still fall for the much-publicized Nigerian scam is even more baffling. Have they been living under a rock? (Or have the brains of one?) A wealthy Nigerian prince/businessman sends total strangers an email (I’ve received dozens) and wants to give them ten million all for the minor inconvenience of letting the prince/businessman use your U.S. bank account to transfer some of his funds out of his war-torn country.

But my other burning question about “Timmy” was: how did he get my number?  Is AARP selling us out?  Is there a list of grandmas you can buy on the internet at grammy-scam.com? Or do they just cold call until they get a woman who sounds old?  (I DO NOT SOUND OLD.) 

I would have loved to have asked him before I hung up, “So Timmy, I’ll actually wire you $50 if you tell me how you got my number.”  But he would never have told me. And I would never have sent the $50 anyway.

 

Unwisely Tempting Fate

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published March 14, 2022] ©2022

One should never tempt the fates, which is why I have no idea what possesses me to do it now. But here goes:

Somehow, both Olof and I have managed to keep from contracting Covid-19. 

Of course, we were vaccinated and boostered as soon as these opportunities became available to us.  We tried not to put ourselves at unnecessary risk but I did continue, fully masked, to grocery shop and patronize my pharmacy. The latter were survival mechanisms. When you know that a trip to CVS is what’s keeping you alive, things are grim. 

However, so many of our friends, equally vaccinated and boostered, did contract Covid.  Why not us?

Of course, I have my theories, some even kinda sorta backed up by science.

Our Christmas was cancelled at the eleventh hour when my youngest grandson and daughter-in-law, at whose home we were headed, both tested positive for Covid. 

Fortunately, some dear friends who live walking distance from us invited us to join their Christmas celebration instead.  Shortly thereafter, five of the 12 of us who had spent four hours at the same indoor table unmasked (because we were eating) had tested positive for Covid.

But not us. 

As I said to my younger son later, if we had known we would be spending the evening with people who had Covid, we could have just gone to his house. 

After pondering for considerable time what the difference was between those who contracted Covid and those who didn’t, there was only one conclusion.  The Covid folks weren’t drinking enough.  Or actually anything since they were driving. We who were walking home, however, made up for them.

I joked about this to people but some weeks later, I was surprised to see an on-line article from The Wine Spectator citing a health study of 500,000 UK residents which found that people who drank one or two glasses of red wine per day had a 10 to 17 percent lower risk of contracting Covid than non-drinkers.  White wine drinkers had 7 to 8 percent lower risk. 

What if you drank your weekly allotment all at once? Would those little Covid buggers stand a chance?

Sadly for beer or cider drinkers, they had a 28 percent higher risk of contracting the disease.  Hard alcohol drinkers were screwed as well.

The authors of the project called for “further study.”  Yeah, I’ll bet they did. Knocking back a few more cases of Chateau Mouton Rothschild would be strictly for scientific purposes.

Meanwhile, my cousin Wally has a totally different theory. Our family had a summer home on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, where I spent my summers growing up. Between the island and the Jersey shore is Barnegat Bay which is about four feet deep except in the International Water Way.  My friends and I were able to earn easy money clamming in the bay and then selling our bounty door to door. One squished one’s bare feet around in the mud (no wussy clam booties for us!) until you felt a clam, then reached down and put it your floating basket.  My own family downed at least a dozen clams on the half shell a night.  A regular sunset ritual.

Now there are those who think that consuming raw clams might be risky, and potentially riskier yet when those clams are from the questionable waters of Barnegat Bay.  But no one ever got sick. (Believe me, you’d know.)  Cousin Wally, who was a regular visitor and clam consumer, commented recently that both of his adult children had acquired Covid but not he.  “I’m thinking,” he observed wryly in a recent email to me, “that our shared history of clams on the half shell at the Jersey shore may have something to do with our immunity.”

Well, it’s probably as good a theory as any. 

I’ve also read a theory that some people have genetic immunity. 

My mother was born November 1, 1918 during the week of the greatest number of deaths from the Spanish Flu pandemic (an estimated 55,000 people worldwide in one week).  Her mother had contracted the flu in the final weeks of the pregnancy and came very close to dying.  In fact, relatives had to care for my mother for the first six months of her life while my grandmother slowly regained her health in an era with far fewer (none?) pharmaceutical interventions. 

OK, not the same virus.  But in some sly genetic way, did some immunity to nasty viruses manage to make its way down to me?  OK, probably makes as much sense as excessive holiday imbibing and suspect bivalves.  And as noted above, it is never a good idea to tempt the fates. Hopefully this is not being read as a cautionary tale after my Covid-related demise.

But in the meantime, I’m going to have an extra glass of chardonnay at night.  Strictly medicinal purposes. 

Olof shucking the nightly platter of clams on the half shell at the Jersey Shore, 1988.  Has this saved us from Covid?

 

The House Of Decrepitude

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published March 7, 2022] ©2022

2022 started out really inauspiciously for us when, 11 hours into the new year, our dog Lily went charging out to our front gate to ward off a Big Black Dog (her nemesis) and ruptured her right ACL (knee).

When she ruptured her left ACL in May of 2020, we were warned that she would have a 60% chance of doing the other one.  We were desperately hoping to be in the lucky 40% but that does not seem to be God’s plan for us. God’s plan for us to be make vets’ Mercedes payments.

On February 3, Lily got her new knee.  The surgeon's instructions read "For the first six weeks, do not allow the dog to run, or to jump on (or off) furniture."  Does he realize we are talking about a DOG? Who lives to chase balls and jump on (and off) furniture?

When we dropped Lily off the morning of surgery, among the tech’s questions was what our “financial cap is for today.”  Huh?  The tech guy continued, “sometimes we run into unexpected problems that we didn’t foresee and need to know if the client has a cap on services should that occur.” Our dog is, after all, twelve-and-a-half and has a heart murmur. 

What, they’re asking for a cap on the life of our fur child?  The one who gives us endless unconditional love, unlike our two human children who most definitely don’t?  I mean, we know our adult children love us but the days of them gazing adoringly at us with their little pink tongues hanging out is long past. (I concede this is probably a good thing.)

And we know from friends’ pets that surgical outcomes for elderly pets can most definitely go awry.  Friends of ours with no human children had a much-adored 13-year-old dog who developed a brain tumor. Once upon a time, there would have been no choice but to put the animal down. But now there is literally nothing you can do medically for a human that you can’t also do for an animal.  Kitty dialysis, for example, is now a major industry. 

Anyway, the friends went for the $8,000 surgery which required a canine neurosurgeon and not one but two canine anesthesiologists.  While the surgery seemed to go well, the dog never seemed to recognize them again. After 40 days in the veterinary ICU with of no improvement and increasing deterioration, the dog was removed from life support.  Total cost: $15,000.

So this cap question isn’t unreasonable.  Still, a stop-loss order on the dog seemed a tad, well, cold.  My perverse mind went into overdrive.  So let’s say I said $6,000.  I had already approved a multi-thousand dollar surgical estimate. But is there a meter running in the operating room?  Maybe that heart murmur turns out to be more serious than expected.  Do they say, “OK, team, we’re at $6,000.  Stop the compressions!”  Would they lament afterwards, “We were so close to restarting Lily’s heart. If you’d only given us another $50, we could have saved her!” 

Let me just apologize right now to our vet whom we totally adore, and saw us through endless medical woes of our much-missed English bulldog Winston.  Our vet had told us that in veterinary school they had a bumper sticker saying, “Buy a bulldog.  Support a vet.”  She was so right.

We were so devastated at losing the pricey but beloved Winston that we swore we’d never get another dog.  Then a rescue agency asked us to do an emergency foster – one week maximum – of an 8-year-old bichon-poodle mix named Lily.  Four years later, she’s still with us, and now on her second ACL surgery.  (Did I mention the $1,500 for her rotten teeth?)

Of course, Lily is not the only disabled individual in the house.  Last June, my left shoulder kept getting more and more painful and I was ultimately diagnosed via MRI last November with a torn rotator cuff (more specifically supraspinatus).  The puzzling part is that I didn’t actually do anything to my shoulder. Spontaneous decrepitude has to be the most annoying part of getting older.

But I really don’t want surgery. Remember where I mentioned that whatever you can do for a person you can now do for an animal?  It turns out that my wonderful physical therapist is also certified for dogs.  Yes, really.  While we were waiting the five weeks for the canine ACL surgeon, my PT person came to the house to help Lily keep some mobility in her stiffened right hip joint.  It’s not easy to hop around on three legs. 

I confess I love using the line “my dog’s and my physical therapist....”  As a writer, I can’t let such a wonderful conversation starter go to waste. And I’m secretly hoping that when my Medicare PT benefits run out, I can work out a two-fer. 

                                                        Sad dog with new knee

 

 

The Pros And Cons Of Writing About Your Family

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published February 14, 2022] ©2022

If there is one universal complaint my family has about me (and it has a lot of competition), it’s that I can’t write a concise message.  I guess it’s the writer in me but why say something in 20 words when you weave in a few amusing tangents in 200?

I suppose I can blame my mother for this.  She always taught me that writing can – and should – be fun, no matter what the subject. Sometimes this concept is even appreciated.  I remember one of my son’s teachers responding to my amusing note excusing him for illness with the reply, “I almost look forward to your kids being sick.”  Actually, in Rory’s case, she probably meant something entirely different but I always chose to read it as an appreciation for my writing skills.                  

I’m sometimes asked by people how my husband and sons feel about my writing about them.  Actually, not much since they don’t read me.  I have to confess that this gives me a great deal more freedom.

Of course, I make my engineer husband, Olof, read the ones I’ve written about him before they’re submitted but even then, I’d bet my next Medicare co-pay he couldn’t even tell me the topic when he’s done.  He has perfected a look of intense concentration as he reads but I’m pretty certain he’s really pondering subjects of more pressing concern to him like Fermat’s Last Theorem or the application of binomial distribution to logistical processes. 

I always say, “So, no objections?”

“No,” he’ll say, “not at all.  It was fine.”

Me (trick question): “So what was your favorite part?” 

Olof (knows it’s a trick question): “All of it!”

Which still doesn’t keep him from coming back a week later when the column is out and saying, “My co-workers said you married me for my skills in pulling a toilet and extracting toy rocket parts.”

And I’ll say, “No, dear.  What I said is that this is not a quality one should overlook in a man, particularly a second husband.  And you approved that column.”

My older son, Rory, meanwhile, a favorite subject of readers, says he doesn’t need to read my column since he generated the content therein.  I’m often asked if I make up the Rory stories.  No.  Believe me, no. Oh, no no no.   You could not make up Rory.

My younger son, Henry, meanwhile, can be described as a man of few words but many emojis.  Seriously, if whatever question you’ve posed doesn’t have an appropriate emoji reply, you’re probably going to get ghosted.  This seems to be considered a legitimate form of communication in his demographic. 

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what the emojis even mean. They’re really tiny. And generally arriving on a small phone screen.  But I guess they’re probably better than their predecessors, that alphabet soup of acronyms which for us oldies were fraught with peril.  I wasn’t the only person of my generation who assumed LOL meant “lots of love”. 

Incoming text message:  Just found out this morning the tumor is malignant.

Inga: What? LOL!

Who knew it meant “laughing out loud”?

And since I’ve mentioned ghosting - my least favorite development of the last 100 years -  I personally feel that people who ghost should be buried in unmarked graves with a Post-it note tacked to the ground saying “Couldn’t be bothered to reply.” #who’scryingNOW?

As a precursor to my current column, I wrote a four-to-six page blog every week when we lived abroad on a work assignment.  Here Mom was having the adventure of her middle-aged life, an unexpected two-year sojourn in Europe (well, it was supposed to be eight months but the Europeans aren’t exactly balls of fire when it comes to deadlines). 

Legions of total strangers were subscribing to the witty saga of the madcap adventures of hers and Olof’s “senior(s) year abroad.”  Henry’s usual comment to the blog?  “Mom - please summarize in three lines or less.”

So what he generally got was:

(1            (1) We are living in Europe.

(It            (2) It is amazing here.

(              (3) They speak a foreign language that we don’t know but which often results in challenging but hilarious situations which I regularly chronicle.

Communicators my sons are not.  As my 60^th birthday approached some time back, both sons wanted to know what I might like.  Seizing the opportunity, I said that what would make me happiest would be if they would each write a short letter relating three happy memories they had of me.  I hated to beg, but I wasn’t getting any younger.  Rory, predictably, quickly negotiated down to one.  For his part, Henry replied, “Can’t I just buy you something?”

So there’s obviously some stylistic differences within my family regarding communication. Rather than ambiguous acronyms or funny little figures, I prefer actual words.  Lots of actual words. So read it or not, family members.  But caution:  it’s probably about you.