["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published, November 25, 2024] ©2024
My long-deceased parents were their own flawed people and certainly products of their times. My mother, a smoker, died at 54 from lung cancer. She never knew her grandchildren which was a huge loss for everyone, including and especially her.
My father, an ad executive in New York City (think "Mad Men" although not Don Draper) probably would have lived longer were it not for the nightly dry martinis that were the norm in our commuter town as I was growing up. (There was a saying in the neighborhood: "The vermouth is just a formality.")
But as I have gotten older and had children and grandchildren of my own, I have had the opportunity to appreciate some of the incredible gifts my parents gave us. Top among them: they didn't hate. Whatever their prejudices might have been, we never heard them. They never referred to anyone by race or religion, and to this day, when I hear gratuitous (or even flat-out biased) references to people like this, it immediately stands out to me in a very sad way.
My father was a conservative Republican Catholic, my mother a third-generation feminist Protestant and a Democrat. (They met in an Honors Shakespeare class in college.) It made for a lot of lively dinner table conversation. It was up to you to make your case.
Interestingly, I am a fourth-generation feminist and Democrat married to a life-long Republican, although Olof and I have both voted across party lines on many occasions. My husband is still fervently hoping the Republican party will return to what he thinks of as its former glory. I, of course, think it never had one. But conversations are pretty lively at our dinner table too.
Both of my parents were avid community volunteers. My father ran the United Fund campaign in our area and we referred to ourselves as "United Fund orphans" during the major fundraising season.
My mother s occupations, meanwhile, included teaching convicts at an area penitentiary, substitute teaching junior high (is there a parallel there?) and leading Brownies and Girl Scouts. But the one she was most passionate about was not only teaching ESL (English as a second language) but tutoring, on her own time, many of her students to pass the written driver s exam which in that era had to be taken in English. Given the lack of public transit in our area, a driver's license was essential to getting any kind of good job. Her efforts included teaching them to drive in our car. I think my mother could yell STOP! in eight languages.
Having immigrants regularly in our house meant that we kids got to learn about other cultures, and how differently, for example, other nationalities celebrated even the same holidays that we celebrated, never mind ones that we didn't. As thanks from her students, we were often gifted with delectable food from other lands.
It was largely from this immigrant influence that I was inspired to apply for a student exchange program to spend my senior year of high school in a foreign country which is, in fact, where I met my now-husband, Olof, who was a fellow student on the same program in Brazil.
Both Olof and I married people from different backgrounds the first time around, and while neither of those marriages lasted, he still misses his Indonesian wife s amazing cooking (except for kimchee, a word he doesn't want to hear out loud). I, meanwhile, can counsel people on how to make a Seder dinner for 20 and I still know all the holiday blessings by heart in Hebrew. Many favorite memories are associated with both.
In the early 1950s when my siblings and I were children, the second biggest fear in the U.S. after nuclear war was polio and with good reason. My siblings and I all contracted it in August of 1955, four months after the Salk vaccine was announced. (It took a year for the vaccine to get to our small town.) I can still remember my parents absolute terror during this time, especially after the little boy in the hospital bed next to my sister suddenly ended up in an iron lung. (This is a cylindrical prison that simulates breathing when polio has affected respiratory muscles.) I wish everyone could take a brief trip back in time to the jammed polio wards of that era.
As one who has dealt with the repercussions of polio, I feel entitled to say that if you are an anti-vaxxer, you are a moron. There is no reason for one single child to ever contract polio again.
Even what people now like to think of as normal (in that there was no way to prevent them then) childhood illnesses like measles, mumps, rubella ("German measles") and chicken pox are not without potentially permanent consequences. Like most of my generation, I had all of these illnesses. Even when there aren't long-term effects, these diseases inflict a lot of suffering.
And would it be OK to mention that while my mouth is more fillings than actual teeth, my kids have never had a cavity? My mother ended up with painful dentures, not even having the benefit of all the dentistry I had.
It s going to be a different world going forward. As the song goes, "You can t always get what you want." The process is the process but I am often reminded of my own parents' philosophy, best summed up as: What you accept, you teach, not just regarding treatment toward yourself but toward the greater world.
So thanks, Mom and Dad. On this Thanksgiving Day, I'm truly grateful to you.
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