Astonishingly — especially to me — this is my 600th “Let Inga Tell You” column in the La Jolla Light.
As I like to say, the first 250 were definitely the easiest.
Even I had to leaf through four huge binders of clip sheets (also known as low-tech archiving) to see what I’d written all those columns about over the past 17 years.
When I started this column in 2009, I honestly didn’t think I’d have enough material for three months since I was retired and had, as my sons affectionately noted, “no life.”
“Inga” actually started in 2005 as a blog I was writing in Stockholm while we lived there on a multi-year work assignment. Hoping to embrace our Swedish experience, we dubbed ourselves Inga and Olof on our first day there.
What I didn’t realize at the time — but have had plenty of time to rue since — is that Inga is a common Swedish porn star name.
After a truly idyllic Swedish life during which we never owned a car, we were barely back to the U.S. when a white Mercedes slammed into us at 85 mph on I-5, putting me in the hospital.
I was missing writing my Sweden blog, which had gotten fairly popular (by my standards, anyway). Once home and recovering, I started sending out articles to newspapers and magazines hoping to freelance. The editor of the La Jolla Light at the time kept returning my submissions, saying she loved the writing but that guest commentaries could be no more than 300 words. For me, that’s barely warming up.
But I did finally manage to submit a 300-word guest commentary with the catchy — and very descriptive — title “Vons parking lot: scariest place in America.”
For reasons I have never understood about editors, the Light ran the commentary but changed the headline to something yawningly boring.
Another example: I submitted a piece to The San Diego Union-Tribune some years back with some creative ideas about conserving water titled “Thinking outside the hose.” They did run it, but once again, with an utter snorer of a headline. (Fortunately my current editor writes way better headlines than I do, so I just have to indicate the topic and let him have at it.)
Despite the abysmal title on my Vons parking lot piece, so many people responded to the paper agreeing with the sentiment that the editor asked if I’d like to write a regular column. I loved the idea but couldn’t imagine what I’d write about, since my main focus at the time was trying to be able to chew on the right side of my mouth again. (My head and the car’s side window had made an excellent illustration of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.)
So I suggested we give it a trial run of three months. But I didn’t want to show my face or use my real name, as I planned to write about my kids (who grew up here) and my husband, who definitely would not want to be easily identified. I had already been writing as Inga for quite awhile at that point, so we decided to keep the name.
Meanwhile, they shot a photo of me wrapped up in a hat, sunglasses and scarf that are not mine and make me look like a terrorist.
People have often asked me what my writing training was. The answer: letter writing. As in thousands upon thousands of letters over my lifetime. There didn’t used to be internet or email (ja, really), and long-distance phone calls were a dollar a minute. In fact, my only formal writing training was freshman composition in college, in which I got the lowest grade of my college career. The professor hated everything I wrote, adorning pretty much every assignment on the top with “Ha ha. You think you’re so funny. C+.”
Which leads me to the second most common question I get: Do I ever get writer’s block? (I think some people have been hoping I would get writer’s block.) The answer is nope. I just always pretend I’m writing a letter to someone.
But it goes without saying that I would not normally be writing newsy letters to people about trash fees and parking debacles, so those are frankly a lot less fun.
But back to the point of this column (you can see why a word limit of 300 would be cruel and inhuman): What have I written 600 columns about?
Well, certainly a lot of whining about technology. I’m definitely past my sell-by date where electronics are concerned. I’ve written about password hell, security questions that don’t apply to me, appliances I can’t work, cellphones I can’t work, computers I can’t work and remotes I can’t work.
I’ve written quite a few columns about our beloved dogs, Winston and then Lily, and how devastated we’ve been — and still are — about their loss.
Less-adored creatures that have found themselves in my column are crows, hawks, rats (lots of rats), raccoons, possums, mallards, coyotes and crickets. Actually, I really like the crickets.
Health has been a pretty common topic, too, especially aging, along with COVID, colonoscopies and contending with constantly changing health advice from the “experts.”
On a more personal level, I’ve written about childhood polio, my chocolate addiction, my weight (see “chocolate addiction”) and finding clothes for a body shaped like a T. rex (really, but not a fault of the chocolate).
I’ve written lots about my (second) husband, Olof, an engineer and a former Air Force pilot who took up both cookie baking and sourdough bread as retirement gigs, both of which he attacks with spreadsheets and flow charts.
When he was recovering from his 2018 heart attack and brain injury, I officially declared him the Worst Patient on the Face of the Earth. I definitely felt I was eating those “better or worse” vows. I wrote a whole column about how he still suspects I married him for his talents with a sewer augur.
The column I wrote titled “Why it takes four women 80 emails to set a lunch date” has had more reprint requests — even from a paper in South Africa — than any column I’ve written. I guess it’s a universal problem.
The city of San Diego has given me vast amounts of material, including the year-plus it took me to get my streetlight fixed, never mind the trash fees debacle, sidewalk repair stupidity, new trash bins, SBs 9 and 10, the “Turquoise Tower” and endless amounts of new parking idiocy (“daylighting” law, Balboa Park meters).
Since I don’t have any confidence that our mayor and City Council (whom, by the way, I supported with votes) are going to start making good decisions anytime soon, I’m confident in pretty much limitless material going forward.
I mined plenty of material about being a divorced, working, perennially destitute mom for 12 years between husbands. I developed what I called the Single Woman Home Repair School, which heavily utilized hair scrunchies and duct tape as go-to tools.
I’ve covered my efforts to master such baffling foreign languages as “spoken coffee” and “modern light bulb.” I haven’t been very successful at either.
I did a hugely fun series testing all manner of internet hacks and gadgets. Even I decided to pass on the reusable toilet paper.
My neighbors kindly consented to let me use stories about themselves and their families. One neighbor let me regale my readers with the saga of the raccoons that took up residence under her house and were ultimately evicted by Trapper Dan the Raccoon Man, who lured them out with Kentucky Fried Chicken and loud mariachi music.
It is this kind of information that needs to be shared with a larger population, and I was grateful to be the one to do it.
My kids — and then grandkids — have had a lot of play, too. I wrote about Olof and I suffering from bladder envy when we realized the grandkids could go 12 hours without going to the bathroom at night.
When the grandtots were small, there would not be a single electronic in our home still working after they left. Even my Caltech-educated husband couldn’t get the remotes working again.
I’ve written about my Jewish-Catholic-Protestant family, my dual-political-party marriage and the hoarder gene that seems to have fortunately escaped me (but none of my siblings or cousins). I’ve covered picky dinner guests and annoying house guests, including and especially people who take phone calls at the table. (Not at my table you don’t.)
Somehow that’s all added up to 600 columns. Frankly, I don’t write nearly as well as I used to. All that chardonnay does catch up with you after a point (lots and lots of points). But as long as the paper continues in print and they want me to fill space, I’m all in.
Writing this column has truly fed my soul, never mind given me an outlet for all manner of grief and grievances, whining and winnings.
And now, on to column No. 601.
Inga’s looks at life appear regularly in the La Jolla Light. Reach her at inga47@san.rr.com. ♦