The Sisterhood Of the Traveling Underpants

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published June 24, 2024] ©2024

With the summer travel season upon us, a person’s thoughts just naturally turn to…underwear.

My many friends who travel a lot have been lamenting for some time that they just can’t seem to resolve the underwear problem, especially if they’re going to be staying at a different place every night.  You wash out your dainties but depending on the climate, they never quite dry before you have to pack them up and move on.  My friend Linda says she toured Scotland and Ireland for seventeen days with a plastic baggie of clean but soggy unmentionables that were never truly dry until she got home and put them in her dryer. 

The nightly washing ritual has a number of other downsides, not the least of which is having one’s undies draped all over one’s hotel bath, particularly if you’re staying in the $1,000 a night Scottish castle-cum-golf resort.  It just looks so, well, low class.  And might explain why those Scots don’t wear anything under their kilts.  They could just never get it to dry in that damp climate either.

The main issue, of course, is that underwear just takes up so much room in your suitcase.  Room you’d rather have for souvenirs.  So several of my friends, including Linda, have been test driving other solutions including disposable underwear specifically meant for traveling.  Wear it once and toss it. 

Apparently, it is much more comfortable than one might imagine for cheap underwear, and thus begs the question as to why one would ever buy expensive underwear that needs to be hand washed if the cheap disposable stuff is just as comfy.  But ours is not to reason why.  Another friend says that she has tried saving up all her old ratty underwear to bring with her to just throw away each night.  Yet another says she hits up the Dollar Store and buys a three-pack for $1.00.

But here’s the problem:  while the plan is excellent, the execution has turned out to be less so.  At the moment of truth, they can’t quite bear to throw perfectly good underwear away.  Or even serviceable if elastically-challenged lingerie.  It just seems so wasteful. 

The ratty underwear solution is even more problematic.  You’ve left a nice tip for the maid at the pricey French chateau so do you really want her to find your shabby dainties in the trash?  One can almost hear her mumbling under her breath, Merci, mais il vaut mieux peut-etre que vous gardiez votre argent pour vous offrir du linge moins fatigués.  (“Thanks, but maybe you should keep the money and buy yourself some new underwear.”)   The French can be so sarcastic.

On a more fundamental basis, wearing ratty underwear also goes against everything that is holey, er holy.  Didn’t your mother always exhort you to wear good underwear in case you were in an accident?  Do you really want to end up in the Cap Ferrat Urgent Care in tattered u-trou?

Yet another friend says she is planning to solve the problem by buying the super-lightweight travel underwear that is guaranteed to dry within hours even in Indian monsoons.  The problem is, it is seriously expensive. Of course, if it truly dries that fast, you wouldn’t need very many pairs.  But if that monsoon thing was a bit of advertising hyperbole, you could be spending your trip feeling like a human terrarium. 

Stories of depending on a hotel laundry service are legion and usually involve sagas of a three-week trip with one’s clean underwear doggedly following two days behind.  My husband, who traveled a lot on business, knew too well the perils of depending on a hotel laundry, especially in out-of-the-way places.  Olof tells the story of traveling to Indonesia and after a certain period of time, needing to get his laundry done.  His underwear had obviously enjoyed the pampered life of a U.S. washing machine but when he got it back from his Yogyakarta hotel, it was clear that it had undergone a far more vigorous manner of washing.  Best case, it had been beaten with rocks.  More likely, it had been subjected to a local cleansing method involving stampeding water buffalo.  Suffice to say, it was full of holes.  On the rest of his travels in Asia, he didn’t dare send his underwear out again, not only out of the sheer embarrassment that a “rich American” would have such shredded skivvies, but his wholehearted conviction that it would never survive a second experience.

Weighing all the options, there’s really only one obvious conclusion.   If you really want to travel light, you’re just going to have to go commando.

Mom Guilt: The Plague That Never Goes Away

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published June 17, 2024] ©2024

I am not generally prone to guilt.  Our former primary care doctor, Dr. No (as in no foods that you’d actually want to eat), did her best to inflict shame upon Olof and me for our culinary choices.  If dietary guilt lowered triglycerides, we would be the healthiest people in America.  But since we aren’t, we’ve directed that when the time comes, we’d like our ashes spread over hot fudge sundaes.

Mom Guilt, however, is another story. It has plagued me relentlessly from the get-go.

June is a time of graduations on every level from pre-school through college. It was thus temporally inevitable that I would revisit my older son, Rory’s, long ago sixth grade graduation and the guilt I have been carrying about it ever since.

Did I mention he is now 46? 

My children’s grade school years were not the happiest time in our household.  Their father and I were involved in a protracted divorce proceeding.  I was back in the work force in an entry level job living paycheck to paycheck. 

Unfortunately, on the day of Rory’s sixth grade graduation, we were in the midst of a grant proposal deadline so my boss wasn’t keen on my taking time off for even two minutes much less two hours.

“They even have graduation for sixth grade?” he muttered. “Do you really have to go?”

“I swear I’ll come right back the second it’s over,” I promised.

And frankly, I was so glad I went. The kids sang “We are the world” and got their diplomas. It was all so touchingly adorable. Full-on mommy heroin.

Out on the school patio, as parents and kids posed for pictures, Rory turned to me and said, “So where are we going for lunch?”

Lunch?  I hadn’t planned on lunch.

“Rory,” I said, “I’m so sorry.  I didn’t realize you were expecting lunch.  I have to get back to the office right away.”

Rory looked at me like I stabbed the family pet to death.  (We didn’t actually any. I couldn’t have afforded so much as a goldfish.)

He burst into tears.  “But everybody is going to lunch with their parents!” Ratcheting it up: “This should have been the happiest day of my life! You completely ruined it!” Ratcheting it up some more: “I will never forget this!” 

For a nanosecond, I thought about calling my boss (if I could find a payphone) and plead for more time.  But my skills were required for this grant proposal being submitted by EOB that day.

As poorly as I was being paid, I could not afford to lose this job and its health insurance.

I apologized profusely all the way back to the house where I dropped Rory off (statute of limitations is fortunately past on my kids’ latch key lives).  When I got home from work later that day, Rory continued to freeze me out.

I have truly been haunted by this ever since.

In trying to assuage my guilt, I look back on those years and wonder how I did it.  Perhaps in an effort to compensate my children for the stigma of having divorced, warring parents, I managed all manner of youth sports teams, ran the local Cub Scout program, and used my minimal vacation time to count laps on Jogathons. I even drove all the carpools on my ex’s custody days because he invariably fucked it up and everyone just called and yelled at me.  I would often collapse fully clothed on top of a pile of clean laundry on my bed at midnight.  I was veteran of the 10-minute combat nap.

Suffice to say, in that era, baking wasn’t something I had much time to do.  So it was not too surprising that if chocolate chip cookies were made, it was from a tube of supermarket Slice n’ Bake. 

Fast forward seven years to Rory leaving for college at UC Santa Cruz.  In an attack of remorsefulness for my children’s lack of mommy domesticity, I decided to make him a batch of homemade Toll House Cookies to take with him.  So overdue. After all this time, he deserved the real thing.

A few days later, I asked how he’d liked them.  Well, he reported, the cookies were only OK.  They didn’t taste like the ones I usually made.

Ah, what sort of failure of a mother was I that my kids didn’t even know what a “real” chocolate chip cookie tasted like, and that they associated my baking efforts with artificial flavors and colors?

But I suppose it could be worse:  one of my daughters-in-law reported that her grandmother was such a terrible cook that her father joined the Coast Guard just for the food.

Not long ago, Rory was down visiting us for a long weekend and I said to him, “You know, I have to confess.  I still feel guilty about sixth grade graduation.” 

He looked puzzled.  “We had sixth grade graduation?”

 

Just Trying To Make A Living

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published June 10, 2024] ©2024

On May 17, I saw our first house fly of the season. Definitely a little early given the cool weather.   This single rogue fly seemed to be either lost or else some mutant strain because once flies show up, there tend to be tons of them, and they’re a scourge for weeks. 

In my heart, I know that every creature is just trying to make a living, including house flies.  Regardless, I squashed it.  Still, this had had me pondering: how many phyla down the taxonomic hierarchy do you have to go to have empathy for one’s fellow earthly travelers?  It’s certainly easier to feel an affinity to those in our own phylum (Chordata – vertebrates) even if I actually eat some of them. 

In recent years there seem to be a greater abundance of fauna in our area who are at odds with the humans who co-habit it - coyotes and crows especially.  Local social media has been rife with debate as to whether creatures that impact us negatively have as much right to live as we do. 

Which side of the coyote argument you’re on might largely depend on whether you have a cat.  Or used to have a cat.  The growing coyote population seems to have decimated a lot of beloved family pets.

Seeing coyotes running around residential neighbors in broad daylight mere blocks from the ocean is definitely a new phenomenon.

I don’t have a cat, but I do have a bichon-poodle mix which our vet says a coyote would definitely consider dinner, in spite of all that fur.  I can just hear the coyote pups complaining, “Geesh, mom!  Could you please find something short-haired?  Maybe a chihuahua?  These fluffy things are a total pain to eat!” 

One night, a few months ago, as I took our dog out at 11 p.m. before bed, I looked across the street to see a coyote trotting by.  They have a very distinctive gait.  Now, whenever I have the dog outside at night in the front yard, I’m standing right next to her.

A recent post on local social media suggested that the coyote situation could be ameliorated by having all the neighbors chip in to hire a company that alleges it will humanely trap coyotes, transport them out of the area and let them go in a more welcoming habitat.

Um, Kansas? 

I have to say that I was immediately reminded of a similar conversation some years back when I was dealing with the rats that were in abundance in our back yard. Upscale areas like La Jolla offer lush foliage for high-end rodential habitation, never mind a veritable cornucopia of rats’ preferred cuisine, including and especially oranges (we have a tree), pet food, and snails.

So a gentleman from a local pest control firm responded to my call for rat-control services and installed live-capture traps around my property with promises that he would be back daily to check on them.  It was all very humane, he explained.

“So, what do you do with them after you catch them?” I asked, immediately regretting the question. 

“Oh,” he said, “we drive them out to the country and let them go.”  He actually said this with a straight face.  Unfortunately, he looked like he’d had a supporting role in The Terminator and that the back of his truck was filled with devices I didn’t want to know about. 

So despite the genuinely charming and well-intentioned suggestion, I was dubious about where those coyotes were going to end up.  Other people responding to the original poster were too.  Which, of course, re-ignited the argument as to whether the coyotes had as much right to be here as humans. They’re just trying to make a living like everyone else, one side noted.  Feed their families. Find affordable housing.  Save for college.

OK, maybe not save for college.  

The other population I haven’t been altogether happy to see in recent years are the influx of crows.  We are very much bird lovers in our house with lots of bird feeders and even our own outdoor aviary. 

Unfortunately, with the advent of the crows, our song bird population has been reduced drastically. The blue jays have disappeared entirely. Crows are annoyingly loud, never mind enjoy entertaining themselves by smashing objects on our skylights to break them open. 

But aren’t they just trying to make it like everything else?

Of course, my wish is that crows could decide to go make a living someplace else, along with coyotes, rats, and house flies.  (Maybe spiders too.)  But none of these creatures seem so inclined so for the time being, we’re guarding our beloved dog against coyote attacks, tolerating the crows, and dispensing with the oranges on our tree that attract rats. 

But I continue to flatten all winged and arachnoidal creatures that get near me.  My empathy, alas, just can’t seem to find its way that far down the taxonomic scale.  Sorry, arthropodae.