A Slide Rule Finally Finds A Loving Home

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published December 19, 2022] ©2022

It becomes harder and harder to find really special gifts for Olof at Christmas, especially when he has everything he wants, buys it himself if he doesn’t, and we’re always trying to downsize.  But in 2018, I hit the jackpot: a slide rule.

Let me be clear that there aren’t that many people left who even know what a slide rule is, much less covet one.  Or know how to use one.  Or wouldn’t rather just calculate on their Apple Watch 8. 

Olof remembers hovering over the slide rule case in the Cal Tech bookstore orgasmically ogling the higher end models.  It was as close to sex, he recalls, as he was likely to get in that era.

In Olof’s and my youth (see “Mesolithic era”) there were, astonishingly, no handheld electronic calculators.  The really geeky guys (they were always guys) had slide rules which are mechanical analog computers, a phrase that I’m sure helps you as little as it did me.  (By “computers”, we mean a device that helps you make computations rather than something you plug into a power circuit.)  Sliding the little bar thingey (not its technical name) back and forth, you could do multiplication and division and also functions such as exponents, roots, logarithms, and trigonometry if you knew or cared what those were.  Olof informs me it was accurate to three places. 

Now, one would think that there would be a ton of cheap slide rules available out there for the mathematically sentimental, until you then realize that those two terms are mutually exclusive.  What was astonishing as I began my search was that searching “slide rule” on Amazon usually just got you pictures of slide rules on coffee mugs, T-shirts, and even wall paper. 

Suffice to say, the better source was eBay, and not surprisingly, every option was labeled “pre-owned.”  If you own stock in a company that claims to make new slide rules, you should sell.   A technologically-savvy neighbor helped me weed through the choices and ultimately found one that, while pre-owned, appeared to be new.  The seller apologetically noted that the case was engraved in gold with the name “William G. Vande Logt” presumably making it less valuable (unless your name was William G. Vande Logt). 

I was sold the second I saw it.  A slide rule with a back story! Does life get better than that? 

When it came, the leather case and carry strap (if you wanted to wear it on your belt to look super-geeky), were still in its original box. The documentation underneath it was literally crumbling and didn’t appear to have ever been removed.

William Vande Logt appeared to have been underwhelmed with this gift. 

I immediately Googled his obligingly-unusual name and found the obituary notice of his death on May 10, 2012 at the age of 81.  He had been employed for 50 years in the Chicago area, was an avid golfer, had no children, was pre-deceased by his wife, beloved by nieces and nephews, and greatly mourned by his dog Breezy. 

But apparently not a slide rule guy. 

So, I’m thinking a slide rule like this was likely given as a high school graduation present, which in Mr. Vande Logt’s case would have been 1949.  But who gave it to him? And was there a message there?  A father who dreamed of his son going into some prestigious engineering career?  Was this a sore subject?

One thing for sure:  this slide rule had never been slid.

It took a certain amount of brute force to move the middle bar which Olof notes will require an overdue application of lube, or at least some occasional use. 

I’m imagining Bill Van de Logt eagerly opening what he thinks is going to be whatever the hot new gadget was in 1949 and finding…a slide rule.  I can see the long face even now.  But why didn’t it end up in the nearest Salvation Army bin? OK, maybe because it had his name on it. 

So, what has this slide rule been up to since it was presented to Mr. Vande Logt?  Well, besides nothing for at least 63 years until his passing in 2012.  Mr. Vande Logt had no children to whom he could inflict this long-ago excoriated gift.  And what about the next six years after that until it was apologetically (given the personalization on the case) put on the eBay auction block? 

Inquiring minds would love to know. 

Our grandkids were quickly bored with Olof’s Christmas morning gift since it didn’t actually do anything.  We explained to them that a slide rule was not the same as an abacus (one of them had heard of this) which pre-dated us by at least a decade. Our then-four-year-old grandson asked if we could put it down and help him sync his new remote-controlled tank to his iPad. 

Well, Bill, your slide rule has waited a long time for the loving home it has always deserved.  And if that’s not a warm fuzzy spirit-of-Christmas story, I don’t know what is. 

Celebrating A Millstone, er, Milestone Birthday

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published December 12, 2022] ©2022

I had a milestone birthday last week and I’m trying not to feel downright old.  The problem is, I am downright old. I was lunching with a friend to celebrate this occasion and we were both commenting that the bar on our concept of “old” kept sliding forward as we approached the ages we formerly thought of as ancient. 

I can’t help but notice that a lot of people in the obits are younger than me. And worse, I actually know, er, knew some of them. I even wrote one of those obits.

Olof and I are five months apart in age, so for five months a year, I get to be a trophy wife.  When we have milestone birthdays, we tend to celebrate them together on Olof’s July birthday with barbecues and outdoor festivities.  Otherwise, my birthday would hardly be recognized at all. 

That’s because anyone with a December birthday will tell you, it’s a total rip-off.  Babies just shouldn’t be allowed to be born between November 30 and January 1. Family and friends are already swamped during December so a birthday that month is just another obligation, and the weather is usually too sucky no matter where you live to do some nice al fresco event. And need I mention that there is a special place in hell for the people who give you what they call a “combined birthday and Christmas gift.” 

We aren’t fooled.  And just so you know, we keep track.  When your May birthday rolls around, we’re so tempted to give you a combined Christmas and birthday gift.  I’ve never actually done it but the fantasy is delicious.

As it turns out, by the time my actual birthday rolled around last week, I’d already had two birthday cakes with my name (along with Olof’s) on them from celebrations last July. But I still insisted on getting my own cake with just my name for my birthday last week. (I bought it myself.)

Milestone birthdays are often marked by rites of passage.  At 21 you can finally drink without a one of those two-left-eared fake IDs. At 30, you have to rethink all that stuff about never trusting someone over 30. At 40, it’s time for a serious mid-life crisis.

On your 50^th birthday, you open your mailbox to find an AARP card and an appointment for a screening colonoscopy.  Congratulations! You’re old! And you may have cancer of the pooper!

As my 60^th birthday approached, 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?”

On your 65^th birthday – as soon as that Medicare card is laminated and tucked into your wallet -  the dementia anxiety attacks – and jokes – begin. We laugh, of course, to hide the fact that we’re completely terrified. Watching the 11 o’clock news about the elderly person who has wandered off from his facility truly puts fear in your heart. You can’t help but super-impose your face on the screen. And you just know your hair would look like hell.

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

As part of our joint 70th birthday festivities, I put together a 400-slide show of Olof and me to show during a celebratory dinner with the kids. Afterwards, there were wonderful toasts made - Henry gave a four-hanky tribute to both of us.  I gave a toast to Olof, commenting on how different this evening would have been had Olof not come into our lives.  Both kids simultaneously chimed, "200 fewer slides?" 

 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 (brutal familial cancer gene, fortunately diagnosed in time for him to be treated) 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! We’re still here!” We honestly can’t believe we are still here.

We just really wish the cremation people would stop sending us mail.

 

I Have No Idea How I Did It

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published November 28, 2022] ©2022

Even though Olof and I have been married for 27 years, I still find myself locked in the mindset of the twelve years between my two marriages when I lived a truly penurious existence.

During that time, nothing got repaired unless I could fix it with duct tape, picture wire, or hair scrunchies (a grossly under-rated tool) and nothing got replaced until it absolutely disintegrated. 

Some months after Olof and I married, he put his arm around my shoulder as he was leaving for work one morning and queried plaintively, “Dear, if the market goes up another ten percent, could we get a new bath mat?” 

My younger son, Henry, now 42, recalls growing up in poverty. Yes, here in La Jolla. Upon hearing this, Olof, never one to miss an opportunity to affectionately ride me about what he felt were my marginal housekeeping skills, replied, “No, you didn’t grow up in poverty.  But you did grow up in squalor.” 

Excuse me, but there are only so many hours in the day when you’re a working single mom of two carpool-intensive kids. I managed youth sports teams and was Pack Committee Chairman of La Jolla Cub Scouts in an era where all communication was by handouts or extremely inefficient “phone trees.”  (Does anyone even know what those are anymore?) I am insanely envious of team managers who can just post maps to game locations on a website.  I, meanwhile, did quite a few Cub Scout mailings in stop-and-go traffic on Torrey Pines Road on my way home from work.

An avid journal keeper and chronicler throughout my life, I sometimes consult my journals to check recollections for columns.  Recently, I came upon this except from a conversation with Henry, almost 10, dated March 9, 1990.  Rollerblades were the new fad toy and Henry was convinced he was the only kid who didn’t own a pair. He sat glumly in the back seat as we drove home from school.   

"What's the matter, sweetheart?" I asked.

"Everybody we know is richer than we are," said Henry.

"Well, you got that right," I said. We rode silently for a while.

"Henry," I said finally, "what you need to understand is that we are not poor.  We just don't have any money." 

Henry rolled his eyes. "So what's the difference?"

"Well, we own our own home. OK, several financial institutions own our home. But that's a big deal these days.  What we don't have is cash."

"Jamie's pool is bigger than our whole house," said Henry.  "And they go to Hawaii every Christmas and skiing every Thanksgiving. And they have a phone in their car. And he get five dollars for every A." 

"Sweetheart, no matter where you go, someone is going to have more than you.  And even if Donald Trump [yes, I really wrote that!] proposed to me tomorrow, you'd still have to do chores.  Richness is relative." 

"Only poor people say that."  

"OK, then. We could move to the barrio.  Then we'd be 'rich'."

"Yeah, but they shoot at you there."

"Hey, you wanna be rich or not?" 

Everything that went wrong with the house was on me.  A friend astutely observed soon after I took over ownership, “You need a lover who likes gardening and pool maintenance.”

I had traded every asset of the marriage plus taken out a second mortgage (co-signed by my wonderful father after banks laughed in my face) to buy my ex out of our house.  It was the best financial decision I’ve ever made but my entry level job and child support didn’t begin to cover the costs of living here 

The house just got shabbier and shabbier until Olof married me and undertook some serious self-preserving improvements.  Like central heat, and an upgrade to our 50-amp fuse box.  He was tired of the kids using the toaster oven and blowing him off his computer.

I recently wrote a column about loving to sit outside on fall evenings listening to the Zen sound of crickets chirping.  I observed that communing with nature like this made up for all the years when the only thing I communed with was my watch. 

I remember nights back then when I would have gotten the laundry done and piled it on the bed at 11 p.m., only to fall asleep on top of it soon after.  I didn’t even read one book a year.  If I had ten spare minutes between car pools, I took a combat nap 

I just feel tired even thinking back on it.  I guess you just do what is required at the time.  I certainly wasn’t spending a lot of time pondering the meaning of life.

And, yes, we did get a new bath mat, although, frankly, I felt the old one still had life in it.  I could have kept its ratty self going for at least another year.

 

 

A Belated Book Club Guide To Inga's Book

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published November 13, 2022] ©2022

One of my greatest joys in retirement is to read at least three books at week, as opposed to the two pages a year I read during my 12 years of divorced working momhood.  I’ve noticed that some of the books I read have a Readers Guide at the end should it be a book club selection.

I published a book back in 2014 (Inga Tells All: A saga of single parenthood, second marriage, surly fauna, and being mistaken for a Swedish porn star) and frankly, it didn’t occur to me to write a Reader’s Guide.  So I am going to do so now.  My autobiographical book had the same characters (way too) familiar to Light readers over the last 14 years: my (second) husband Olof; my sons Rory and Henry, my granddog, Winston (now gone over the rainbow bridge), and my first husband.  

So here might be some questions that would stimulate discussion:

(1) Inga chronicles her early divorce life in her Dates From Hell series.  Which of her early dates was the biggest creep: the criminal lawyer with a cocaine habit and herpes? The commodities broker whose decrepit car required Inga to climb through the passenger side window in a short skirt? The newly-certified massage therapist whose date proposal was giving her a massage at half price? The guy who, tasked with renting a movie for the evening on her Video Library membership, rented “American Girls in Heat, Part II?”

(2) Inga maintains in her book that “Olof has always maintained that I married him for his skills with a sewer augur, but this is only partially true.”  After reading this book, do you agree that the definition of “romance” for single women with young toilet-ravaging children is more about plumbing and home repair skills?

(3) Inga and Olof met as exchange students spending their senior year of high school in Brazil.  They could have married each other the first time around.  Is there any accounting for the stupidity of youth?

(4) Inga’s older son, Rory, was adopted and turned out to be a diabolically creative child with world class skills at psychological warfare against adults, most especially his mother.  Which of Rory’s many escapades would you consider the most inventive:  the Jolly Jumper baby brother slingshot disaster? The dropping the big rock down the chimney onto the metal grate two feet from where Mom was reading prank? The spray-painting Henry silver crisis?  The Cleveland airport catastrophe? The Jack in the Box ketchup packets under the tires spraying the black sports car affair? The Philadelphia airport debacle? The 15-inch rubber penis in the guest bath during mom’s dinner party event? The Bomb Squad incident?

(5) When people adopt, they like to believe that how a child turns out is 5% nature and 95% nurture. Rory has turned into a devoted husband and father with a successful career, but still likes to keep his hand in things, as Inga chronicled in the chapter about Rory hijacking her library account when he was 32, reserving such titles as “The complete illustrated guide to lesbian sex” and “How to cope with your colitis and hemorrhoids.”  Is a person’s nature fixed at birth? 

(6) In a chapter entitled “The son also rises”, Inga writes about her younger son Henry receiving a prestigious scholar-athlete award, and, when interviewed by local papers, was asked if there was anyone he wished to thank.  He replied, “I’d like to thank my dad for teaching me how to have fun.”  Dad had never driven a single sports practice carpool or helped on a single school project. Was Inga justified in fantasizing over the next few weeks about poisoning Henry’s lunches?

(7) Inga’s chapter on how to be a good mother-in-law was summed up in two words: “Shut. Up.”  Agree or disagree?

(8) Inga’s granddog Winston was prone to mount guests’ legs under the dinner table. Why do you think dogs prefer women’s legs over men’s?

(9) In a chapter entitled “There’s more cookin’ than the food” Inga writes about Olof having an emotional affair with a southern cooking show host. Every time she said, “mah bourbon pecahn pah” Olof’s eyes would go out of focus. Can this be considered culinary adultery?

(10) Inga was dismayed to realize that all the TV shows she likes are sponsored by anti-depressants.  Should she be taking Cymbalta?

(11) Inga is an avowed technomoron and is hoping to die before she has to upgrade to another iPhone, for which everything she currently knows how to do will cease to work. Olof, an engineer, insists that the reasons that phones don’t come with nice written instruction manuals anymore is because the working of them is “intuitive.”  Is Inga justified in smiting Olof when he says that?

(12) Inga has written a chapter called “Why it takes four women eighty emails to set a lunch date.”  Is this true of book clubs too? Or is the issue there why some people show up without having read the book just to drink wine and announce, “Can someone summarize it for me?”  Should those people be permanently banished and never allowed to join a book club again? Yours especially?

 

Would You Make Up Your Mind Already?

[“Let Inga Tell you,” La Jolla Light, published October 31, 2022] ©2022

You never really know how annoying people can be until you actually live with them.

Some of them can continue to be really annoying even after they don’t live with you anymore but merely visit.

I am speaking of my husband and sons. I am so over picky consumers.

As the family shopper, I do my best to stock my family’s preferred foods and beverages, only to have them change those preferences without informing me.

It’s bad enough to have a pantry or freezer full of food from your usual market that people specifically asked for but no one is eating anymore.  But if it came from another market to which you made a special trip, it makes the household shopper positively surly.

I am sure I am not alone in this.

Olof, for example, seems to go through cycles of favorite snack foods.  For a while, he preferred unsalted roasted almonds that were really only available, and not always in stock, in those bulk bins at Sprouts. 

So, when they had them, I’d buy up to ten pounds at a time and transfer them to plastic containers and store them in the modest freezer of my side-by-side refrigerator.  They’d take up a fair amount of room but usually he was eating them at a sufficient pace that there would quickly be room for actual food.

After a while, I’m noticing that there still seem to be eight pounds of almonds taking up valuable real estate in the freezer, and they aren’t moving. 

“Olof,” I say, “what’s with the almonds? You don’t seem to be eating them. 

 “I’m kind of tired of them,” Olof replies. “Would you start getting unsalted mixed nuts instead?”

Let me say that I now know pretty much every recipe you can make with eight pounds of orphaned almonds.  Pestos! Banana bread! Crusted fish! All of which I never intend to eat again!

Alas, unsalted mixed nuts went the way of roasted almonds.  Then he was on to a specific brand of tortilla chips and fresh salsa.

Two weeks ago, I couldn’t help but notice that the opened bag of tortilla chips had gone stale, and the container of fresh salsa had just expired.  I ended up dumping both.  He’s apparently moved on to sliced cheese.

“Olof, min lilla lutfisk,” I said, “would it be at all possible to indicate to the family shopper – that would be moi - when your food preferences have changed? Because the family shopper lacks clairvoyance but is finding herself increasingly aggravated at the lack of communication skills in this household of which the only other occupant is you.” 

It’s been a problem long before Olof got picky about snacks. When my sons were growing up, and even now in their adult years, keeping up with what they’d eat – and drink –has been a constantly changing script. School lunches would start coming home uneaten.

For a while, Rory would only eat sandwiches made from cold cuts from a certain deli (not, of course, the one at your local supermarket.)

And don’t even get me going on sandwich bread.

Henry was a particularly difficult kid to feed.  If he’d had his druthers, he would have subsisted entirely on Chinese food until he was ten.  I had this theory that some major cosmic accident had occurred during his conception and that there was some poor woman in Asian whose kid would only eat Hostess Ding Dongs and McNuggets.

Keeping up with Henry’s beer preferences in his adult years has been a losing battle.  Since you have to buy a whole six-pack at a time, I could open my own Farmer’s Market concession stand of formerly-preferred IPAs. 

I have to admit, even the dog does it.  No, not change beer preferences.  She’s a confirmed teetotaler. She’ll suddenly refuse to eat whatever she’d been eating, so I’ll try different foods until I find something else she’s willing to consume.  Then I go ahead and order a case of it on Chewy which she decides she doesn’t like when we are halfway through it.

Maybe I can add all that dog food to my IPA stand? I could even invite other local moms to consign their own family’s rejectables to the table.  I’m thinking this could be a whole new cottage industry among terminally testy household shoppers nationwide. We could ever donate the proceeds to some good cause, which I’m thinking should be a weekly happy hour.

Now, one might suggest buying in smaller quantities but that would assume that my time is only important to me, not to the uncommunicative fellow residents.

OK, I admit I’m an enabler.  But like most moms, it’s built into our ego systems to want to take care of our families, including the pathologically picky dog, and have their preferred sustenance on hand.

But from now on, Henry can bring his own damn beer.

 

 

Inga's Guide To Acing Your Driver's Test

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published October 24, 2022] ©2022

Despite five decades of clean driving records, Olof and I were required to take a written test to renew our driver’s licenses since we’re over 70.  Lifelong Type A students, we took some 40 practice exams just to make sure we didn’t fail by missing one of those trick questions the DMV is famous for. I think I can save readers a lot of trouble and just sum it all up in one all-encompassing test.  Pass this and you’re good to go.

At a stop sign with at least a little bit of visibility on either side, you should:

(a) quickly glance both ways then increase speed and blow through it

(b) forget the glancing and just blow through it

(c) realize that STOP means “Slow To Observe Police”

You are stuck behind a total geezer driving the speed limit on a two-lane road where passing on the left is prohibited.  You:

(a) pass him on the right hoping to nudge him into oncoming traffic

(b) wait for the next ravine and make your move

(c) Old people should be put on ice floes and sent out to sea

As the light turns green, a blind person with a service dog is crossing in front of you.  You:

(a) honk and proceed (damn dog needs to learn to walk faster)

(b) assume the guy bought the cane and the dog’s vest on Amazon and is faking.

(c) should make a donation to the Humane Society in the dog’s name if you were wrong

With a Class C driver license, a person may drive:

(a) a two-axle vehicle if the Gross Vehicular Weight is less than 6,000 pounds and you are towing a horse trailer

(b) a two-axle vehicle if the Gross Vehicular Weight is more than 6,000 pounds but the horse trailer contains goats

(c) No one, including the DMV, actually knows what a “Class C” driver’s license is

You do not have to signal a left turn:

(a) if one hand is occupied with the wheel and the other with your cell phone

(b) if you drive a black SUV

(c) because it’s nobody’s business which direction you’re turning

Children who say “Are we there yet?” more than 10 times may be:

(a) left by the side of the road

(b) given phenobarbital

(c) addressed in a tone that is not our “inside voice” 

Hitting a tree at 80 miles per hour while intoxicated:

(a) is most damaging to deciduous varieties and ornamentals

(b) makes a moot point of the whole 400-feet-to-stop thing

(c) may require your estate to replace the tree

The yellow light in a traffic signal:

(a) means “speed up or you’ll miss the light!”

(b) is also known as a “pink” light if the light has already turned red when you go through it

(c) All of the above

Alcohol concentration in the blood is legally described as:

(a) “a buzz”

(b) “hammered”

(c) “basted” 

Just before a train hits your car that is stalled on the railroad tracks, your last words are:

(a) #@%^**^&!

(b) @(&^%$$%!!

(c) &$#@###*&%!!!

You must stop at railroad tracks when the bell sounds and the gate goes down:

(a) if you actually have time to wait for a whole frigging freight train to go by

(b) unless you think there is room to get around the gate before the train gets there

(c) This question should have been before the last one 

If you park your vehicle in an area not usually used for parking:

(a) it usually means it is a primo make-out area

(b) you have no memory after that 10^th Jell-o shot how you got your car ended up on top of that storage shed

(c) think the parking control people are too rigid in their definition of “sidewalk”

State law requires children to be restrained in an approved car seat until:

(a) the square root of their age plus the reciprocal of their weight

(b) the square root of their weight minus the reciprocal of their height

(c) they whine so loud that you can’t stand it

When using a roundabout, drivers should:

(a) be prepared to get sucked into a vortex from which they’ll never escape

(b) petition your Congress person to outlaw roundabouts which are confusing and terrifying to just about everyone

(c) just drive over the median on the smaller ones

It is OK to smoke in a car with passengers under 16 if:

(a) the kids are not coughing violently

(b) you can still see out the windshield

(c) it really depends on what you’re smoking (wink wink)

You can make a U-turn in the middle of a block when:

(a) you see a prime parking spot on the other side of the street

(b) you spot a Taco Bell advertising a two-for-one Chalupa special

(c) Police officers pursuing you have put up a road block ahead

The best mindset toward other drivers when navigating California’s roadways is:

(a) It’s all about me

(b) It’s only about me

(c) Move over

 

 

It's Crickets For Me

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published October 17, 2022] ©2022  

While my husband Olof and I have many common interests, we will be the first to admit we suffer from insect incompatibility.  He’s a spider guy and I’m a cricket person. 

I’m not particular bug-phobic.  But I’ve never managed to make friends with spiders.

My husband, however, is probably their biggest fan. Hence, fall is his favorite season. The other night he went outside to put the garbage bag in the black bin but was back again still carrying it.  “There was a huge spider web right next to it,” he explained reverently.  “I didn’t want to disturb it.”

I, meanwhile, keep several old brooms around the outside of the house for the specific purpose of disturbing spider webs. If it had been me bringing out the trash, I would have said, “Sorry, cowboy, dinner’s over. This is a loading zone.” 

My husband considers spiders to be fellow engineers and has only the utmost respect – almost a veneration - of their talent.

Olof loves to wax awestruck about spiders. Who, he marvels, programmed the brains of these amazing creatures with such sophistication as to be able to create such complicated webs night and after? How could anyone not be impressed, nay, dazzled? 

 My arachnophiliac husband points out that spiders are good for the environment, eating disease-carrying and crop-destroying insects among them others. I have pointed out to him that our little chunk of La Jolla heaven is minimally agriculture-intensive, although if spiders were willing to consume whatever pest chomps on my basil plants, my opinion of them could change considerably. In the decades I’ve been in my house, I know where spiders’ favorite places are:  Across the steps of our front porch. Between our cars in the driveway.  Silhouetted in the trees.  Under the house. Especially under the house.

At various times in my 12 years of chronically-broke single momdom, I was forced to crawl under the house – a heavily-populated arthropodal Hell - to pour muriatic acid into the cleanout pipe. My list of lifetime goals includes never doing it again. 

I realize that arachnids are just trying to make a living like everyone else.  I remember first being informed of this at a workshop at Esalen Institute at Big Sur years ago when I breathlessly reported that our room had black widow spiders. The front desk counter-culture kid replied with barely disguised ennui that the spiders had just as much right to life as I did.  (I chose to squash them.) 

If there were a product called Arachnid Death, I wouldn't mind spraying it around the outside of the house when my husband wasn't looking. But Olof would be bereft. Olof is aware that this time of year, I'm offing spiders pretty regularly. It's one of those "don't ask, don't tell" things.  Olof would never squash a fellow engineer.

 Meanwhile, while Olof is enraptured watching spiders spin their webs, I’m sitting in my lawn chair waiting for the crickets to start their nightly orgy. Nocturnal creatures, they sleep off last night’s bacchanalia during the day and come to crepuscular life ready to look for a late lunch and a hot female cricket.  It’s the male crickets who are rubbing their wings together to create a vibration called stridulation, Latin for “hey, baby, wanna see my etchings?”. No actually, it means “harsh sound” but neither lady crickets nor I would agree with that description. 

I just find there’s something very Zen about cricket chirping. I love listening to them, communing with nature.  It makes up for all the years that I didn’t commune with anything but my watch. 

It’s not that Olof dislikes crickets. He just thinks their eat-sleep-mate repertoire is a little limited. Although he fully admits that there was a time when this would have been his ideal life.

Sometimes crickets will find their way into our bedroom which is fine with me.  A few years ago, around New Years, Olof and I were lying in bed late one night, he reading, and I enjoying a cricket concert.  I commented to Olof how late the cricket season seemed to be this year.  And after a pause, Olof says, “Um, Inga, I don’t hear any crickets.” 

Turns out Inga had developed a form of tinnitus (ringing in the ears) that mimics the sounds of crickets chirping.  As opposed to the other common tinnitus sounds (ringing, clicking, buzzing, and roaring), this was fortuitous indeed. The other ones would make me nuts. But hallucinating cricket sounds off-season was pure pleasure, until it disappeared as quickly as it had come. 

After all these years of Olof's influence, I am trying to develop empathy for spiders.  Still, just before I whacked a web across our front porch, I said to the spider, "See that tan house across the street with the Ford Explorer in the driveway? I hear they're friendlier."  It was the best I could do.