Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Aging Out

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published June 22, 2016] © 2016 
 
Both my husband Olof and I will turn 69 this year and for the first time, we’ve started talking about “aging out” – just being too old to do things.
 
It’s not as though this thought hasn’t occurred to us before. For example, we decided some years ago that we’d aged out of hang gliding, which was fine since we’d never aspired to do it anyway.  But what about the stuff we might actually still want to do?
 
The issue first came up when the last of our cockatiels died last year at the age of 21. Our older son, Rory, decided to breed cockatiels back when he was nine. He’s now in his mid-thirties and married to a cat person in Santa Cruz but we still had the cockatiels. Those little guys can live to 25. As I’ve often counseled parents of elementary school age kids: never let your kids get a pet with a life expectancy greater than yours.
 
Over the years, our outdoor aviary has also acquired parakeets (often neighbors’ kids’ ill-considered bird buys). Somehow – we’re not sure how – we’ve become an avian social service agency. Our tiny grandkids love the aviary and they especially love naming the birds when new ones show up. When we were down to our last cockatiel, they suggested that we get another one to keep it company. But Olof and I realized: we’ve aged out of cockatiels. We decided we probably still have enough life expectancy for parakeets as they tend to live to be only about seven. We like to think we’re good for that long.
 
We ran into the aging issue again when we had to replace the beautiful 35-foot tree in our front yard which succumbed to some un-named but pernicious borer. As I wrote a few weeks ago, we did everything we could, hiring expert after expert, to save it.
 
We finally had to admit that our beloved tree, under whose welcome shade we had spent hundreds of hours, had gone to the big forest in the sky. We really wanted some sort of tree there but were hit with the realization that unlike its predecessor, which we watched grow over the last 43 years, the replacement was not going to be that big in our lifetime even with bionic fertilizer. We’d aged out of the possibility of 35-foot trees. Or maybe we were just financially ineligible for 35-foot trees (this is, after all, La Jolla). But might we still have the life expectancy to see, say, a 15-footer?
 
The kids, of course, accuse both of us of spending too much time doing what they call “rehearsing for death.” But Olof is the first man in his family to ever live to 65 (nasty familial affliction) while my mother died at 54 and my grandmother at 48. Actuarial tables? Bwahahahaha. It’s hard not to feel like we’re on borrowed time. Every birthday we do our little happy dance around the table singing “Woo-hoo! Against all odds!” (In our circumstances, fun is where you find it.) We really wish the cremation people would stop sending us mail.
 
We’ve been confronting the aging-out issue yet again recently after our beloved bulldog, Winston, died recently. We inherited him from our younger son (see birds, above; are we seeing a pattern here?) but fell totally in love with him and have been completely heartbroken since his very unexpected passing this spring. Frankly, at the moment, the only dog we want is the one we can’t have but many people have encouraged us to transfer the profound heartache we feel about Winston into love for another dog, preferably a rescue. But while Winston died prematurely, dogs live to 15 years. Have we aged out of dogs?
 
Well, puppies certainly. Besides, we still have Winston’s teeth marks in the furniture from his puppyhood visits. Given how much time and money we spent dealing with Winston’s endless allergy problems, taking on an older animal with health issues wouldn’t be our first choice either.
 
“So,” I queried Olof the other night at dinner, “what age dog have two people who have already outlived their genes NOT aged out of?”
 
Olof pondered this. “A fourteen-and-a-half-year old with cancer?”
 
Our biggest concern, of course: what would happen to the little guy if we crumped before it did.
 
Our friends say that there is an easy answer to that: leave the dog to the kids in our will. After thirty years of birds and one problematic bulldog, they wouldn’t dare say no. (Would they?)  Still, we’re loath to take on an animal whose reasonable life span we couldn’t see through.
 
Meanwhile, we recently channel surfed into a Motocross competition on TV. We looked at each other. “Definitely aged out of Motocross,” we concluded. And we couldn’t be happier about it.
 
Parakeets “Green Bean” and “Banana” (named by the grandtots)

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Thinking Outside The Hose

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published June 15, 2016] ©2016
 
What is so rare as a day in June that is not gloomy?
 
Actually, for once San Diego’s May Gray-June Gloom season is welcome at our house given how stringent the watering restrictions are. A day without sunshine is an automatic deduction in our water bill. As hard as we’ve worked to conserve water, we sometimes feel we are single-handedly underwriting the Metropolitan Water Authority’s infrastructure improvements. What annoys us is that they do not seem the least bit grateful.
 
I’ve written before how we’ve let our grass be overtaken by kikuyu, a grassy-looking weed that is fortunately drought tolerant. We’re just not ready to let the grandtots have to dodge cactus.
 
Given that this is year four of the Great California Drought, a variety of lawn solutions are in evidence in our neighborhood. A few people have gone for artificial turf. Others have gone for “natural” landscaping. I wrote once before that I considered “attractive native plants” an oxymoron. If the plants are attractive, they’re native to somewhere else. But I will concede that some of the new low-water landscapes on my block are genuinely attractive even if the plants might not be strictly local.
 
A few neighbors have gone for just letting the lawn die. As in brown and dead. I couldn’t help but reflect that the very lawn that now gets you the Brown Badge of Honor would only a short time ago have brought a nasty note from the Town Council for failing to maintain your property. Such are life’s ironies. Now, if your grass is too green, will you get a warning that your neighbors have complained you’re keeping up your lawn?
 
Of course, we’d have to think twice about advising everyone to just let their grass die. It would almost certainly cause the collapse of the Mow & Blow biz, the major (only?) growth industry in Southern California. There’d be nothing to either mow or blow although if it would herald the end of those 130-decibel leaf blowers, I know lots of people who could get on board with it.
 
Inquiring minds want to know: Could dead lawns be the first of a domino effect of previously impermissible property-value-lowering constraints in La Jolla? Could clothes lines be allowed next? What about chickens? The clothes lines certainly make sense for energy conservation and whatever else you can say about chickens, they’re gluten-free.
 
If clothes lines are permissible, could real estate For Sale signs be far behind? A lifetime La Jollan friend sniffs that the presence of either would be irrefutable evidence that the town has gone to hell in an off-season lobster trap.
 
The drought has already brought changes to San Diego that no one would have predicted. Like, for example, the Water Police. Dare to irrigate after 10 a.m. or before 6 on your two allotted watering days – and for more than the time limit – and you risk the wrath of the water gendarmes.
 
California communities across the Southland are now having to balance property values against the realities of the drought. Glendale, for example, is reconsidering its ban on artificial turf in front yards, so long as it adheres to a certain quality standard, which as you might guess, is determined by the good fathers of Glendale. Translation: None of that Home Depot stuff need apply.
 
This property values issue is serious stuff. Every time I’ve been on jury duty, it’s been a property dispute. In 1988 I spent two long weeks on a case between two neighbors in Carlsbad after one of them planted tomato plants in his front yard in violation of the CC&Rs (Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions). It polarized the entire neighborhood. I’m guessing that the CC&R folks are still not speaking to Team Tomatoes 28 years later. 
 
The much-hyped El Niño of the Century didn’t, alas, appear. Well, at least not in San Diego. In spite of predictions last fall that the next diluvian phase was upon us, we got one third less rainfall than normal.  (Can we sue for breach of forecast?) So despite the easing of water conserving requirements in the rest of the state, I doubt much is going to change here.
 
Ever looking for ways to save water, my husband and I have spent many an hour surveying our property to make decisions about what we’d really like to save and what, worst case, we might have to let die. The Sophie’s Choice of horticulture, as it were. Already we think we can hear our plants pleading with us:
 
 “Save me!” 
 
“No, save ME!” 
 
“Screw her – I bloom more!” 
 
“But I’m more drought resistant!” 
 
“Don’t believe him – he’s an annual!”
 
We’re really trying to think outside the hose. But if the spring marine layer will just hang on a while longer, we‘re good.  So gloom away, June!
 
Only a few short non-drought years ago, this lawn would have elicited
a nasty note from the Town Council