The Foods You Will Never Eat Again

[ Let Inga Tell You, La Jolla Light, published September 2, 2024] 2024

Probably everyone has associations with certain foods that they will never eat again after having a negative experience with them.

In my parents'  case, it was lots of experiences. After the Second World War, they lived in Boston while my father got an MBA, our family of four living on $91 a month on the GI Bill and subsisting by necessity on mackerel and baked beans - two foods banned from our household in perpetuity thereafter.

I have similar feelings about broiled chicken breasts, steamed broccoli, and cottage cheese the default diet foods of my teenage years. Cottage cheese seems to have made a comeback, given all the TV ads I see these days, where they actually try to make it look like a food one would choose to eat for any other reason that it's allegedly low calorie. Sure, they dress it up and make it look pretty but I can t be fooled. Underneath it all, it's cottage cheese and it is vile and should be banned from existence. Even though I haven't eaten it in decades, I can still hear it screaming "you are being deprived!"

Of course, one reason people would shun a particular food is if they've ever gotten sick on it. It doesn't even matter if it was the actual food's fault or some other affliction - a stomach flu, for example. Your gag reflex remembers forever. It s probably a good evolutionary adaption if you think about it.

My first husband, a New Jersey boy, had a particularly sad saga in this regard. Growing up, he'd practically lived on the submarine sandwiches (also known as heroes or hoagies ) which were pretty much the state food of New Jersey. But by the time I met him, however, he had suffered a severe submarine sandwich trauma the likes of which precluded his ever consuming another one again.

As he told the story, it all started back when he was a young college student just being initiated into the ways of the world. Kind of a nerd in high school, he hadn't seen a lot of what might be called "action." So he was delighted to make the acquaintance of a coed who had a reputation for loose morals and indiscriminate taste. To his surprise and delight, he was able to procure a date with the lady for "dinner and a show"  which at that stage of his economic life meant an Italian sandwich at the diner around the corner from the movie theater.

He ordered a submarine sandwich and his date a salad, after which they adjourned to the movie theater where he sat with agonizing late-adolescent anticipation waiting for the show to end and the entertainment to begin.

He doesn't remember quite when the queasiness started but somewhere towards the end of the movie, he excused himself and made it just out of view of his lady friend before throwing up all over the cigarette machine outside the men s room.

And yes, you used to be able to smoke in movie theaters, sometimes to the point you could barely see the screen. Honestly, that should have been enough to make you throw up, never mind the sandwich.

Despite his limited savoir faire, he knew enough to stop at the candy counter for some breath mints, on the theory that even a young lady of loose morals and indiscriminate taste might draw the line at a kiss that tasted like mortadella marinated in hydrochloric acid.

He felt better briefly, but by the time the movie ended, he had the terrible feeling that the second wave of gastric instability was not far away, and he rapidly felt compelled to change his priorities from trying to "score" to trying to get his date home without being sick on her.

The young lady was meanwhile oblivious to his difficulties, suggesting a moonlit drive in the Silver Streak (his Rambler with the reclining seats) and was dumbfounded when her date (sobbing quietly to himself) instead suggested taking her home.

After a hasty kiss on her front porch, she slipped quietly into the house, whereupon he turned around and threw up in her bushes.

She told him later that he was "weird"  and refused to go out with him again. And he never had a submarine sandwich again, despite Jersey Mikes literally opening up right in downtown La Jolla which at one point in his life would have been absolute nirvana.

Of course, sometimes you can overcome negative associations with food. When my siblings and I were quarantined with polio during the summer of 1955, the family ate a lot of canned food since we couldn't grocery shop. I'm not even sure we could have gotten Uber Eats to deliver if they had existed at the time. People were terrified - justifiably - of polio.

I remember eating canned Chun King chow mein and chop suey - or trying to eat them, anyway. I found that stuff so slimy and inedible that I assumed for many years afterwards that I simply didn't like Chinese food. It was only after my first husband, a medical student in New York City, - and yes, the submarine sandwich guy - finally persuaded me to go to China Town and eat actual Chinese food which I instantly fell in love with.

Of course, there was no version of either mackerel or baked beans (even homemade) that would ever have changed my parents'  minds. Sometimes, aversion just can t be overcome. Especially when it s compounded, as my first husband experienced, by profound social trauma. There are some things the body just can t forget.

 

Trying To Out Wit The Long Term Care Insurance Lady

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 19, 2024] 

It’s really easy to put your head in the sand about getting old and decrepit until you start hearing about friends’ parents, and even the friends themselves, requiring 24-hour care.  As in forever. 

So Olof and I decided that maybe we should look into long-term care insurance.  Let me sum up the concept: they hope you pay exorbitant premiums for 20 years then die of a heart attack. 

Olof was out of town when the long-term care people called in response to my application and said they were sending a nurse out for a physical exam, including a cognitive evaluation. 

Uh-oh. I do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day (except Monday; too easy) and read three books a week. But I’m clear that my mind is not as sharp as it once was.  The Light will testify that my proofreading skills have gone to hell.  I mis-use words a lot more.  When I’m writing, I’ll ask myself, “Do I mean ‘propitious’ or “prophetic’?”  I’m not so sure of spelling anymore.  I have to look up grammar rules regularly. 

As we get older, Olof and I are hoping that together, we can maintain one complete brain and one functioning body between us.  Especially one semi-complete long-term memory bank.  We’re always asking each other: What was the name of the actor in… 

What’s scary, however, is that I sometimes temporarily lose a really basic word. 

Inga: “Olof, what’s the word for those things you put on your feet inside your shoes?”

Olof: “Socks?” 

Inga: “Yes! Thanks!”

There was a time when one of us querying the other as to whether they’d remembered to take out the dog or turn down the heat before bed would have suggested a mildly insulting lack of faith in the other’s mental prowess.  But now we’re in total agreement that we have no faith in either our own or the other’s mental prowess.  We’re just trying to keep the dog from peeing on the carpet and the heating bill under control.  We’re grateful for the reminder. 

The problem will be when neither of us remembers to either ask or do it.  Or remembers that we even have a dog. Or heat.

Fortunately, that day is not here yet. 

But having the long-term health care insurance evaluator come out unnerved me.  I knew I could chug an extra blood pressure pill a few hours before she got there, but what was a “cognitive evaluation” going to actually entail?  If they asked me to count back by 7’s or do a level one (easiest) Sudoku puzzle, I’d be toast. 

I decided to do a little home staging before she came, carelessly strewing around collections of New York Times Saturday crossword puzzles (the really hard ones, NOT the Sunday), a few books in Swedish, an assortment of green teas. I wanted to create a subconscious impression of someone who dwells among the cognitive-scenti, the kind of person for whom an evaluator would say, “Oh, we obviously don’t need to be testing YOU.”

But she didn’t buy it. The cognitive exam, alas, was even worse than I expected. She told me she was going to tell me ten words and ask me to repeat back as many as I could remember a half hour later.  (Would two be enough?) I explained to the nice lady that I am afflicted with Auditory Processing Disorder (really) and learn better visually. Could I see the words instead? Nope. 

Um, doesn’t this violate the Americans with Disabilities Act?  If people can get more time on their SATs, shouldn’t I be entitled to accommodations on a dementia exam?

After she told me the words, giving me as much time as I needed to try to process them, she chatted it up with me about my current health and level of functioning.  (Inquiring minds want to know: Since when did “toileting” become a verb? Actually, when did it become a word?)

And by the way, didn’t Trump only have to remember five words on his dementia exam (person, woman, man, camera, TV)?  And the first three are practically the same word.  Even the last two are both electronics.  How come I had to do ten?  Well, I guess long-term care insurance automatically comes with Trump’s former job. 

The evaluator (closer?) had been deliberately vague about the costs of the insurance, noting that it would greatly depend on what type of coverage I might choose, and for how long I might want it.  Apparently, long term care can be pretty short term.  When I balked at the cost, she handed me a price sheet showing all the local memory care facilities costing anywhere from $10,000-$14,000 a MONTH.  And no, Medicare doesn’t pay. 

Against all odds, I actually was able to come up with nine of the ten words after the required 30-minute lag. Years ago, I learned that if I can’t write something down, I project it up on a pretend screen in front of me so I can see it. 

By the way, the words were chimney, salt, button, train, harp, meadow, finger, flower, book, and rug.  (The one I couldn’t remember was meadow.) 

Write these down.  You may get the same lady. 

 

 

Confessions Of a Cruciverbalist Lexophile Bibliotherapist

[ Let Inga Tell You, La Jolla Light, published August 12, 2024] 2024

It's only in recent years that I learned that I was a cruciverbalist lexophile engaging in daily bibliotherapy.

In simpler terms, I am a word-loving crossword puzzle enthusiast who indulges in therapeutic reading with a medicinal glass of wine. I don t think the wine is strictly part of the bibliotherapy definition but if you're going for therapeutic, you might as well go all the way.

I wasn't always a book person even though I grew up in a family of voracious readers. There were always at least three trips a week to the Pleasantville Public Library where my mother and sibs stocked up on new reading material. I did too, but I read one book to their five. 

Somehow the family speed reading gene seemed to have missed me. I was the middle child, a blue-eyed blond in a family of brown-eyed brunettes, the creamy blond filling in the family Oreo. (OK, so I think we're mixing some metaphors here.) I liked reading but I read slowly, with my lips.

While my siblings tested into the stratosphere on IQ tests, the school's guidance counselor informed my mother that two out of three ain't bad. Mom was advised to (waaay) lower her expectations where I was concerned. Vocational school could be a good fit, or perhaps one of the less demanding state schools.

My Ivy League-educated parents (they met in an Honors Shakespeare class at Brown) were having none of this. They refused to believe I was as dumb as I tested. But I think there was some unstated concern that babies had been switched at birth. Somewhere out there was a family of blond dodos who inexplicably ended up with a brunette genius.

Ironically, I was always a much better student than either of my siblings, grade-wise. It's amazing what dogged determination will do for you. In fact, it was my signature "pathological persistence"  (my husband's term) that finally got our streetlight fixed last year after more than 100 hours and a year of effort. 

As the blond sheep of the family, I was sometimes the target of my siblings touting their superior reading-acquired vocabulary. (And yes, you do acquire an amazing vocabulary if you read a lot.) Our dog was misbehaving one day, and I announced, "Josephine, you are a recalcitrant animal!"  ("Recalcitrant" being one of the vocabulary words in English class that week.)

Everyone looked up from their books. "Whoa! Inga said a big word!"   (Then they went right back to reading.)

I was never a crossword person (cruciverbalist) until my sister and multiple locale friends kept calling me asking for foreign language answers that frequently show up on the New York Times puzzle. While I m not fluent in anything (anymore), I've studied French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Italian, and Swedish. So when the clue was Portuguese for "she,"  I could say, "ela."

Now, of course, you could just Google it but that wasn't true then.

As a matter of self-defense, given all the answers I was providing, I started doing the New York Times puzzle myself which I confess is kind of an addiction at this point.

It didn't hurt that studies had indicated that doing crossword puzzles every day made the aging brain stay agile. But then the Wall Street Journal published a study a few years back that all that crossword puzzles do for your brain is make you better at crossword puzzles. Such a buzz kill, those WSJ folks. But by this time, I liked them for their own sake. Although if the NYT could publish a sports-less version, I would not be unhappy.

Never a patient person, I have found that bringing the prior week's New York Times crossword puzzles to a doctor s office is the perfect way to keep my annoyance in check in case I have to wait. (OK, in this day and age, you always have to wait.) There is a neurologist, who shall remain nameless, whose wait times are always so onerous that I get through five days of puzzles, even the Saturday crossword which, I will say, is usually a bear.

For the 12 years that I was a single working parent, I read literally not one book. Probably not even a full page of one book. I obviously couldn't use the public library at that stage of my life as they not unreasonably want their books back sooner than a decade. So I would buy a book that looked interesting to me at Warwicks, and it would languish on my bedside table with the book mark still on the first page. Most nights in that era, I was falling asleep on top of the clean laundry piled on the bed at midnight.

But now I m retired, and get to read at least three books a week. The public library has become my second home. My husband has gone the Kindle route but I still like the tactile experience of an actual book in my lap, and turning pages. Sometimes turning pages really fast if the book is a total snorer. But that's the beauty of the public library: don't like the book and back it goes. My book queue is always full.

I'm loving my late-found identity as a cruciverbalist lexophile bibliotherapist. It feels positively recalcitrant.

 

 

A Saga That Might Make You Never Want To Fly Again

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published August 5, 2024] ©2024

This is a story that will make you never want to travel again.  Unfortunately, it was probably replayed tens of thousands of times over the weekend of July 19 when the CrowdStrike security glitch cancelled planes throughout the U.S. and Europe. 

My friend, “Catherine” and her husband had just enjoyed an idyllic family reunion in the Ozarks and were due to fly back to San Diego at 6 a.m. on Saturday, June 20 from Springfield, MO to San Diego on Delta. The saga of their three-day effort to get home would fill five times the space I’m allotted for this column. 

As soon as they were alerted on Friday night that their Delta flights were cancelled, they tried to rebook, to no avail, on Delta’s website.  So Catherine’s husband queued up on Delta’s help chat app while Catherine waited on hold on Delta’s customer service line, hoping to double their chances of connecting with the required human.    

Dismayingly, every 20 minutes, the help chat line would refresh with wait times that got longer rather than shorter.  At one point, they were notified that “The estimated wait time to message with our next available specialists [sic] is 663 minutes.”  For those with limited math skills, that’s eleven hours. 

When they did finally reach a Delta representative, many hours later, the best the Delta rep could offer them was a flight out of St. Louis, a three-hour drive away, on Sunday night.  They took it.

In true irony, as soon as the call ended, a message from Delta popped up on Catherine’s phone asking her to rate her experience with Delta on a scale of 1 to 5.  Unfortunately, minus 400 wasn’t an option.

One (they thought minor) hitch with the St. Louis flights was that they had a rental car – an electric vehicle (EV) – that was supposed to be turned in at the Springfield airport. They called the rental car company to see what it might cost to turn it in in St. Louis instead.  One rep told them $300, another $495, and yet another a deal-breaking $1,500.  And you also had to get permission from a manager who didn’t reply to any of the multiple messages they left him.

Ultimately, they decided to just drive the EV to the Springfield airport to see what could be worked out. Maybe swap it for a gas-fueled car they could take to St. Louis. 

They knew they didn’t have enough charge on the car to get to the Springfield Airport but fortunately, they had a map of locations of charging stations.  So they get to the first one but to their dismay, none of the four chargers are working.  They’re told by the gas station attendant, “Oh, they’ve haven’t worked in years.  Nobody around here [rural Missouri] drives them things anyway.”

Fortunately, the next place, a used car dealership 23 miles down the road, did indeed have a working (albeit decrepit) charger.  While waiting for an absolutely glacial charge, they passed the time test driving used vehicles on the lot. The sales guy told them that they could buy a used car for cheap and drive it home to San Diego and probably get there faster.  It was seriously tempting.  And, ironically, he was right! But they still needed to turn in the EV in Springfield.

Condensing the next part of this saga, the rental car company folks will not let them drop off a car – any car, EV or not - in St. Louis. So Catherine and hubby find themselves back at the Delta counter begging for a flight from Springfield since they can’t get to St. Louis.

There are plenty of flights on other airlines but Delta claims they “only have a ticketing agreement with them for certain booking codes” which can’t be overridden.  Best that Delta can offer is a flight out on Tuesday.  But ultimately, Delta is persuaded (Catherine can be very persuasive when pushed several orders of magnitude beyond her last nerve) to book them on an American flight with a connection through Dallas for Sunday night.  They take it.

Alas, when they get to the airport Sunday night, the American flight is leaving an hour late.  They might not make their Dallas connection.

But they are deeply religious people.  They decided to pray that the connection in Dallas would be delayed as well.  Even though the end game is eternal salvation, would it be too much to ask that some divine intervention might come their way while they’re still on earth?

As Catherine later noted, “We prayed too hard.”  When they got to Dallas, their connection there was delayed three hours, now scheduled to leave at 1:40 a.m. for San Diego.  But they notice that there were two other (much delayed) flights to San Diego, one leaving slightly earlier.  So they get in yet another line, and are able to get two seats on the one that leaves at 1:04 a.m. (originally scheduled for 4:55 p.m..)  

The American agent confides that the other two flights have timed-out crews.  She thinks both are likely to be cancelled.  And yup!  They are!

But ultimately, luck sort of finally finding them, they are on the one flight that actually leaves – at 2:20 a.m., delayed by cleanup after a presumably excessively-partying (or vindictive?) passenger on the incoming flight from Las Vegas had created what I think is now euphemistically called a “biohazard” on the plane.

 They arrive in San Diego at 4:30 a.m.  But are any of their four bags there too?  Nope! 

Standing in yet another line, having been up all night, they are informed by the baggage office that their bags will be delivered to them if or when they are ever found.  They were finally repatriated with them at 7 p.m. Monday night. 

By the way: Delta was making no promises about reimbursements for the extra hotel and rental car costs they incurred.  Catherine was advised to send her hotel and car receipts to Delta.com - and pray. 

So what are the take-aways here, beside one should never rent an EV in Missouri?  Like most people, I had never even heard of CrowdStrike.  It is frankly terrifying that a security (!) software glitch could have had this level of disruption not only to air travel, but hospitals, emergency services, banks, retail stores around the world.  Like pilot strikes, storms, overbooking, and IT glitches aren’t enough?  Like we world-class worriers don’t have enough to torment ourselves about already?

Travel is starting to feel like a giant game of roulette. And one thing is clear: you are totally on your own when things go awry.  Airlines can apologize for “any inconvenience it might have caused you” (a phrase that should be outlawed) all they want, but in the end, this kind of saga is becoming all too common.  (Southwest two Christmases ago, anyone?) 

It’s too bad the “beam me up” technology is in its infancy.  Elon Musk: are you listening?

 Wait times for Delta human just keep getting longer rather than shorter:

8:34 p.m.:  537 minutes estimated wait time

8:53 p.m.:  581 minutes

9:14 p.m.: 602 minutes

10:30:  663 minutes (11 hours!)