Definitely In The Wrong Profession

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published January 1, 2026] 2026

OK, I know it's not nice to make fun of other people's occupations, but I really have trouble with animal psychics. Part of that trouble is my regret that I never entered this lucrative field myself especially in a place where there is both lots of money and lots of pets.

Some years ago, I had an acquaintance who shall remain nameless who told me that her dog kept getting out of the yard while she was at work. Now, it seemed obvious to me that the poor animal was lonely and didn't like being left alone all day. To entertain itself (and hopefully seek some companionship), it spent its time digging a hole under her fence to escape.

Finally, the acquaintance engaged the services of a pet psychic to meet with the dog and see what its issues might be. She first met with the psychic, explained the problem and then had the canine clairvoyant meet privately with the pup.

My acquaintance couldn't sing the praises more highly of the psychic afterwards.

"It was amazing!" she effused. "She said that Bowser was feeling sad while I was at work and felt incredibly stressed and was just trying to come and find me."

"Um,"  I said. "But isn't that kind of what you told her? (I didn't add: "and freaking obvious?")

"But not exactly like that!"  insisted my acquaintance. "I couldn't believe the details Bowser told her! I never would have guessed!"

Personally, it seemed that the money spent on the pooch portender might have been better spent on enrolling it in doggie daycare. But that's just me.

During this conversation, I kept having a deja  vu to a long-ago psychology class about a therapeutic style called "emphathic paraphrasing."   This involves restating, using different words, someone's thoughts and feelings in a way that demonstrates understanding and compassion. It makes the client feel heard and is a genuinely powerful therapeutic tool.

So are pet psychics simply experts at empathic paraphrasing with maybe a side of fabrication?

In fact, this reminded me of another situation that I wrote about a long time ago when a neighbor's cat, known as Butterscotch, was left behind when they moved. Tracked down, they said they thought someone else might also be feeding him so they d felt OK departing without him. (Gah!)

Butterscotch showed up like clockwork at our doorstep every night meowing piteously until I came out to the front porch with a can of people tuna. Meanwhile I posted his photo on "Do you know me?"  fliers around the neighborhood. We couldn't keep Butterscotch ourselves as my younger son was anaphylatically-allergic to cats.

A day or so later, two women called. "Yes, that s our cat Tiger,"  they said. "He adopted us a few months ago but disappears for days at a time. We've spent $600 on his vet bills."

When Tiger/Butterscotch showed up at my doorstep that night doing his starving homeless cat act, I stared him down and said, "I'm on to you, you kitty con artist. Just how many homes do you have???"

Several, as it turned out. Once the tuna train ended at my house, he began frequenting the master bedroom of another neighbor, Jeff, whose French doors were often open. Jeff had no interest in a cat but Tiger/Butterscotch was not to be dissuaded.

I connected Jeff up with the two ladies on the next street. As often as Jeff returned the marmalade manipulator to their house, Tiger would be back to Jeff s an hour later. The two women were distraught at Tiger s rejection (especially after their financial investment in the furry felon's medical care) and finally concluded there was only one thing to be done.

They called in the cat whisperer. 

The kitty psychic ($150 hour) closeted herself with her feline client for a private consultation. Tiger, the cat shrink reported when she emerged, was distraught that there was now another male cat on the women's block who was more dominant than he. His male ego bruised, he had sought refuge at Jeff's where there was less competition, not to mention gratuitous male bonding. (The cat whisperer didn't specifically mention it, but I'm sure Tiger told her that he, like Jeff, was a rabid Yankees fan.) While Tiger didn't want to appear ungrateful for the ladies many kindnesses, at this stage in his life, he needed a more guy-centric environment.

"Well," said Jeff, who didn't want to admit just how attached he and his girlfriend were to the cat at this point, "if it s really what Tiger wants..."

Easter Sunday was to be the official changeover day. Jeff's girlfriend made a nice brunch and the two tearful ladies showed up, Tiger in tow, for the official handover of distemper shot records. They surveyed Tiger s new home, and approved. Food was served. But when it came time for the relinquishment to become final, the ladies had a sudden change of heart. What if the Feline Freud had misunderstood the tabby terror's wishes?

Tiger was put on the phone during an emergency call to the cat psychic whose skills fortunately included aural communication over optical fiber. The ladies were assured that Tiger had re-asserted his wishes to live with Jeff.

And that was that. Jeff was now the proud owner of a kitty bigamist.

Personally, I was always suspicious about the story of Tiger being threatened by other male cats on the block but who was going to dispute it? Definitely not Tiger who lived a long and happy life at Jeff s.

But I do feel that maybe I'm in the wrong occupation. And by the way, I'd be willing to do it for $125, treats included.

 

 

The Hazards Of Hostessing

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published December 25, 2025] 2025

I love to collect stories from friends who host large groups during the holidays and have to deal with picky eaters.

Seriously, these women qualify for sainthood. Unless it's a genuine allergy situation (verified by a note from the guest's doctor), I tend to go with my mother's philosophy which was the same both for entertaining and weeknight family meals: dinner is served!

Since there appears to be a new health fad just about weekly, trying to accommodate what guests are or more to the point, are not eating is pretty much doomed to failure. But this does not keep my heroic friends from trying.

A good friend of mine recounted how she was planning a Christmas day dinner for 11 (her table can only accommodate ten but she decided she could squish two people together at the end of the table) which would include three young grandchildren plus some family friends.

One of the guests was her husband s ex-wife with whom both she and her husband have maintained an enviably cordial relationship. The ex-wife called and mentioned that she had a new boyfriend and wondered if he might be able to attend as well? My friend, ever accommodating, decided she could probably squish two people together at BOTH ends of the table, and said yes.

Ex-wife calls back the next day. Boyfriend wants to know if he can bring his teenage daughter since it will be a custody day. My friend starts to panic. But the grandkids are tiny, she can maybe double them up, so she says yes.

That afternoon, another call. The teenage daughter would really like to bring her boyfriend who is in a horrible family situation and will not otherwise have any celebration at all. It would be a great kindness to include him, and of course, would be in the spirit of the holiday. My friend says yes, realizing that she will probably be eating by herself in the kitchen. Or maybe she can rent some folding chairs to put around the table instead of using the comfy chairs that go with her dining room set.

She then learns that all four of these guests are vegetarians.

She decides to make this meal really simple: pasta with a choice of a red marinara sauce with meat or a green pesto sauce. Very Christmas-y. There will be a big salad, and some fabulous bread. Voila!

But then she hears from her daughter-in-law. DIL has decided that the grandtots, who have been eating bread and pasta for their entire little lives, including the day before, are gluten-sensitive and will henceforth be eating only gluten-free pasta and gluten-free bread. DIL notes that that would include any croutons in the salad.

My friend decides, OK, so she'll serve two types of pasta, one gluten and one gluten-free, with the two sauces, along with both gluten-y and gluten-free bread. Croutons will be eliminated from the salad. Or she could make some using the gluten-free bread? Nope, that might push her into the zone of hostility.

There went the pies she was planning to serve for dessert too. Can't serve a dessert (gluten in crusts) that the grandkids can t eat. Relationship with the daughter-in-law could not be saved.

One of the other guests then reminds my friend that in her dietary regimen (no allergies, has something to do with blood type?), she does not consume fungi (that would be mushrooms), root vegetables (including onions), or meat. Dang! That red sauce was going to have all three of those ingredients. And the now-crouton-free salad was going to have mushrooms too. Okay, so my friend makes a note to remember to put the mushrooms on the side and let people add them to their salad if they want. But eliminating onions, mushrooms and meat from her treasured family red sauce was going to be problematical at best. She realizes that there are just going to have to be two red sauces, the traditional one that she usually makes, and one that will pretty much be...tomatoes.

But now the problem is how to serve all these dishes since her sideboard really doesn't have enough room for so many options. It will also be critical to make sure that everything is scrupulously labeled so that nobody eats gluten-y bread and mushroom-tainted marinara sauce by mistake.

Of course, it would be so easy to get all those labels confused! Imagine the horror to find that the gluten-free preferers (not actually allergic) had accidentally eaten the gluten stuff by mistake, or that the onion lady had ingested not only fungi but cow!

Personally, I would feel really really bad if that happened. For about five minutes. And then I would sit down with my glass of chardonnay looking at the twinkly lights on my tree, chuckling maniacally, and basking in the spirit of the holiday season.

 

Getting A Christmas Tree Hasn’t Always Gone Smoothly

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published December 8, 2025] ©2025

A few days ago I went to buy my Christmas tree and couldn’t help but reflect on the ghosts of Christmas trees past.

My first husband always insisted we get a small live tree which we would then plant in the yard in what he considered a charming post-Christmas tradition. Folks: do NOT try this at home!  Little did we realize how much those suckers would grow - one to 40 feet! By the time my husband and I divorced ten years (and Christmas trees) later, anyone driving by would think our place was a tree farm with a driveway.  Meanwhile, the interior of the house descended into a cave-esque gloom since the tree tops had created a rain forest canopy effect. The tree roots made for constant plumbing problems and grass wouldn’t grow under pine needles. Ultimately, it cost me $4,000 to have ten originally-$20 trees removed from the property.  (I knew I should have had a Christmas tree removal reimbursement clause in the divorce decree!)

Post-divorce and single with two little kids, I went for the six-foot Douglas fir simply because they were the cheapest. I’d be on my stomach trying to screw the trunk into the stand while six-year-old Rory was holding up the tree. Three-year-old Henry was supposed to tell me when it was straight.  I crawled out from under the tree to discover that it was listing 45 degrees. Irrefutably demonstrating the principle of gravitational vector forces, it promptly fell over.

It was several more years until we had a Christmas tree that wasn’t leaning precariously. In a brilliant Single Mom Home Repair School move, I tied a rope midway up the trunk and tethered the other end to a ceiling plant hook.  Miraculously (since I guarantee that butterfly bolts are not rated for Christmas tree stabilization), it stayed vertical.

Some years later, Henry, who was about 11 at the time, and I brought home a bargain supermarket tree. Our tree, alas, had lots of branches right at the base of the trunk which we were attempting to amputate with a rusty jigsaw (left over from Pinewood Derby days) - in the dark in the front yard via flashlight - so that we could get the trunk into the stand.  What’s amazing is that we didn’t sever any digits in the process. I finally ended up calling a neighbor who came over with the appropriate tools and did the job for us. Decision for next year: better saw, or a tree from a Christmas tree lot.

Since I wasn’t all that interested in replicating the experience even with good tools, the next year I did indeed go to a tree lot and got full-service branch trimming. The tree lot guys mentioned that they could probably get the tree on top of my little Toyota if I wanted to save the delivery fee. (I think they sensed a cheap tipper.)  I was dubious but they did indeed get the tree tied securely on top of the car by having me open the two front windows and running the rope through the car and around the tree, knotting it on top.

IQ test: What’s wrong with this picture?

Off I went in the early evening darkness driving as slowly as possible through back streets.  I was terrified that a sudden stop would put this tree on the hood of my car, or worse, through the windshield of the car behind me. With enormous relief, I pulled up in front of my darkened house. It was the kids’ night at their dad’s, and my second husband, Olof, and I were not yet married.  My plan was to untie the tree, drag it onto the front porch and have the kids help me set it up the following night.

Obviously over-focused on saving the delivery fee and failing to engage even a single synapse, I had not stopped to realize that with the rope threaded through the car windows, the doors couldn’t open. I was trapped in my car. It was well before cell phones. I sat in my car thinking, “Geesh, Inga, it’s amazing you’re allowed to leave the house without a conservator.”  (And also: Would it have killed those tree guys to ask if there would be anybody at home???)

I sat there shivering in my open-windowed car and pondering my options. I didn’t really want to have to go all the way back to the tree lot. But it would probably take all evening to cut through the rope with my car keys. (Note to self: Keep 9-inch Bowie knife in glove compartment!)

As luck would have it, a neighbor arrived home from work shortly after, and, graciously avoiding voicing what must surely have been his assessment of the situation, extricated me from the car. Why all of my neighbors were not hiding from me after the first year I was single is still a mystery.

But ultimately, I married Olof and we could afford to have not only the Noble fir I had always coveted but have the nice Christmas tree lot people deliver it and set it up to my satisfaction. Personally, I think I’ve earned it.

 

Why Some People Will Never Use E-Readers

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published December 1, 2025] 2025

Recently I read an article about the personality traits of people who still read physical books instead of e-books. Even before I read the first word, I was willing to go wild and crazy and surmise that those would be positive traits and that the author was likely a physical book reader herself.

Of course, if this article had been written by either of my strictly-digital-reading sons, I would guess that those personality traits would include "Luddite", "techno-moron", "change-averse", "retro"  and the ever-popular "tree killer".

And actually, all of those terms would be true.

Now that I'm retired, I read at least three books a week, the vast majority of them from my always-full public library queue. The front seat of my car has library books being transported to and from the library pretty much at all times.

Being able to read so many books is definitely a corrective emotional experience from my twelve years as a divorced working mom when I read exactly no books a year. I mean, zee-ro. I didn't even bother with a library card since they unreasonably wouldn't let you keep a book out for twelve months (years?) at a time. There used to be library fines and mine would have looked like the defense budget.

So I'd buy a book from Warwick's which would reside on my bedside table with hopes that over time I'd have enough time or energy to actually read it. But I never got past the first page. In that era, I was so chronically exhausted that I was usually asleep before my head had even hit the pillow.

I'm just glad I lived long enough to make up for all those books I never got to read. My engineer husband Olof reads both e-books and physical books. He likes novels on his e-reader but thinks the graphics are better in those massive 1,200-page techno-tomes he inexplicably considers pleasure reading. As for me, I just like the tactile feel of an actual book in my lap.

According to the article about physical book readers, the traits we have (as opposed to you unctuous e-reader people) are (allegedly): we're self-aware, empathic, imaginative, self-disciplined, reflective, thoughtful, deeply emotional, poetic, and introspective. 

Actually, I can simplify that list. If it requires instructions and/or batteries, we're not interested.

I read the list of qualities of physical book readers to my husband and asked if he thought these traits described me. When I got to "deeply emotional", he queried, "So like hurling f-bombs at your electronics?"   OK, I admit it. I am not only techno-disabled but have the frustration of a gnat. It seems like the only reasonable response when technology thwarts me. Which it seems to do pretty continuously.

Seriously, everything has gotten so much more complicated than it needs to be. Even my new stove required a 60-page manual of instructions. It doesn't even get to "bake"  until page 40. The stove I had when I first married had two knobs, one marked "Off-Bake-Broil"  and the other temperatures. (The pre-heat setting, not indicated, was waiting 15 minutes.) I still think of that stove incredibly fondly.

I have seen first-hand that I am not the only physical book aficionado out there. Never was this illustrated more eloquently than on March 14, 2020 when the Covid epidemic hit and the library announced it would be closing the next day until further notice. The Riford library on Draper looked like a literary Luddite Fall of Saigon. There was wholesale panic. The place was packed. The librarians were frantically dispensing plastic grocery bags and allowing patrons to check out up to 40 books although I don t think anyone was actually counting. Like everyone else, I was dumping books wholesale into my bags according to two criteria which were (1) it had a cover and (2) there were words inside.

During the pandemic, books were assumed to be carrying Covid cooties so there was no way to return them during the long library closure. They rode around in the trunk of my car for months waiting to be repatriated with the mothership. 

Covid generated a new DSM-5 category: "People Who Will Just Not Use E-Readers No Matter What."  (There is no vaccine for this.)

Fortunately, a lot of those neighborhood Little Libraries popped up during that time when people could exchange books. They were a godsend. I was pawing through them at every opportunity.

From time to time, we techno-hostile people actually prevail. Olof and I like to sit outside on summer evenings and read, he on his iPad or e-reader, and me with a library book. Occasionally, Olof will have to go in early because the iPad's low battery sensor is flashing. I try to look sympathetic but it's all I can do to stifle a snicker. I never have to worry about the battery on my library book getting too low.

"You don't have to look so smug,"  my techno-husband will say, heading indoors.

But I can't help myself. I just want to sit outside for as long as I want to with a nice glass of wine and an actual book that makes a soothing susurrus when you turn the pages. No charging necessary.

 

 

 

Even More Things To Be Thankful About This Year

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published November 24, 2025] 2025

Last year at Thanksgiving, I wrote a column thanking my parents for all the things that I didn't even know to thank them for when they were alive. A year later and a new political era, the list has grown even longer.

I've covered in previous columns that 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. It's a dynamic that feels very familiar to me. My father was a conservative Republican and my mother a liberal feminist Democrat. It made for a lot of lively, but respectful, dinner table conversation at our house.

Conversations are pretty lively at our dinner table too but in the current era, for different reasons entirely. Olof and I have never been more politically aligned. 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. We both feel failed by the parties we have supported our whole lives. But we are both committed to voting even on the occasions our votes cancel each other out. (Prop 50 was a recent example.)

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 the challenges they faced surviving in a new land without knowing the language. It was one of the most valuable educations I've ever had. I've never known people who worked harder

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.

As a total aside on the immigrant issue, I recently met a young woman who volunteered, in a conversation about illegal aliens being deported, that her ethnicity was White Mountain Apache. I had never heard of this tribe of some 12,000 native Americans mostly residing in a reservation in Arizona. Not surprisingly, her sardonic view was that the 342 million current Americans all fall into the illegal alien category.

I'm writing this column on November 11 - Veteran s Day - and realized that last year I failed to thank all the people in my family who have served in the military, including my current husband, Olof, who was an Air Force pilot for ten years. Even my first husband served two years as a Navy doctor under the Berry Plan (which was how we ended up in San Diego in the first place).

My father served in the Army Air Forces (now the Air Force) in World War II; my husband Olof s father as a Navy pilot in the Pacific an incredibly high-hazard assignment. Even my grandfather served in the US Army in World War I. All of these men were clear in their mission and put their lives on the line for it.

My father and Olof s were among sixteen million fellow Americans who served in the U.S. Armed Forces during the Second World War, 407,000 of whom lost their lives in the process. It just seems that saying "thank you for your service", however well intended, doesn't begin to acknowledge the sacrifices that so many men and women have made to keep this country a democracy. I am especially grateful this year.

My parents, like everyone else, were flawed people making their share of mistakes. My mother, a smoker, died of lung cancer at 54. My father, like most of the neighbor men, could have done with fewer martinis. But there were three things I think my parents did extremely well.

Top among the things I am grateful to them for: 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 based on these factors, it immediately stands out to me in a very sad way.

Secondly, I consider one of the major gifts they gave their children was the concept that people could disagree, that over respectful - I can t emphasize the word enough - debate, ones view of the world could evolve and change. But you had to be willing to listen. And to vet your information to the best of your ability. And then: make your case.

And finally, one of the concepts my parents emphasized that seems especially important in current times involves the philosophy that what you accept, you teach. I'm guessing I'm not the only person who still talks to their dead relatives, but I can  put myself at our dinner table and hear them, if they were still alive, soliciting our opinions on the current state of affairs, and asking us: is this what you want? And if not, speak up.

So on this Thanksgiving Day, thank you Mom and Dad, and all the family members who have served to protect this country. I so appreciate all of you.

 

Inga's All-Time Favorite Quotes

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published November 10, 2025] 2025

Over the years, I've been collecting favorite quotes way too many to list here. I first published this list in March of 2018 and got such a huge response to it that I like to run an updated version of it every few years with new additions. As before, some of these quotes seem truly prescient for their time especially the first four:

"In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take." - Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."   First line of the book The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. (1953)

"You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."  - Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003), and others

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." - Journalist A.J. Liebling

"I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don't work."  Thomas Edison

"The older you get, the better you get. Unless you re a banana."  - Late actress Betty White

"Things always get worse before they get a lot worse."  - Lily Tomlin

"If you're the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room."  Attributed to various leaders

"The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn't decide."   (Unknown)

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." William Faulkner

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943

"My body isn't me. I just live here."   (Magnet on Inga s refrigerator)

"Most editors are failed writers. So are most writers." T.S. Eliot

"A drug is any substance that, when injected in a rat, gives rise to a scientific paper."   - Darryl Inaba (1984)

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now."    Chinese Proverb

"We never wanted to divorce at the same time."  Reply from friends of Inga s when asked the secret of their 50-year marriage 

"Not having to worry about your hair anymore may be the secret upside of death."   - Nora Ephron

"In our judicial system, you are assumed guilty until proven rich or lucky."   Pundit John Oliver 

A scientist friend who was invited to present at a professional meeting in Jakarta observed to the organizer that the schedule, as set, was not being even remotely followed. The reply: "You should think of the schedule more as a first draft of a play that will be given improvisationally.

"The only way to be reliably sure the hero gets the girl at the end of the story is to be both the hero and the girl."  - Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, A Memoir

"A closed mouth gathers no feet."   - Inga s personal motto, poorly followed 

"What you accept, you teach."   - Inga s parents motto, well followed.

"The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."     George Bernard Shaw

"May you step on Legos in the middle of the night."    Curse

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."  - Thomas Edison

"I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

"A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say, How to Build a Boat." Actor Stephen Wright

"I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction." - Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)

"After a failure, there's always someone who wished there was an opportunity they'd missed."  - Lily Tomlin

"All swash and no buckle."   - variation on "all hat and no cattle"

"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time." - Vince Lombardi

"There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." - Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

"My brain seems to be working for a different organization now."   (Inga s friend Julia referring to menopause)

"If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door." - Milton Berle

"The wages of sin are death, but after taxes are taken out, it s just kind of a tired feeling."    Paula Poundstone.

"Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure." - Mystery writer Ross MacDonald (1915-1983)

"The chief cause of problems is solutions."    Journalist Eric Sevareid (1912-1992)

"Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."  - Oscar Wilde

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." - Mario Andretti

"Happiness is good health and a bad memory." - Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)

 

When Your Family - And Dog - Keep Switching Food Preferences

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published November 3, 2025] ©2025

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve pretty much become a confirmed lacto-ovo-pesci-clucko-heifertarian.  Which is to say, no pork or veal. And truthfully, the heifertarian part is increasingly rare.  But every once in a while, I just have to indulge in a hamburger although working hard at not thinking of the bovine who gave its life for this. I’m truly sorry, cow.  But boy are you delicious.

While I think I’m a pretty flexible eater, accommodating family members’ dietary preferences – which now includes five grandchildren – has been a challenge.  For years, I tried to keep up with whatever brands of yogurt and peanut butter and bread the grandkids would consume.  Fortunately, as they’ve gotten older, they’ve become far less picky.

My older granddaughter is still the toughest.  She’s currently a vegetarian (mostly vegan) with the exception of … hotdogs. Yup, seriously.  She’s a vegan-BallParkFrankian. This is definitely a niche dietary category. 

As the family shopper, I always did my best to stock my husband and sons’ preferred foods and beverages, only to have them change those preferences without informing me.  And I confess, even the dog did (and still does) it.

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

I am sure I am not alone in this.

My husband, Olof, for example, seems to go through cycles of favorite snack foods.  For a while, he preferred unsalted roasted almonds that, given the quantity in which he was consuming them, were really only available in those bulk bins at Sprouts. 

So I’d buy up to ten pounds at a time and transfer them to plastic containers and store them in the freezer.  They take up a fair amount of room but usually he was eating them at a sufficient pace that there would quickly be room for other freezables, like the dog’s homemade food.  She’s an incredibly picky eater and has, at 16, a delicate stomach.

So after a while, I’m noticing that there still seem to be ten pounds of almonds in the freezer, and they aren’t moving. 

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

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

Alas, unsalted mixed nuts went the way of roasted almonds.  Then he was on to tortilla chips and fresh salsa.  But I now know pretty much every recipe you can make with ten pounds of rejected almonds, and an abandoned cannister of unsalted nuts.  Pestos! Brownies! Crusted fish!

A few months into the snack chip phase, I couldn’t help but notice that the current opened bag of tortilla chips had gone stale, and the container of fresh salsa had expired.  I ended up dumping both.  Olof had 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 family.” 

When my sons were growing up, and even in their adult years, keeping up with what they’d eat – and drink – seemed to be a constantly changing tableau as well.  School lunches would start coming home uneaten. For a long time, Henry would only eat sandwiches made from cold cuts from a certain deli (not, of course, the one at your local supermarket.)

Keeping up with Henry’s beer preferences over the years has also been a losing battle.  Whatever I have in stock is the beer (IPA?) he used to drink.  So I make a note for the next visit. But by that time, he’s already moved on.

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 try her on something else to find something else she likes.  Then I go ahead an order a case of it (minimum order) which she decides she doesn’t like when we are halfway through it.

I’ve tried making homemade food for her as well which, like the canned stuff, she likes until she doesn’t.  But since it is labor intensive to make, I end up with a freezer shelf full of containers of food she won’t eat.  Fortunately, I finally got rid of all the damned almonds so at least there’s room for it. 

But I really wouldn’t mind having room in the modest freezer section of my side-by-side refrigerator for actual food. 

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, and even our incredibly picky dog, and have their preferred sustenance on hand.

I’m thinking I should start a Rejected Food Bank with other moms in my area.  We could all post the stuff our families have stopped eating and exchange it for something our own family might. Because I got really, really tired of pesto.

 

 

When Home Ownership Is Over Rated

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published October 27, 2025] 2025

When you own a 1947 house that still has most of its original cast iron pipes, there is nothing that puts more fear in your heart than plumbing catastrophes.

Our pipes have been photographed more often than most super models. The technology for this is actually pretty cool. The plumbing catastrophe guys thread a camera 130 feet through our pipes starting from our back cleanout access (and more on that anon) to the street, resulting in a movie, with audio, that they can then Airdrop onto your Smart phone for future viewing pleasure.

I will say that this video would be the perfect way to dispense with dinner guests who might be overstaying their welcome. "Hey,"  you mention to the diner who doesn't seem inclined to depart your table even though everyone else left an hour ago, "wanna see some really cool video of our sewer line?"

Fortunately, this is only the third major plumbing catastrophe we've had in the decades we've lived here. But all three have been epic.

Of course, for years, we had a plumber on speed dial when our older son, Rory, used to have a predilection for flushing toys - rocket parts were a specialty - down the toilet and watching with fascination the ensuring flood. There is nothing more disconcerting than seeing rolls of toilet paper bobbing down the hallway.

Our first major plumbing disaster occurred on January 7, 1981 at 7 a.m. when, through no fault of ours, a mainline sewer block in front of our home caused the entire neighborhoods'  sewage to detour through our home for more than two hours before the city emergency crews could clear it. After Proposition 13 passed in 1978, one of the line items that disappeared from the city's budget was routine maintenance of sewer lines resulting in far too many situations such as ours.

I was home alone with my two-year-old and eight-month-old baby (my then-husband was, of course, off playing tennis) when I heard a loud rumbling followed by the whole house shaking before geysers of sewage exploded from every sink, toilet, shower and drain in the house. They could truly make a horror movie out of this. I have photos taken for insurance purposes but are not printable because, as my then-editor pointed out, they are completely disgusting. Remediation took months, and we won't even go into the Gamma Globulin shots and finding toilet paper in our home in colors we had never used. (Toilet paper used to come in decorator colors to match your decor.)

So that this could never happen again, we paid a lot of money to install cleanouts and overflow valves both in front of the house, and in the crawl space under the house in the back.

Suffice to say that sewer line maintenance came back into the city budget due to significant claims like ours. But this has not all been good news. In fact, I have written several previous columns detailing episodes when both our immediate neighbors along with fellow La Jollans posting on local social media reported that the city's overzealous sewer maintenance crews have blasted raw sewage into their bathrooms. Our neighbors across the street actually had sewage on their bathroom ceiling. Ironically, the city had been attempting to forcefully eradicate another neighbor s subterranean roach problem but maybe got a little overzealous on the velocity. 

It's the people closest to the manhole covers where the crews are working that are most vulnerable to this. Adding to a long list of quirks to our home, aside from the phantom streetlight that neither the city nor SD G&E will acknowledge, and an address that even Uber can t find, is that we have not one but two manhole covers on either side of our property. Unfortunately, there are a lot of electrical conduits in them and if water gets down there, they short out, and sometimes actually even explode. Seriously, there should have been disclosures when we bought this place.

We had fortunately managed to avoid any city sewer maintenance blasts into our home until September of 2024 when our hallway shower was suddenly filled with raw sewage that also managed to rupture the cast iron pipes underneath it. I have written about this before as well, and my now-editor also declined to publish those pictures citing "readers eating breakfast."

I was sort of hoping that God wouldn't consider us candidates for plumbing crises again so soon (we're good people!) But this past summer, I was noticing that azaleas that I thought were long gone (they take a lot of water so we decided to let them crump) were suddenly flourishing. They are not on a sprinkler line and it has hardly rained. Meanwhile, the almost-impossible-to-kill philodendrons which had always flourished in that location, slowly died. And of course, this was all taking place right next to our front porch in the most prominent location possible.

Denial is a wonderful thing. I was enjoying the renaissance of the pretty azaleas until I had a sudden realization at 3 a.m. one morning when one's denial mechanism is at its weakness that the azaleas were flourishing because they had a water source.

Two months, seven different companies, and a meteoric rise in my knowledge of plumbing later, we discovered a broken/cracked 1947 cast iron sewer pipe right near our front porch which is (a) two feet underground (b) under brick (c) crisscrossed by landscaping pipes (d) requiring the removal of dense (but largely dead) landscaping with lots of roots (e) running right under our main incoming water line which (f) had to be expensively mapped and flagged before anything could be remediated.  It couldn't be in a worse location. 

We were cautioned that whoever tried to fix this pipe would have to be really really careful not to sever our main water line which would be a sudden crisis, a massive water bill, and leaving us without water. 

Estimates just to fix this line were up to $12,000, no guarantees about any main water line severing, and didn't include the $2,000 in diagnostics and line mapping we had already spent, nor re-landscaping and re-bricking afterwards. 

Home ownership can be really over-rated.

But we finally decided to go with a non-digging option, called an "epoxy patch liner" that would be threaded through the existing pipe through those clean outs we had installed back in 1981.

The azaleas will be the acid test. Please, please don t grow back.

Epoxy liner patch gets ready to be threaded into sewer line

                Blue flags map the location of our main incoming water line so it isn't severed

September, 2024: City sewer maintenance crews accidentally blasted raw sewage into our shower and broke pipes in the process 

Why It Takes Four Women 80 Emails To Set A Lunch Date

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published October 13, 2025] 2025

I've spent considerable time over the years pondering the mysteries of the universe, but the one I truly can't solve is why it takes four women eighty emails to find a mutually-agreed upon date for lunch.

Of course, that also applies to movie groups, book clubs, bridge dates, and pretty much any activity where more than three women are attempting to congregate.

I know there are digital applications where everyone can post her available dates. But it doesn't matter. By the time everyone does, someone is already not available. How is it that we can be this busy?

A friend belongs to a theoretically-weekly bridge foursome that only ends up meeting about ten times a year. Hoping to improve that, they enacted policy about requiring a replacement to be provided should one not be able to attend. That lasted until four subs showed up to play.

Now, I've never belonged to a bridge club (can't count cards to save my life) but I have belonged to a number of movie groups. One that I belonged to had eight members. Deciding on a movie was complicated enough, so to keep the logistics down, we decided we would always meet on the second Thursday of the month. We saw lots of movies over time but the one date on which we never saw one was the second Thursday of the month. Because as soon as the long-suffering movie group organizer sent out a query as to what we wanted to see, someone invariably responded that she wouldn't be available on that night but would be available on these nights. And then we were off and running. Eighty emails to find a new date would have been optimistic.

The organizer of that group, who valiantly hung in there for years and for whom I have nothing but admiration, is now rumored to be in a home for the organizationally frustrated, sipping umbrella drinks on a bucolic lawn and being tended by white-coated professionals.

Because even when we finally agreed upon a new date (which curiously always seemed to be a Monday even though we'd all decided earlier that we shouldn't meet on Mondays since it was a bad day for everyone), we had to pick a movie. (A corollary of the Eighty Emails To Find a Date Rule seems to be Forty Emails to Agree on Anything Else.) Now, these were women who liked movies (and hence why they joined such a group) and some of them belonged to film societies as well. So we couldn't see any of the film society picks, or anything that was being reserved to see with a husband, or even that anyone had already seen with someone else. One of our members would only see "important"  movies, defined as being well reviewed by the New York Times film critic and thus having socially-redeeming value. I myself am a "fluffy" movie person (think rom-coms) but movie groups are not generally fluffy movie crowds. In fact, we did not see movies; we saw "films."    The end result was that our selections were often three-hour black-and-white graphically-violent war dramas in Hungarian with subtitles depicting (way too successfully, in my view) the misery of the human condition. But no one had already seen it. (I think that statement may apply globally.) I spent many of these with my jacket over my head. However, I totally adored the other women in the group and we always had dinner afterwards, often with enough wine to blot out memories of the movie which usually caused me screaming nightmares for weeks.

I would also mention that the person who threw out the first volley about changing the date usually cancelled at the last minute. And don't even ask how many emails it was to decide where to go to dinner.

But getting back to my topic (and somewhere back there, I think I had one): what is it that we re all doing that scheduling anything is so impossible? For most of my friends, our car pool days are over, but we seem to have filled that time with endless other activities which is going to be a whole separate column. I have to say that one of my favorite excuses for being unavailable for lunch came from a long-time extremely dear friend who had volunteered to make the communion wafers for church, a full day affair. (Well, at least that way you know they didn't from China.) Even her son said, So Mom, is holycommunionwafers.com out of the question? That one gets a pass for pure originality.

But otherwise, I'm kind of hoping that the pendulum can swing the other way on this frantic over-scheduling of our lives. Because this eighty emails thing? We have better things to do with our time. (Don't we?)

 

Dooming Your Own College Application

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published October 6, 2025]  2025

Watching my friends'  grandchildren wrestle with the college application process, I am reminded of my own saga of applying to - and being rejected by - Brown University. It turns out the school requires you to be able to locate the state of Rhode Island.

My older granddaughter, a high school sophomore in Los Angeles, is already pondering colleges, and given that she has spent considerable time in the Northeast with the other grandparents, definitely has Brown on her radar. But she fears that I have sabotaged her chances. I have assured her that they don't keep application records that far back but she is not convinced.

If legacies were a guarantee of admission, I would have been a shoo-in at Brown. My father's family was from Rhode Island and Brown was almost like the local community college. You could go to Brown and still be home for Sunday dinner. It s a small state.

I should mention that Brown (all male) and its associated women's college, Pembroke, merged in 1971 making Brown a co-ed school. My parents were a Brown-Pembroke marriage. My grandparents were a Brown-Pembroke marriage. All the aunts and uncles had gone to Brown or Pembroke. My brother, a year older, was already at Brown.

My mother's Ohio family, definitely not wealthy, were all educators. My great-grandmother graduated from college. My grandmother had a Ph.D. in zoology. My mother snagged a full scholarship to Pembroke where she met my father in an Honors Shakespeare class at Brown.

Everyone hoped I'd go there too. I frankly had no interest. Fortunately for me, I was a long shot anyway.

I've covered in previous columns my uncontested career as the family idiot. I was the blond sheep in a family of brown-eyed brunette geniuses. My younger son is fortunate to have inherited the lightning-fast mind of my siblings, and fortunately much better social skills.

Speaking with my brother (whom I love dearly) he has observed that if he were in elementary school now, he'd be diagnosed with Aspergers. No argument from me! (Only Aspergers?) I was more recently contemplating how many bottles of Tylenol my mother might have consumed during her pregnancy with him until I realized Tylenol hadn't been invented yet. 

I was always deemed to "not test well."   The illusion was that this poorly-designed IQ test simply failed to capture what was my obvious intellect. Looking back, I think that I was simply not very good at much of what it was testing and that my scores were an accurate reflection of that. In fact, when I was applying to graduate schools, I screened for any requirements for tests that required heavy abstract abilities. The GREs I could study for, but if a test gave me a series of numbers or geometric figures and asked what the next one in the series would be, my only answer was ever beats me!

Because I "didn't test well,"  I was by seventh grade in a track of kids headed for a less competitive state colleges or possibly vocational school. My siblings, of course, were in the top track, already headed for the Ivies.

I did have one superpower, which I have to this day. I am pathologically persistent. You will never outlast me. My grades were always better than my siblings'. I try harder.

I was also fortunate to have a mother who early on recognized my love of writing and encouraged it in every way. I still remember her advice: Write what you know. Write from your heart. Find your own voice. I feel so grateful to her to this day.

She always praised - never critiqued - anything I wrote. She wanted writing to be only joy. But in hopes of subtly encouraging the better stuff ("better"  being very relative), she'd ask if she could buy her favorites for a nickel. (After she died, I found a folder of these early purchases.  She was one optimistic woman.) 

Writing has been a life-long coping mechanism for me. No matter how bad things ever get, I m always thinking, "how will I write about this?"

So by the time I was applying to colleges, including Brown, I was a legitimate candidate in many ways:   top 10% of my class, editor of the school paper and president of the school's service group. Wrote a great essay. But my SATs in the high 500s were most definitely not Ivy League level.

One thing I've learned over the years is how many different types of intelligence there are. My first husband, for example, was born with homing pigeon instincts. He could find a place he'd only been to once twenty-five years ago.

Neither my second husband, Olof, nor I possess this skill. We are both directionally disabled. As my younger son, Henry, used to lament as we ferried him around to soccer games all over the county, "if there's a 50% chance of turning in the right direction, you guys will get it wrong 90% of the time."   Sadly, he was correct.

Back when I was applying to colleges, a personal interview was required for the most competitive colleges. For reasons not clear to me now, my parents allowed me, a 16-year-old, to make the four-hour drive from Pleasantville, New York, to Providence, Rhode Island for my interview at Brown. Afterwards, I would spend the weekend visiting my grandparents in the area.

The only directional support at the time was a road map. Off I went, allowing plenty of time. I listened to the radio and sang along.

After I'd been driving for a while, I kept thinking I ought to be there by now so I pulled into a gas station in Seekonk, Massachusetts and explained to the nice guy at the pump that I was trying to get to Brown University in Providence and I seemed to be lost.

He inquired what direction I had come from. "The I-95 from New York,"  I replied.

"Sweetheart,"  he exclaimed, "you drove all the way through the state of Rhode Island and right through downtown Providence!"

He got me turned around and I did find Providence, and Brown, but I was two hours late for my interview. I regaled the admissions director with my hilarious story about not being able to find Rhode Island.

Brown rejected me. My grandmother, a substantial contributor, never gave them another dime. I was so relieved.

Had I subconsciously sabotaged my interview? Maybe. My directional disabilities probably didn't help. Or then, maybe they did. I ended up at the school I had really wanted to go to. 

Still, my granddaughter is convinced they have records of this somewhere and that her own application will be doomed. That somewhere in their computer even after all these years, it will say, "grandmother couldn't find Rhode Island."

 

 My mother outside her dorm 

 

Would Paleo Guy Have Preferred Pizza?

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 29, 2025.  2025

It has really only been in the most recent history that humans - well, first world humans anyway - have had the luxury of deciding what they want to eat.  This has lead to endless debate and virtually no agreement on what constitutes a healthy food regimen.  I know a number of people, for example, who follow the the Paleo diet, basically limiting themselves to what was available to our earliest ancestors.

Now, I am in no way bashing the Paleo diet except to comment that a life without ice cream or pasta seems like a cruel way to live. But when you read about what those guys were actually eating back in the early Stone Age, you gotta wonder whether they would have killed for a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of Jiffy.

I was imagining Stone Age family life back in the Paleolithic era where people allegedly lived in caves, but most didn't simply because there weren't all that many caves.  Also, there was a lot of competition for cave real estate from wild creatures.  I whine about rodents but Paleo Mom had to call Hyena-Be-Gone if she wanted to get rid of household pests.

In that era, dinner was basically whatever you could hunt or gather.  Eat it or starve.  I imagine that starving probably sometimes felt like the better option. But then, those people didn't throw their genes forward.

Now "gather' has such a nice idyllic sound to it.  When I imagine it, it is never raining.  Paleo Mom (women were the gatherers), a couple of squabbling kids in tow, meanders the local terrain picking berries, digging for tubers, and trying to create a balanced meal that would satisfy the minimum daily requirements for iron, folate, and at least a smattering of the B vitamins.  Unless, of course, it was winter, in which case she wasn't picking much of anything.  It all depended on where you lived, obviously, but in colder climates, more likely a lot of edible roots and tree bark  Yum-mo!

Again, depending on where you lived, you could be finding fruit, nuts, insects, small lizards, and a selection of various sized mammals.  The option of getting food that was "out of season" was 35,000 years out.

The "hunting" part is under some debate. One likes to imagine Paleo Dad loping across the savannah in hot pursuit of a wooly mammoth.  Of course, he had to drag it back home once he slew it, or at least the meaty parts. In my fantasies, the Paleo kids are sitting around the fire when Dad gets home, and instead of greeting him with delight that he has brought home dinner (and that he himself wasn't the dinner of assorted predators), they whine, "Wooly mammoth AGAIN?  That's all we ate LAST week!"  

But no, I'm guessing that didn't happen much.  Paleo Mom, meanwhile, wanted to know, "Does this wolf pelt make me look fat?"

While the Mighty Hunter image sounds kind of romantic, it's been theorized that those Paleo folks didn't necessarily always kill their own food.  Some anthropologists maintain it was likely that they scavenged meat, fat, and organs from carcasses that larger animals had killed or from animals that had died of natural causes.  Sort of like an early deli.  "Look, Thag! The snout is still here!  Lunch!"  By this theory, Paleo dieters should probably be eating roadkill.

It's always fun to superimpose our lives onto those of our antecedents, especially if trying to replicate their diet. So I'm thinking about Paleo Mom saying to Paleo Dad, "The Groksteins are coming for dinner on Saturday.  I'm thinking bison or ground sloth, with a side of grasshoppers and fly larvae.  Do not even THINK of bringing home any carcasses.  Fresh kill only!"

And Paleo Dad grumbles but goes and picks up his spear.  No point in telling her that ground sloths are already extinct and the last bison he saw was twenty miles away

So I guess it's kind of hard to know how healthy the Paleo diet really was for the people who actually ate it.  Definitely a lot of protein in those insects.  But a lot of risk in eating a rotting carcass that has sat in the sun a day too long.  Maybe that's why Paleo Guy was usually dead by thirty.

Letting my always-perverse imagination run free, I like to speculate what Paleo Guy would think if he could see into the future world of us trying to emulate his diet (minus the lizards and beetles and fly larvae).  Would he say, "That pepperoni pizza you're eschewing in my name? I would have eaten it in a heartbeat." Unfortunately, home delivery didn't start until the Mesolithic.  Would it baffle him why anyone would restrict their diet if they could eat anything they wanted?  Would be puzzle why anyone would eat tofu if they had another choice?  Much to ponder. 

 

 

Geography: The Subject That Fell Off The U.S. Curriculum

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published September 15, 2025]  ©2025

A while back, I hired an amiable local kid to help me move some boxes, explaining that my husband was in Saudi Arabia.

My teen helper’s brow puckered for a moment before he inquired, “Is that near Fresno?”

My husband and I remember geography as a regular part of our grade school education.  We had to fill in blank maps of the United States with the state names, and to be able to recite all the state capitals.  World geography figured in pretty predominantly as well, especially as part of the required social studies segment, Current Events.  It seemed pertinent to know where those Current Events were actually occurring. 

At some point, it seems that geography ceased to be taught in the U.S,  When Olof and I were relocated by his company to Stockholm for two years, I stopped by a La Jolla shipping office and queried the sweet young thing at the counter about shipping rates to Sweden.

“Is that like a country?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s very much like a country.” 

American’s lack of geographical knowledge in general, and Sweden’s location in particular, became apparent to us over and over in our Scandinavian sojourn.   At a last-minute medical appointment before leaving for Stockholm, the physician’s assistant departed the room with a cheery, “Well, enjoy the Alps!”

Meanwhile, a younger friend asked me to bring her back a box of “those great chocolates.”  Even when I suggested she might be confusing Sweden with Switzerland, it was followed by a look of, “There’s a difference?” And then: “So you’ll bring the chocolates?” 

The Swedes are only too ruefully aware of this tendency of Americans to confuse Sweden with Switzerland.  In fact, when we were living there, there was an entire humorous billboard campaign with slogans translating to “Do you see the world as the world sees you?” showing Sweden on a map where Switzerland is actually located.  Other billboards facetiously showed polar bears roaming the streets of Stockholm. 

Even though geography seems to have dropped off American curricula, we were always impressed at how well-versed Europeans were on world geography.  I remember sitting with several American friends in a Stockholm café having fika (a coffee tradition beloved by the Swedes).  We were trying to remember the capital of Michigan which somehow was related to our conversation.  A Swedish guy at the next table overheard our conversation and supplied, “Lansing.” 

There must have been a least some minimal geography instruction in more recent times as my older son remembers being taught the mnemonic Not So Fast to help remember the order of Norway, Sweden and Finland on a map. Now geography seems to be Not So Much.

By pure luck, my younger son was blessed with two years of concentrated geography courtesy of a third and fourth grade teacher who began each day with a student giving a three-minute presentation, including maps, of a city, country, or region of their choosing anywhere in the world.  By his second year with this teacher, Henry, then nine, struggled to find an area that hadn’t been done before. 

“How about Abu Dhabi?” I said, since Olof had just been there.

“Mom,” said Henry with barely disguised annoyance, “Abu Dhabi has been done THREE TIMES.”

Inspired by this teacher, I had acquired a Map of the World shower curtain for the kids’ bathroom.  They might never look at a globe but they had to take a bath.

Several years later, Henry and I were watching a quiz show and the clue was “island nation in the Indian Ocean beginning with “M”.  Mom had to ponder that, but without missing a beat, Henry said, “Madagascar, Mauritius, or Maldives.”  Adding, “Malta is in the Mediterranean.” 

“You actually remember that from fourth grade?”  I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “but I mostly remember that from yesterday from the shower curtain.” 

We are now on at least the 10^th successor of that first one.  As an atlas, it tends to run at least a few years behind but the manufacturer has gradually updated it:  Bombay has morphed into Mumbai, and all the “stans” are duly indicated.  We have long embraced Geography Through Bathing.

At one point, a decorator who was doing a faux finish wall treatment of the bathroom for me grumbled that the curtain was unforgivably tacky and why had I bothered to upgrade the bathroom if I were going to keep it? 

We’re keeping it because at my British nephew’s wedding to a young lady from an American southwestern state, the groom’s exasperated uncle ditched his prepared toast for a lecture on “Where is England?” and “What is the U.K.?” to a bewildered-looking group of the bride’s guests. In his week in this country prior to the wedding, the uncle had fielded such questions, “Is England near Thailand?” (because they both end in “land.”)  And “is England different from New England?” 

But getting back to the kid who asked about Arabia’s proximity to Fresno:  

“Actually,” I said, “it’s closer to Omaha.”

This shower curtain has taught a lot of geography to my kids

This Swedish billboard campaign illustrated how confused foreigners are about Sweden's location