**It's All In How You (Don't) Say It

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 26, 2013]  © 2013 

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. 

Olof is strictly a “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of guy, although it has nothing to do with the military.  As far as he’s concerned, a lot of those “anything” conversations could quickly careen into the dreaded to-be-avoided-at-all-costs category of Too Much Information.   

I won a Press Club award, for example, for a previous column about Olof’s massive aversion to feminine hygiene commercials on TV which he maintains have gangrenously pervaded channels that could formerly be counted on to be guy-friendly.  When shouting at the TV fails to work, he is forced to retreat to the kitchen for a snack until it’s safe to return.  He maintains he’s put on eight pounds on the Seasonique birth control ads alone. 

As far as Olof is concerned, my TMI filter was broken at birth.  But actually, it just runs in completely different directions than his.  I can’t watch violence or gore of any kind.  My former movie group used to end up seeing a lot of three hour black-and-white dubbed-from-the-Hungarian documentary-style prison camp movies since we couldn’t see anything any of us had already seen or had promised to a spouse.  I usually had my jacket over my head and my hands in my ears muttering lalalalala, to the annoyance of the people behind me (never mind my movie group).  During the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan (which we watched at home on DVD for precisely that reason), I was on far side of the house with a pillow over my head. 

Olof has a hard time seeing this aversion to video violence as actual TMI.  An engineer and a former Air Force pilot, most of his areas of TMI tend to exist in the murky underworld of “feelings.”  If it’s an engineering or aviation issue, Olof is all guts and glory, no detail too difficult to confront openly and with full disclosure.  But a sentence that starts with “I feel” is not going to come out of this man’s mouth.  Ever.

Now, keep in mind that Olof is hardly a curmudgeonly undemonstrative kind of guy.  He’s out-going, universally liked (which I find very annoying), incredibly kind, and has a great sense of humor. Actions, he maintains, speak louder than words.  OK, but as I’ve pointed out to him on more than a few occasions, sometimes words would come in really handy.

Whole industries involved with the world of psychology completely baffle him.  It’s not that he is against psychotherapy per se; he’s just puzzled why anyone would do it.  In his personal view, if one has a problem, one mulls.  One ponders.  One might even create a flow chart.  No, one especially creates a flow chart.   One certainly doesn’t pay after-tax dollars to some charlatan with a pseudo degree in what he refers to as the squishy sciences to engage in – we’ve come full circle now – sharing of Too Much Information.

After we had a devastating encounter with a drunk driver on I-5 a few years ago and I recovered from injuries enough to begin driving in my replacement car, I could barely bring myself to drive down the street.  It didn’t help that seconds into my first actual foray around town, some jerk coming the other way on La Jolla Boulevard made a sudden U-turn in front of me barely avoiding a major collision.  (Where is one’s 9 millimeter Glock when one needs it?)  Some people, when they fall off a horse, climb right back on.  Others of us develop a life-long fear of equines.

So I did the only reasonable thing.  I hired a cognitive therapist who actually drove around with me in spite of my absolute 100% conviction that we were both going to die.  Now, Olof was certainly aware of my difficulties driving.  I got a lot of extra hugs in that era.  But in Olof Land, one looks fear in the face and refuses to be defeated by it.  And one certainly STOPS TALKING ABOUT IT.  I had landed firmly on the wrong side of Olof’s TMI line. 

I didn’t mention my new driving companion to Olof although he must have known.  (See “after-tax dollars,” above.) If he had asked, I certainly would have been happy to discuss it.  Which, of course, is exactly what he was trying to avoid at all costs.  I know he wouldn’t have begrudged me any help that the quacks could explicably provide although I am sure that he thought if I would just get in the damn car and drive, we could cut the witch doctor out of the equation. 

As far as he was concerned, we absolutely adhered to the “we can talk about anything” philosophy.  But he’s just really glad we didn’t.  Sometimes illusion is everything.
 

Step AWAY from the bin

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 18, 2013] © 2013 

You know you’re turning into a curmudgeon when you can’t decide whether to write about dog poop or leaf blowers. 

The anti-leaf blower lobby is already gaining traction in the Letters section of the Light.  Personally, I’m fine with whatever construction noise, leaf blowing and tree trimmer chain sawing goes on during the week, but on the weekends, I’d love to give all of those guys mandatory time off.  Fire up that leaf blower on a Sunday morning while people are outside reading the paper and the Noise Police would come and stuff you into a metal trash can which the neighbors could pound on with aluminum rakes until you promised never to do it again.

Ah, I feel better already.

OK, now that we’ve covered that, let’s whine about dog poop.  Now, we don’t technically own a dog although we seem to be habitually harboring our grand dog, Winston the Wonder Dog.  We genuinely love dogs, and in particular, the perpetually-recalcitrant Winston.    

But if you opened our trash can on any given day, you’d think we were running a kennel for digestively-compromised canines.  This is because our city-mandated-and-dispensed black trash receptacle lives at the far end of our driveway nestled next to our house, its unfortunate accessibility making it the neighborhood poop dump of choice.   In the pre-city-dispensed receptacle days, our trash cans lived safely inside our back gate away from excretory-abandoning miscreants.   But the required new bins are too big for that space. 

I do not exaggerate when I say that opening the lid of a trash bin with a week’s worth of neighborhood pooch poop is a veritable biohazard, a fetid feculence, a mephitic miasma, a noisome nose full.  It could drop a goat from ten yards.

Our neighborhood is truly Dog Central.  You can’t go five minutes without seeing someone walking a dog. I can understand that dog owners don’t want to walk for a half hour clutching a bag of steamy effluvium.  But so plentiful is the canine population in our area that there are a number of strategically-located dog poop bag dispensing stations which include a convenient bin to deposit their odiferously-amplified  contents.  I often see two guys driving up in their city truck to empty these bins and replenish the bag supply.  I’m not sure what they pay them.  But given our own experience, I’m guessing it’s not enough. 

Despite the city’s uncharacteristic prescience in providing these bins, we would hear the lid of our trash can opening and closing all day long and the gentle thud of bags of leaden dog leavings hitting the bottom.  So we decide to importune the offenders with a polite entreaty on the top:  “Please - No dog poop in the trash bin!” 

Like that worked.

I was telling my friend Lorraine about this and she said, “Well, geesh, Inga.  You totally DARED the dog people with that sign.  I’m surprised they haven’t tweeted your address!”   Even  I agree that people who leave jars of water on their grass (which are supposed to, but don’t actually, keep animal ordure off your lawn) or who post curt “Curb your dog!” signs positively beg dog owners to do the opposite.  After their dog dumps on your sidewalk, a photo of the offending egesta is probably posted on their Facebook page within minutes.

But as I explained to Lorraine, in our case, the sign (written on about half of an 8x11 piece of paper) is discreetly taped to the top of the can. You have to actually walk up to the trash bin at the end of our driveway to see it and then you can’t miss it.  I agree that if it were on the side of the bin and visible from the street, I would be declaring open season on myself.  (“Let’s fill @trashcan with #dogpoop LOL!”)

Interestingly, a neighborhood friend said that when the sanitation truck missed her trash one week and the receptacle sat on the street for four days, it acquired at least two dozen bags of puppy putrescence.  Puzzling, she said, since there was a city doo-disposal bin exactly sixteen feet away.

Despite the sign, I still hear the lid of my trash can being raised during the day, but more quietly now, and I will have to say, much less often than before.  I confess that I sometimes entertain delicious fantasies of rigging it in some excretorially vengeful way.  But forget to disarm it even once and the garbage men would never pick up our trash again.

No, I think the real solution lies in wheeling our bin to the middle of our front yard and letting the ever-unpredictable Winston chase the baggers around the front yard doing his crazed pit bull imitation.  On one of those laps, they’d see that the sign on the top now read “Make My Day.” 

 

 

**For Better Or Worse But Not For Lunch

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published Sept. 12, 2013] © 2013  

After three straight years of 7-day 80-hour weeks punctuated by frequent international travel to the U.K. and the Middle East, my husband, Olof, decided to retire. In the last four blissful weeks, it feels like I’ve reconnected with someone who’s been brought back from the dead, or at least United. 

Surprisingly, most of my friends greeted the news of his retirement with genuine condolences, confiding that their ultimate nightmare was a husband not only under foot but requiring entertainment.  For better or worse, they said, but not for lunch.

Everyone who knows Olof was shocked to the core at his decision to retire as his well-known four word retirement plan has always been “Die at my desk.”  Speaking of that desk, it has always puzzled me that Olof’s work desk looked like a Staples office furniture ad but his home office resembled a paper recycling plant that had suffered a power outage. So I was delighted when one of his first retirement projects was to consolidate the work and home offices into a model of efficiency.  “It turns out that you CAN reduce entropy,” Mr. Engineer observed at my gratitude for this.  “But you have to apply energy.”

It is, of course, important to have plans for retirement.  (A recently-retired social worker friend maintains her goal is to “never help anyone again.”)  High on Olof’s list is his version of pleasure reading, and faster than you can say “40 pound techno tome,” boxes arrived from Amazon with snorer (well, to me) titles like “Introduction to Queueing Theory” and “Professional ASP.Net.”  After breakfast, he parks himself out on the patio, metal clipboard and mechanical pencil in hand suitable for diagramming and note taking, and happily wallows in technology.  You can take the guy out of the office, but you can’t take the office out of the guy.

I swear I didn’t ask, but he has taken on some of the household chores he used to do, like the dishes.  It’s reminds me of when my younger son first got his driver’s license and we heard the sound of the car backing out of the driveway for pre-dawn Saturday crew practice and we weren’t in it.  It was heaven.  I have the same feeling about hearing dishes going into a dishwasher that I’m not loading.

Olof picked after-dinner clean-up, he said, partly because he read that, in recorded history, no man has ever been shot by his wife while doing the dishes.  But though he’s too nice to say so out loud, I’ve sensed he’s never been all that happy with the job I do on the stove and counters and sink which the dishwasher, maliciously, refuses to clean.  (We can put people on the moon but someone can’t invent this?)  I am not the worst housekeeper in the world.  But I AM a contender.

Olof, on the other hand, spends at least a half hour doing the dishes just for the two of us.  He would never have made it as a single mother, let me tell you.  The stove top is spotless, the granite counter tops positively sparkle, you could be blinded by the shine in our stainless steel sink.  The cleaning lady showed up the first week after Olof retired, took one look at the kitchen and stopped dead in her tracks with a barely disguised “WTF?” look.  Olof is her new best friend. 

Like military wives who find it hard to let returning husbands do things their own way, I have definitely had to get in touch with my inner control freak since Olof retired.  In my defense, much has changed in Dishwasher Land since Olof deployed to the office three years ago.

As I wrote in a previous column, we inherited a set of sterling silver flatware from one of his relatives.  It has Rules, including not putting the sterling next to the stainless in the silverware bins.  Even I ignore the caveat about hand washing the knives, having concluded that the glue attaching the handles to the blades has a longer life expectancy that I do.  But the first night, I saw Olof mixing the sterling and the stainless.

I didn’t say anything.  Husband doing dishes is not an event to be messed with.  But then I noticed he ran the dishwasher half full.  Now, to be fair, I think the Bosch people would probably consider it correctly loaded.  But seriously, I could have crammed three more days’ dishes in there, easy. 

“Inga,” I said to myself.  “Step AWAY from the dishwasher!  The man is DOING THE DISHES.  If he wants to run it with two friggin’ forks, let him!”  But it’s been hard. Very hard.

So despite a couple little adjustments, so far so good.  Just love having the big guy around.  But my friends are already placing bets for December.

Getting a kick out of youth soccer

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 29, 2013] © 2013 

I think most parents would agree that there is no greater theater than youth sports.  In T-ball, for example, everyone can hit off the tee but no one can field so home runs are the norm even with a one-base-per-overthrow rule.  Every base is an overthrow.  In fact, my older son’s T-ball coach used to tell the kids to hit the ball and keep running until someone told them to stop. It was a remarkably winning strategy.  In my personal view, why would one want to sit through nine yawner innings of adult baseball with a final score of 1-0 when you could see an action-packed cliffhanger ending in 30 to 29?  And I humbly submit:  where but on the T-ball field at the Y will you ever see an unassisted triple play? 

But T-ball games are over for the season and now every available open space seems to be populated by youth soccer teams revving up for the fall season.  Not long ago while I was sorting through old files, I came across a copy of a letter I had written to a friend when my younger son, Henri, then age four, first started soccer. 

Dear Linda,

Although I was initially hesitant to have him start team sports so early, Henri has now played the first four out of a ten game season in a nursery school soccer league. At first I wondered:  who are these deranged people who put four-year-olds in regulation uniforms and have them run up and down a soccer field during nap time?  Somehow a basic requirement (or three) of team soccer ought to be that you can (a) talk (b) do a jumping jack, and (3) know which is your goal.  The socks also shouldn’t be taller than you are.  Most points were initially scored by each team kicking the ball into their own goal, while the parents ran up and down the sidelines gesturing wildly and screaming, “The OTHER WAY!  Go the OTHER WAY!”  Just as the poor kids start to get a sense of which way they were going, they change goals at half time.  But the kids seemed just as happy to score on their own goal as the other team’s; in fact, just after Henri’s team had lost 10-0, one of his teammates came running off the field jubilantly declaring, “We won!  We won!”

Henri came back after the first game (which I hadn’t been able to attend) announcing that his job was “‘tecting the goal.”  During one game when we had a substitute coach, we had to call a time out while I loped out into the field and explained to my sobbing, distraught child that the substitute coach’s instructions to defend the goal were the same as ‘tecting the goal.  (The poor kid just had no idea what that meant.)  In another game, the other team’s goalie walked off the field mid-play announcing with barely contained ennui that he didn’t feel like playing any more.  This is not an uncommon occurrence. 

They run up and kick the ball, missing it, and fall down.  Some of them are so short they just knee it.   None of them have quite grasped that, with the exception of the goalie, this is a “feet only” game; the coach has been trying to convey to them that you cannot just pick up the ball and run.  Henri came home from his third game announcing happily that his team “got free goalies” (three goals).  Actually, they may just have gotten three goalies as that is definitely the most hazardous position in the game.  Just as the goalie reaches down to get the ball, a kid runs up and accidentally kicks the goalie in the head.  It’s very hard being the goalie’s mother.  Time outs are frequently called for players needing to have their shoes tied or their elbows kissed.   Definitely unclear on zone defense, both teams end up bunched in a single clump lurching down the field looking like a scrum of disoriented midgets, and often ending up in the equivalent of a ten car pile-up when one kid trips over another one.  In their heart of hearts, I think what the kids like best is the post-game donut stop at Winchell’s.

What I couldn’t have known then was that Henri would continue ‘tecting the goal all the way through high school and college and now in adult leagues.  I’ve watched hundreds of soccer games over the years but I have to confess:  I’ve never enjoyed a season more than the first one. 

Neighbors you wish would die

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 22, 2013]  © 2013 

Every neighborhood seems to have its requisite nutcase.  Over the years, I’ve done informal research on this subject by querying friends if they have at least one problem neighbor.  I’ve never had anyone say no.  In fact, I usually get a 20 minute diatribe on the wingnut who is terrorizing their particular block. 

One of our highest priorities has always been getting along with the people who live around us.  Fortunately, we’re had nice neighbors over the years with the exception of two that we were really happy to see go.  One died (but not soon enough) and the other moved (but not soon enough either).  Two bad neighbors over several decades is actually pretty good.  But even one difficult neighbor can wreak a lot of havoc.  Sometimes it was hard to stick to our inviolable rule:  No matter what, do not escalate.  But we’ve entertained some very ugly fantasies about their cat.

The houses in my area are in close proximity so it doesn’t take much noise for the entire block to hear it.  Still, my husband and I consider most noise to be in the category of the music of life.  Dogs, kids, parties, the occasional loud band.  We often comment that not hearing these sounds would be the hardest part of ever moving to a retirement home in our old age. 

Of course, even the music of life can occasionally get seriously out of tune. Chain saws on weekends.  Or drums, ever.   We also remind ourselves that for years, WE were the noisiest family on the block.  We had one of the few pools in the neighborhood then and multiple trees with tree forts, a veritable attractive nuisance.  Everybody came to play.

But even so, our elderly spinster retired school teacher next door neighbor never complained once in her 25 years there.  We could never tell whether this was because she was just an incredibly sweet lady (she was) or because she was deaf.  Actually, she WAS fairly deaf but we never wanted to explore whether our kids had contributed to it. 

The first of our two terrible neighbors was one we encountered a year after we moved in.  All of a sudden we were getting annoyingly regular notices from the La Jolla Town Council that a neighbor had complained we were “not maintaining our property.”  We were puzzled as we took great pride in our place.  Turns out that an elderly lady down the block felt our trees were blocking the breeze which she maintained her doctor had prescribed for her Raynaud’s Syndrome.  (My then-husband, a physician, said WTF?)  A minor detail was that we had no common property with this woman. But she felt that all trees from a five house radius were blocking her breeze and if we wished to be good neighbors, my husband and I would cut down all the beautiful, mature, biggest-on-the-block trees on our property.  She then added, “I would think people of your persuasion would understand persecution.”   

We were trying to figure out which of our multitude of persuasions she could be referring to but it turned out she used the same line on all the other neighbors and their multifarious persuasions as well.  In her mind, all persuasions were out to block her breeze and therefore by definition persecutorial.  Which I realize is not even a word.  Anyway, we ultimately all formed a coalition against the nasty old bat, ironically bringing the neighbors together in heretofore unparalleled harmony.  Ten years later when she died (see “not soon enough”, above) there was a brief moment of silence, followed by a rousing chorus of “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.” 

As for the second all-time terrible neighbor, she moved in while Olof and I were doing a two year work assignment in Europe so we were mostly spared.  But by the time we returned, the other neighbors were already planning to vote her off the island.  Fortunately, sensing that people were sticking extra-sharp pins up the back sides of little effigies of her, she departed and is now allegedly making a new group of neighbors’ lives miserable. 

I think it is only fair to point out that it is sometimes unclear who the resident lunatic on the block really is.  Most of the jury duty cases I’ve been on involved neighbor disputes that could best be summarized as Lots of Adults Behaving Badly. 

After several decades in our current house, we looked around recently and realize we’ve officially won the neighbor lottery.  For pretty much the last two years, we have been surrounded not only by good neighbors, but stupendously wonderful neighbors, people you can count on day or night who are the epitome of kindness and consideration and who, on top of that, are great friends.  If we wrote the “perfect neighbor” job description, we couldn’t have done any better.

But just so they’re clear:  no one had ever even THINK of moving.

 

 

Of Pi And Agapanthus

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 15, 2013]  © 2013 

When my younger son visited over the Fourth of July, one of his first comments was, “I never realized you had so much agapanthus.” 

Of course, I knew immediately it wasn’t my real son and that I would have to petition the embassy on the planet Klingon for his release.  Because this botany-identifying facsimile was not the one I raised who knew exactly two types of flowers:  orchids for prom corsages and roses for Valentine’s Day. 

Just so you understand, my real son loves math, economics, and sports.  He regarded high school Art History as a forced march through Circles 1-9 of Hell.  I do not exaggerate when I say he could easily have been elected “Kid most likely never to utter the word ‘agapanthus’.”  Rather, his idea of a good time as a sophomore was to enter a school contest as to who could memorize pi to the greatest number of places.  He won at 301 (that last digit as insurance in case a competitor memorized 300).

But plants?  Um, not so much.  Even those prom corsages were largely orchestrated by Mom who attempted to pry information from him as to, say, what color the girl’s dress might be, or whether she preferred a wrist corsage.  These queries generally elicited a look of a deer caught in the headlights of a Mack truck. 

300 digits of pi, on the other hand, were easily remembered by breaking up the digits into sequences of five numbers then stringing the sequences together.  The inter-relationships of flowers and dresses, however, was a murky slough of aesthetic despond into which he had no desire to wade. 

As the Fourth of July weekend progressed, it appeared that the forces on Klingon had indeed replaced the fake Klingon son with my real one until a barbecue one night when he surveyed our flower garden and observed “the downside of agapanthus is that they have such a short blooming season.”  I had the Klingon embassy back on speed dial within seconds. 

As it turns out, the reason my pi-loving progeny is suddenly so interested in things botanical is that he and his wife now own a home.  Well, a bank owns the home but they have a proprietary interest.   I would have thought he would have left landscaping decisions to his wife but she, although possessing lovely taste all on her own, wishes his input.  And he, wisely, wishes to make her happy.

My husband, Olof, has always maintained that when husbands (or even husbands-to-be) are queried about their opinion on anything aesthetic, the correct (and only) answer is, “Wouldn’t blue be better?”  He swears it works on all interior design selections, landscaping options, and especially on wedding planning decisions which is where he himself honed this strategy.  It fulfills the illusion of participation, he maintains, without entering into the Dantean world of actual aesthetic opinion.

But my younger son was now perusing our yard – the very same yard he grew up in and in which I would swear that he could not previously have identified a single piece of flora – and was avidly interested in what our plants were called, how often we had to water them, did they attract white fly?  Although he’d never paid attention to it before, Mom’s long-term landscaping strategy of “Plants You Can’t Kill”  had not been lost on him. 

As for pi, he will apologetically state that 15 years later, he can only still remember the first 50 digits which he happily rattled off in some four seconds flat.  That’s how I knew he was my real son and I could stop calling the embassy on Klingon.  Somewhere in that brain where 251 more digits of pi used to reside is a veritable Google Images of agapanthi and shade trees, border plants and drought-resistant shrubs.  Sometimes as a parent, you just have to live long enough. 

They'll Get Their Revenge

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 8, 2013] © 2013 

People often ask me if my husband and children mind that I write about them. Well, they might if they ever read my column. 

After twenty-one years in clerical bondage, Mom finally gets a chance to shine in her twilight years.  But can they be bothered?  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 paycheck 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 logistics 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.”

The kids are easier.  They don’t live in town.  And yes, they could easily read my column on the Light’s website.  If they were so inclined.  Which they are generally not.  I realize that they both work long hours and have tiny children.  My older son, Rory, says that no offense, but they’ve heard a lot of these stories before.  So I only send them ones that I think would be (a) of genuine interest to them, and more specifically (b) are not about them. 

As a precursor to my current column, I wrote a four to six page blog every week when we lived in Europe in 2005 and 2006 on a work assignment.  Olof, amazingly, never read a word of it.  “Um, why?” he said, genuinely puzzled.  “I was there.  Living it.”

In the kids’ defense, this was four to six pages a WEEK.  My older son, Rory’s, take was that this might be waaayy more information than they wanted to know about the folks’ activities.  He said he wanted to retain the mystique of us as the staid parents he knew and not some alien facsimiles who were suddenly auditioning for IKEA commercials.  (The ad did specifically say, “Blond American couple in their fifties.”  We even got call backs!)

But my younger son, Henri’s, response was the worst. 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).  Temporarily paroled from a career fighting the good fight against felony semicolon abuse among her scientist bosses, it was the first new thing Mom had done in 25 years.   Legions of total strangers were subscribing to the witty saga of the madcap adventures of hers and Olof’s “senior(s) year abroad.”  Henri’s usual comment to the blog?  “Mom – Really busy at work.  From now on, would you please summarize in three lines or less?”

So what he generally got was:
(1)  We are living in Europe.
(2)   It is amazingly fun here.
(3)   They speak a foreign language that we don’t know and which results in some seriously challenging but often hilarious encounters.

I remember reading a 1950’s book about writing which cautioned, “Never write about family.”  Geesh, where’s the fun in that? They’re the best topics.  Of course, turnabout is fair play.  Fortunately for me, neither of my kids seems to have a literary bent but I have been promised that at my funeral, the stories will come fast and furious, particularly some seriously unflattering (actually downright vicious) ones involving chocolate.  It will get ugly.  Which, of course, is why I’ve tried hard to get my own versions of the chocolate stories in print while I’m still above the grass.  (There were extenuating circumstances!  I’m an addict, I admit it!) I’m fairly certain that every time one of my family members accidentally reads a column about himself, he quietly cackles.  He knows his time will come.