*Time To Have More Time

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published June 30, 2011] © 2011

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. 

Of course, that also applies to movie groups, book clubs, bridge dates, and pretty much any activity where more than three women are attempting to congregate.

I know there are digital applications where everyone can post her available dates.  But it doesn’t matter.  By the time everyone does, someone is already not available.   How is it that we can be this busy?

A friend belongs to a theoretically-weekly bridge foursome that only ends up meeting about ten times a year.  Hoping to improve that, they enacted policy about requiring a replacement to be provided should one not be able to attend.  That lasted until four subs showed up to play.

Now, I’ve never belonged to either a bridge club (can’t count cards to save my life) or a book club, but I have belonged to a number of movie groups.  One that I belonged to had eight members.  Deciding on a movie was complicated enough, so to keep the logistics down, we decided we would always meet on the second Thursday of the month.  We saw lots of movies over time but the one date on which we never saw one was the second Thursday of the month.  Because as soon as the long-suffering movie group organizer sent out a query as to what we wanted to see, someone invariably responded that she wouldn’t be available on that night but would be available on these nights.  And then we were off and running.  Eighty emails to find a new date would have been optimistic.

The organizer of that group, who valiantly hung in there for years and for whom I have nothing but admiration, is now rumored to be in a home for the organizationally frustrated, sipping umbrella drinks on a bucolic lawn and being tended by white-coated professionals.  

Because even when we finally agreed upon a new date (which curiously always seemed to be a Monday even though we’d all decided earlier that we shouldn’t meet on Mondays since it was a bad day for everyone), we had to pick a movie.  (A corollary of the Eighty Emails To Find a Date Rule seems to be Forty Emails to Agree on Anything Else.)  Now, these were women who liked movies (and hence why they joined such a group) and some of them belonged to film societies as well.  So we couldn’t see any of the film society picks, or anything that was being reserved to see with a husband, or even that anyone had already seen with someone else.  One of our members would only see “important” movies, defined as being well reviewed by the New York Times film critic and thus having socially-redeeming value.  I myself am a “fluffy” movie person (think Herbie: Fully Loaded) but movie groups are not generally fluffy movie crowds. In fact, we did not see movies; we saw “films”.   The end result was that our selections were often three-hour black and white graphically-violent war dramas in Hungarian with subtitles  depicting (way too successfully, in my view) the misery of the human condition.  But no one had already seen it.  (I think that statement may apply globally.)  I spent many of these with my jacket over my head.   However, I totally adored the other women in the group and we always had dinner afterwards, often with enough wine to blot out memories of the movie which usually caused me screaming nightmares for weeks. 

I would also mention that the person who threw out the first volley about changing the date usually cancelled at the last minute.  And don’t even ask how many emails it was to decide where to go to dinner.

But getting back to my topic (and somewhere back there, I think I had one):  what is it that we’re all doing that scheduling anything is so impossible?  For most of my friends, our car pool days are over, but we seem to have filled that time with endless other activities.  I have to say that one of my favorite excuses for being unavailable came a few months ago from a long-time extremely dear friend who had volunteered to make the communion wafers for church, a full day affair.  (Well, at least that way you know they didn’t from China.)  Even her son said, “So Mom, is holycommunionwafers.com out of the question?”  That one gets a pass for pure originality.

But otherwise, I’m kind of hoping that the pendulum can swing the other way on this frantic over-scheduling of our lives.  Because this eighty emails thing?   We have better things to do with our time.

Taking the Igloos for a Spin

["Let Inga Tell You",La Jolla Light, published June 16, 2011] © 2011

Now that all the local high schools have graduated, I can safely tell the saga of a friend’s teenage daughter who has a serious future in spin.  In fact, if I were a political organization, I’d be signing her up now.

I happened to be visiting her mother when the daughter arrived home in a panic at five o’clock after a sports practice to announce that a project she thought was due in “a few months” was in fact due the next day.  The assignment was to make either a diorama or a flat board depiction of “my ideal life”.  But Daughter also had a “super important” history test the next day. Please, Mom, she says, can you help me?  Both parties were clear what “help” meant. 

Let me interject here that there is not a mom in America who has not been put in this position in some form or another, even if it’s the 10 p.m. announcement that three dozen cookies are required for the school bake sale the next day.  Fortunately, my friend was a pro at school projects, to the envy (and abject jealousy) of all her friends, including me.  The Plaster of Paris topography map of central Asia was to scale, the science fair board sparkled in glitter paper wonder, the Christmas diorama sported a battery-operated fireplace and a yuletide sound track, and the oral report on Colonial America was delivered via two hand-made museum-quality puppets of George and Martha Washington.  Fortuitously, she had a virtual warehouse of her kids’ former projects carefully stored in the garage. A local gallery should do a retrospective.

Surveying the arsenal of possibilities, she asked her daughter a question that in my mind should be immortalized:   “So, do you care what your ideal life looks like?”  And Daughter says “nope”.  Mom pulls out a board that one of her sons did in the second grade, exact topic no longer obvious.  But it had a bunch of Styrofoam igloos glued to a board with a lot of white snow around them.  Hard to imagine that a La Jolla born-and-bred child’s ideal life would include living in an igloo and eating whale blubber with no Burger Lounge in sight.  Daughter has to admit that the accompanying paragraph – yes! they did actually have to create prose! - was going to be a tough sell.  So she suggested that Mom could maybe scrape off the snow in one corner and add some sand for a beach.  She ponders this a bit more and adds brightly, “I could say that I like contrasts!  My ideal life is about contrasts!”  As I said, the young lady definitely has a future in politics.

While Daughter went upstairs to wax poetic about contrasts, Mom dutifully set about making little palm trees out of pipe cleaners and green construction paper to stick into the sand to make it look appropriately beachy.  Et voilà!  Or not.

Just in time, Mom notices that in large block letters on the bottom of the board is the name of her older son and the notation “Grade 2”.  Mom set a land speed record to get a can of black spray paint at Meanley’s in the ten minutes before they closed.   One could always have made the argument that one was re-using just the wooden board from a long ago project but I like to think that any teacher worth her salt would have been a tad suspicious about the remarkable coincidence of the “second grade” ID on the bottom in combination with the igloos.  At least I hope she would.  But then, this is a teacher who assigned dioramas as a term project for a high school Advanced English class. 

Ironically, the project they ended up doing would have made an excellent assignment:  Take a previous project and give it an entirely different conclusion.  Anymore, we live in a world of spin.  Never too early to develop the skill. 

By the way:  grade on this project?  B+.  One of the highest grades in the class.  The teacher also gave her an excellent recommendation for college.  Where, I’m hoping, the diorama and flat board projects are in the daughter’s academic past.  But if not, have I got a garage for her.

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.