Family

Oklahoma Hockey (and Other Natural Disasters)

Oklahoma weather forecasters don’t give you a report — they give you a threat assessment. A full week out. Not “bring an umbrella.” More like “settle your affairs and consider your roof a temporary situation.” We’re talking atmospheric tantrums that halt air travel, reroute rivers, and occasionally redecorate entire zip codes. I’ve lived in the South long enough that Ohio has some catching up to do, but Oklahoma still plays in its own division — the one where the meteorologists have agents.

Friday night was billet appreciation night at the Warriors game. It was exactly that. It just came with an unscheduled intermission.

The evening started with a charcuterie spread and adult beverages — a social event, not a meal, which is a distinction that matters when you’re trying to justify the brie. Judy and I were mostly there to spend time with the mother of our age-out boys. The year a player turns 21 is the end of his junior hockey career — and the end of his time with whatever family took him in. Crowds aren’t really my preferred operating environment, and I didn’t know most of the people there, which meant I got to perfect my “engaged bystander” expression for the better part of an hour.

The Warriors came out and went up 2-0. As the last team to squeeze into the postseason, this was not how anyone expected them to play. The backup goalie was in net. Nobody cared. The lead was everything.

Between the first and second periods, all the billet families walked out onto the ice. The boys skated over to whoever feeds them and does their laundry, a photographer snapped pictures, and each family received a personalized engraving — “Gruenbaum” was the name etched into our Warriors billet family keepsake. Genuinely lovely gesture. Also, not the reason anyone is doing this. Nobody stands in their guest room — the one now permanently scented with hockey equipment and teenage ambition — and thinks, you know what would make this worth it? A tasteful engraving. The season tickets and monthly stipend do the actual persuading. The engraving is the cherry on top of the “I have a teenager living in my guest room” sundae. A very nice cherry. But still.

The second period had good hockey. Our boys were competing.

Somewhere between the second and third periods, while the crowd watched chuck-a-puck, my phone buzzed. Tornado warning. My first instinct was purely structural: we’re in a large, well-constructed building, they’ll just keep playing. This is what years of Oklahoma meteorology does to a person — they scream wolf so enthusiastically, so consistently, that eventually you stop flinching and start quietly rooting for the wolf just to see how it plays out.

Then our son called. He’d forgotten we were at the game, but since he was near our house, he wanted to use our storm shelter. Permission granted. Good kid. Efficient crisis management.

The arena announcer — who normally delivers commentary at a frequency only retrievers can decode — was suddenly, remarkably, comprehensible. “Leave your seats now and make your way under the bleachers. This is not a test.” The crowd moved efficiently, calmly, without drama. In Oklahoma, a tornado warning is less an emergency and more a scheduling inconvenience.

Judy had more urgency than most. She was ahead of me almost immediately, and by the time we reached the concourse I’d lost her in the crowd. I checked the rooms along the hallway under the bleachers, doing a quick inventory of the available Judys, which came up short.

Under the bleachers, the true Oklahoma spirit revealed itself. Someone nearby announced, loud enough for several people to hear: “I hope the tornado doesn’t mess up my Amazon delivery.”

Cell signal was rough, so anyone who had it became an involuntary broadcaster — announcing radar updates to whoever was standing close enough to hear. The murmuring started: How long would they keep us down here? Would they wait out the full watch? Would the game even finish? Then a guy who had clearly aced every weather-related exam Oklahoma had ever administered worked his way through the crowd and told everyone to head back to their seats. No report on what happened to the west. No update on what occurred to the east. The information was: go sit down.

The Warriors finished the night with a W. The tornado moved on to inconvenience someone else. And somewhere nearby, a Ring camera confirmed that a package survived the whole ordeal without incident.

Feeding the Ungrateful

The first night with a new hockey player, we made pasta with roasted cherry tomatoes. He had told us beforehand, “I eat everything.” After dinner, he quietly revised that to “everything but tomatoes” — with the look of someone who’d just been served a plate of gravel. Good to know. Lesson learned.

We have been feeding a rotating cast of hockey players, exchange students, and our own four kids long enough to know that the dinner table is not a democracy. It’s a negotiation, and we are usually the ones making concessions.

The extra challenge with hockey boys is their shelf life. One week you’ve learned a kid’s specific enthusiasm for jalapeño sausages, and the next week he’s injured or traded, replaced by someone who eyes a Hebrew National hot dog like it’s a personal insult. Being nimble is the only way to survive. This year, broccoli has been universally accepted. Brussels sprouts with a hot honey glaze were a shocking upset victory. The Hebrew National — gold standard of my youth — has not had a good season.

The safe foods exist for a reason. Grilled burgers, sliders, tater tots, mac and cheese, and pizza that warms up well in the toaster oven. Both the meat-lovers’ and the BBQ chicken versions are improved by bacon, which I consider self-evident.

Speaking of bacon — I call it the Paradox of the Bacon. Bacon on a pizza: consumed without hesitation. That same piece slides off onto the plate: suddenly toxic, fit only for the trash. I don’t know what molecular threshold determines when meat loses its dignity, but it is apparently non-negotiable. The unwritten rule, imported from somewhere I was not consulted, is that wasting food is acceptable provided you were enjoying it moments earlier. That wasn’t taught at my table. But staging an intervention for young men unlikely to change their habits based on my disappointment is not a good use of dinner conversation — especially when they’re already eyeing the door.

The complications stack up fast. My wife picks out mushrooms with the precision of a diamond sorter, so mushrooms get roasted separately now and left to fend for themselves. Tomatoes are a minefield. Meat in the sauce gets carefully excavated like a crime scene. My son’s fiancée has moved us to vegetarian baked beans, whose label cheerfully claims they “Make Burgers and Hot Dogs Even Better” — which feels like a passive-aggressive way to sell beans, but here we are. Seafood options evaporated after a quiet veto years ago. Chicken and pork are cheaper anyway.

And then there is the brisket — the meat that doesn’t care about my feelings. We have invested. It has returned nothing but chewy heartache. The oven is kinder than the smoker, but the oven is already running the sides, and getting everything to the table at the same temperature at the same time is a project I have not solved.

What I’ve learned is that you don’t perfect a recipe for an audience that eats around it. You stick to the reliable choices, you guard the refrigerator’s sovereignty against the slow creep of warmups that age out or multiply, and you remember that the dinner table is really just a place to sit together.

They know this, too. Which is why, when the meal doesn’t land, the move is always the same: “I think I’m going to run out for ice cream.”

You go get your ice cream. I’ll be glad I didn’t double the recipe.

The Call That Postponed My Retirement

This is a further explanation of two of the titles included on my “semi-retired” business card. (Dual Format Bookworm and Spousal Support Engineer)

The phone call came two months ago, and just like that, the Summer of ’26 vanished.

It was an offer my wife couldn’t — and, logically, shouldn’t — refuse. A similar role to her current one, fully remote, better pay, working with a well-respected colleague from her past. I wasn’t in the room when she took the call. I heard about it afterward, which is probably how most husbands learn the major plot twists in their lives.

I considered a counterargument. The best I had was “I have over 6,000 books on Kindle and Audible.” Most of them were free. The rest I bought on sale, fully intending to read them immediately. That argument, it turns out, doesn’t hold much water against a high-level role with better benefits. So we pushed the goalposts. Summer of ’29 it is.

To understand why I didn’t put up more of a fight, you have to understand our roles. For 35 years, my wife has been the undisputed Bread-Winner. I’ve made several noble attempts at being a Dough-Winner, but her bread is simply better baked, more plentiful, and has a much more reliable crust.

As we navigated kids, fostering, and a move to Texas, she was the one traveling when the company called. She worked evenings and weekends to make the bosses happy, while I waved from the sidelines — or texted her from the same room to see if she remembered she had a husband. My retirement is technically rock-solid and investment-backed, but it is not the golf-and-slow-coffee variety. It is a series of Supporting Roles. I am the Head of Domestic Logistics, and my CEO just signed a three-year extension.

Here’s the part that gets me. She’ll be home. Physically present, same house, same zip code — and completely unreachable. My wife working remotely is not my wife being available. It’s my wife in a digital fortress with a closed door and four consecutive video calls.

I was hoping to pass the childcare baton this year. Instead, I’ve been re-enlisted. I am currently a specialist in diaper-related hazardous waste management — an unpaid internship with zero upward mobility, but I’m told the exposure is great. By the time 2029 rolls around, our granddaughter will be four and likely helping her mom manage two or more siblings.

Then there are the hockey boys. Another three years of work means another three seasons of high-protein breakfasts and civilized-living lessons. It’s all penciled in. As long as they like toddlers and don’t commit any sins beyond redemption, the house stays full.

So we’re staying in the wind and the Oklahoma heat a little longer. Our local kids will be here at least two more years before their academic pursuits take them elsewhere, which means delaying retirement only adds one year of real extension anyway. I participated in this decision. I agreed it was the right call. My counterargument was weak, and I knew it.

I am a reluctant retiree, but I have people — and one very small person — depending on me most days of the week. I don’t get paid, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get compensated.

I’ll get to those 6,000 books eventually. I just need my wife to retire first.

The 6 AM Rule

I have a 6 AM rule.

If the airport dropoff requires me to wake up before 6, I am operating in dangerous territory. When I am awake, I am awake — but the manner in which I arrive at “awake” matters enormously. I shake the sand out slowly. I need time to build momentum. If that process starts before the sun has any intention of showing up, I will spend the rest of the day staring at walls, losing verbal sparring matches I would normally win, and napping in chairs I had no plans to sit in. I am, essentially, a human screensaver.

My wife has no such limitations. She can wake at 3 AM, drive to the airport, come home, and go back to sleep like none of it happened. I find this both impressive and deeply unfair.

The labor of being the free Uber isn’t actually free, by the way. It’s paid for in brain cells and accidental afternoon naps.

Earlier this year — February, maybe, or early March, the details are fuzzy in the way that only pre-dawn experiences can be — I did a 5 AM dropoff. The wakeup was somewhere around 4:30. I won’t describe the rest of that day except to say I spent most of it trying to goose a single brain cell into firing.

So I updated the policy. One pre-6 AM spousal run per quarter.

This coming Saturday, her flight is at 5 AM. The math on that wakeup is not complicated. She asked me something about the flight options — “5:00 or 1:00?” —, and I thought my preference was obvious. She said, “Oh, they gave me the 5:00 flight.” There I was. A man of principle, staring down his principles.

I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do about that. A paid Uber is getting my vote, but votes change

Now, the rules are not the same for everyone. I’ve developed what you might call a tiered system. It is not written down anywhere, but it is very real.

Hockey boys know the score. They’ve seen enough early practices to understand that some hours of the day are not meant for human activity. If their flights are reasonable, I’m happy to run them. If they’re leaving at what the military calls 0-dark-thirty, they’re calling an Uber without any hurt feelings on either side. This is an understood arrangement.

Exchange students have, in my experience, been European, and Europeans apparently book flights like reasonable people. Arrivals tend to land in the afternoon. Departures can get a little early, but my wife handles those. She, as previously established, is built for this.

Family is where the policy gets complicated, mostly because family comes with feelings attached to it. There is an ongoing negotiation in our house about whether saving forty dollars on an early flight is worth what it costs in parental sleep and the general goodwill that holds a family together. I have opinions on this. I keep most of them to myself.

The honest truth is that family members (not our kids) who visit us for weddings usually have rental cars. Which means I can say, with complete sincerity, “Too bad you’ve got the rental — I would have been happy to run you.” And I might even mean it. I just don’t have to specify that my happy shuttle service has operating hours, and those hours start at 6.

The OKC airport, for what it’s worth, is a genuinely pleasant experience. Easy drive, easy TSA, more marijuana dispensaries along the route than I remember from DFW but fewer traffic lights, so it probably evens out. The only real drawback is that flights out of here tend to leave early. If you’re connecting through Dallas or Denver to get somewhere real, your day starts at an hour that tests people.

It tests me, anyway.

My wife is fine.

Values Don’t Retire

My wife and I are somewhere in the foothills of retirement. Not even close to the summit. There are still detours on this road, and honestly, we keep choosing them. We could draw a straight line to the finish — coast, let someone else worry about the spring weather.

But here we are, babysitting a ten-month-old and still figuring out health insurance. And I wouldn’t trade it.

Faith Is a Verb

Every time our kids gather around the table, we say a prayer. That’s not a performance — it’s just what we do. Faith comes up again before the meal’s over, usually more than once. We counsel our kids, married and unmarried, on building something with a Godly foundation. But we learned a long time ago that advice requires a listener. Acting on it? That part belongs to them.

We’re conservative Christians. We attend a church that reflects that — not perfectly, but pretty close. Our kids know where we stand. They also know we can’t believe for them. My granddaughter, as much as I adore her, will have to find her own faith someday. Her parents’ belief won’t carry her across that finish line, and neither will ours. What we can do is make sure the example exists. Doing nothing, after all, is the easiest thing in the world to imitate.

The Tangible Stuff

I’m not going to pretend grandparenting is purely a spiritual exercise. My granddaughter needs a babysitter, and I technically have “spare time” — though I’m not sure where I’m hiding it. My wife works remotely, so we tag-team diaper duty in shifts that would make any grandparent proud.

And yes — her job keeps us from raiding our savings for insurance premiums until we hit 65. These aren’t just financial decisions. They’re the quiet argument I make every day to my kids without saying a word: this is what showing up looks like.

Respect Isn’t Political

Everyone has value. The prisoner. The foster kid. The garbage man. We did foster care for six years — that wasn’t a hobby, it was a conviction. The political lines blur for me here. But the bottom line is simple: treat me and my country with respect, and I’ll meet you with kindness. As a Christian, at a minimum, I owe you a prayer. We’re all sinners. Just not all saved.

Generosity Without the Receipt

Could I give more? Absolutely — most of us could, and I’d be a fool to claim otherwise. We give to causes, including our church. Our kids know we give. They don’t need to know the number. The impression matters more than the invoice.

Commitment Is the Whole Game

Marriage is the biggest bet most people will ever place. We’re honest with our kids about it: it’s not easy. It requires two people willing to grow up and reckon with the fact that their decisions now affect someone else’s life, too. We hold an old-fashioned view on this. A marriage with a Christian foundation is simply better, in our experience. That’s not a lecture. It’s just what we’ve lived.

The Promotion We Didn’t Know Was Coming

Somewhere around the time your kids leave the house, you stop being a parent in the daily operational sense and get promoted — if you’re lucky — to trusted counselor. We’re hoping to earn that promotion unanimously.

We weren’t perfect parents. Our advice isn’t flawless either. But if our kids can feel the gist of how we’ve lived — if they’ve seen our convictions match our words, if they’ve watched our marriage hold — then it’ll be hard for any of them to look back and say, “Nobody told me that.”

You were told. You were shown.

We’re not trying to make our kids into copies of us. We’re trying to make sure they don’t walk into the world without a compass. Call me boring. Just don’t accuse me of raising kids who’ll make the world worse. We fought too hard for that. And if they pass something worthwhile to the next generation of Gruenbaums?

That’s the whole point of the journey.

The Sunday Vortex: A Sacred Trust (and a Lot of Bacon)

I ask myself, “Am I really living in Oklahoma?” more often than you’d think. Usually, it’s somewhere between church, junior hockey logistics, and negotiating a meal that works for seven people—one of whom has apparently decided bacon is the enemy. That’s Oklahoma life. The clock runs it, the weather comments on it, and the menu is always up for debate.

The Granddaughter Tax

Sunday mornings start at Bible study and church, where our daughter and son-in-law reliably end up beside us. The real perk, though, comes at the end of the service: a brief, glorious window with our granddaughter. I made some nonsense noises until she reached for me, and I want to be clear—that is a win.

I make no claims to being her favorite person, but I am absolutely certain I am her favorite grandpa. (I’m also her only one, but I’ve learned not to audit the wins. You take them.)

Diplomatic Dining

One phone call with my daughter confirmed the headcount. The plan: bacon pasta. The complication: one vegetarian at the table. Her solution was delivered with the energy of someone explaining gravity to a confused golden retriever: “Pull out some of the pasta before adding the bacon, Dad.” I said, “Of course,” like I’d always known that. I had not always known that. The vortex does things to your brain.

The Wind’s Opinion

I managed to squeeze in my walk before the cooking started—a small miracle. After a mid-90s Saturday, Sunday was manageable, though the Oklahoma wind let me know about it for thirty minutes.

To drown out the gale, I’m working through a women’s mystery on Kindle Unlimited. It’s not my usual lane, but it’s included in the subscription, and it’s kept me out of the WWII concentration-camp romance spiral my wife has apparently completed in its entirety. We all make different choices.

A Word About the Hockey Boys

If you’re not familiar with junior hockey, here’s the short version: we host young athletes—gap-year guys sharpening their skills before college hockey—from late summer through May. They are large, they eat aggressively, and they usually solve our bacon problems by limiting themselves to a pound (It is a lot!), so we just make a little more than that.

This weekend, the “supply chain” was offline. The boys played in Amarillo on Friday and Saturday before trekking down to Odessa. They were mid-trip on the long haul back to OKC today, and while I rooted for them from my living room TV, the scoreboard wasn’t kind. With the boys on the road, I was forced into a rare position: I had to cook bacon that didn’t first have an appointment with breakfast.

The Bacon Manifesto

I cook bacon in the oven now. Parchment paper on the bottom, grease pooling in a shallow golden layer, the result being what I can only describe as perfect floppy bacon—cooked through, never burnt, yielding. Yes, the house doesn’t smell like a diner fire right away, but the taste is entirely there. This is what growth looks like.

Between the bacon, the banana cake my wife had staged for the oven, and the focaccia already doing its thing on the counter, the kitchen was finally catching up to what a Sunday is supposed to feel like.

Why It’s Worth the Chaos

Broccoli roasted, focaccia out, and the bacon supply retired with dignity. We sat around a table that had needed some diplomatic negotiating to populate and celebrated our granddaughter’s latest month-iversary (two days early, but who’s counting?).

We do a lot for the hockey boys, and we’re glad to. But for the family meal, there is something that feels less like an obligation and more like an anchor. The week is loud. The vortex is always spinning. We’re pretty lucky to have this one on our weekly calendar.

Crack Cookies

This is a further explanation of one of the titles included on my “semi-retired” business card. (Oven Overlord)

Our top-secret weapon for a post-dinner win comes in a bucket from Sam’s Club.

It’s a tub of Pillsbury chocolate chip cookie dough so user-friendly that even a “hockey boy” could manage it — provided he could find the kitchen. We choose to ignore the manufacturer’s optimistic suggestion of “76 cookies per tub.” In this house, we measure servings by “emotional necessity,” which usually caps out at about four trays.

The strategy is non-negotiable: the cookie must hold together just long enough to betray you. A one-inch perimeter of stability — just enough integrity to transport the cargo — wrapped around an inner inch of pure gooeyness. Science. Probably.

We recently put the bucket to the test over two meals. The first round was a tactical recovery mission. Dinner had been Hamburger Helper — a fuel-only situation, full stop. The boys inhaled half the cookies before bed. My pride insists they were carbo-loading for the long journey up the stairs. My gut knows better.

My own approach is considerably more refined. I tell myself I’m practicing moderation by using a spatula to surgically extract a center that wasn’t cooling fast enough to disengage from the pan. It’s not gluttony if it’s quality control.

The second half of the tub was reserved for higher stakes. The kids were over for a proper comfort meal — roast beef, mashed potatoes, and actual vegetables. It was the first time we’d all been together in weeks, so the cookies weren’t just dessert. They were bait.

My technique is a humble “scoop and hope.” One of my kids, however, treats cookie dough like a precision engineering project — rolling multiple scoops into one Mega-Ball for maximum gooey-density. I don’t argue with the process. I focus on outcomes. With my wife running point on the inner gooey, the rest of us took a tactical walk to let the oven do its work. We all knew it was a distraction. We went anyway. The cookies would be ready when we got back, and that was enough.

When we got back, the cookies did exactly what they were designed to do. Between the milk and the ice cream, the evening didn’t just end — it lingered.

Babies eventually need baths. Adults eventually need to wind down. But for a few extra minutes, nobody was checking their watch or heading for the door. Turns out three inches of underbaked dough is the only thing fast enough to catch time and slow it down.

Crack cookies or not — it was the highlight of my week.

The Gruenbaum Guarantees

We all spent twenty‑ish years under the same roof, breathing the same air, tripping over the same shoes, and negotiating the same dinner table politics. You’d think that would produce six carbon‑copy humans. It didn’t. What it did produce — according to my second son, who has always had a running comedy routine in his head — is a set of “Gruenbaum Guarantees.” Not rules, not traditions, not even expectations. More like… tendencies. Family traits that show up often enough that you start to think they might be genetic, even though the real culprit is probably twenty years of shared kitchen counters and car rides.

Here are a few of the classics.

Pretty Good Banana Bread

If you’ve met us, you’ve probably eaten our banana bread. Hockey boys, exchange students, neighbors, hairdressers, the folks at Leslie’s who tested my pool water — the bread has fans on four continents, which is more than I can say for some of my luggage.

The recipe calls for six bananas, which means it produces enough loaves to feed a mid‑sized village. When the kids were in school, the ratio was six small loaves to one big one, mostly so teachers could get their cut. And if that ratio happened to give me some rounding flexibility, I didn’t complain.

Bottom line: we make good bread, and we hand it out to people we like. Or people we should like. I don’t always check the list too carefully.

We Are Active

This one starts with me, which feels both accurate and slightly unfair to admit. Work flexibility helped. When the kids were young, walking was something I did with intention — part of the time spent praying for people, moving through the neighborhood with actual purpose. Somewhere along the way I traded that habit for audiobooks at 2x speed. The results are shorter-lived but more immediately satisfying. I’m working on feeling worse about this.

Judy’s path was longer. Early marriage meant aerobics and swimming, then injuries and life made consistency harder to hold onto. She’s building it back now, with retirement on the horizon and a swimming and weightlifting routine that runs four to six times a week. She figured out what I already knew: the time to start is before you need to.

The kids took the general idea and ran with it — sometimes literally. Three of them have finished half marathons or longer. When my daughter ran her full marathon, I walked alongside her for a stretch, then finished the course on foot while she pulled ahead at a jog. I stayed well clear of the official finish line. Found her eventually, along with Judy, her husband, and a small crowd of people who had done the harder version of what I’d done. My youngest has entered powerlifting competitions. My son and his fiancé have built their life around walking and yoga.

For the ones where the activity level is harder to gauge, I take comfort in the dogs. Two of my kids have them — my oldest has two in the house — and dogs, whatever else they do, require daily walking. I’ll count it.

We Read

My wife sticks to her genre lane but is rarely without a book on the nightstand. My oldest son doesn’t always have one going, but when he does, the pages smoke. And a perfectly normal question when we all get together is “what are you reading?” or “any recommendations?” — asked with the same casual expectation as asking about the weather.

The Gruenbaums are readers. It snuck up on us, but here we are.

We Clean Our Plates

This one took time. Not every kid arrived at the table as an enthusiastic eater — the crockpot and mashed potatoes were traded for the oven and a near nightly pan of roasted veggies. Adulthood expands the palate. The ratio of protein to greens on our plates isn’t what it used to be, and honestly, that’s fine.

These days there’s almost nothing they won’t eat. My wife might actually be the pickiest one of the bunch, which she would contest on principle.(Her list of “won’t eat foods” is definitely the longest.)

A vegetarian is marrying into the family soon. She is fully welcome. She is also fully expected to clean her plate — though given that she uses more hot sauce in a single meal than the rest of us do in a whole year, I’m not particularly worried about her appetite. The girl commits.

My standard remains: clean plate, and if there’s bread nearby, use it to mop up the juices until the plate is almost clean enough to put back in the cabinet. Almost.

We Are Planning, Going On, or Dreaming About a Vacation

This one is universal. We may not travel every year — pandemics have opinions — but someone in the family is always in research mode. I like a cruise ship with daily excursions. Others prefer hiking destinations that require actual exertion, which I respect in theory.

My wife has planned two land‑based trips to Alaska that never made it out of the planning phase. We did eventually cruise there, so I count that as a win. She does not.

Our youngest is in Portugal right now. Another is in the “let’s give my parents some grandkids” phase, already dreaming of the day travel becomes possible again — ideally with parental support. My son and his fiancée are planning a trip to India after the wedding. And another son is a camper who still jumps at a big trip when the calendar cooperates.

If we’re not packing, we’re planning. If we’re not planning, we’re researching. It’s a cycle. We’ve made peace with it.

At 30,000 feet, we look pretty similar. Even at 10,000 feet, you can still see the family resemblance. But zoom in close enough — the reading choices, the preferred adventures, the way each kid approaches a problem — and the differences show up fast.

I wouldn’t want cookie-cutter kids. And they would revolt if anyone told them they’re just like their dad.

They’re not wrong to revolt. But they’re not entirely right, either.

When we gather, we don’t compare step counts or race times. We talk about books. We talk about travel. And there’s usually banana bread on the counter, waiting for the moment someone decides they have just enough room left for a slice.

Maybe it’s DNA. Maybe it’s twenty years of modeling, nagging, and hoping certain things would stick.

Either way — similar enough to recognize, different enough to keep things interesting.

The Illusion of Travel Control

My daughter’s flight was postponed again. What started as a clean six-day babysitting stint for granddaughter Ellie (and Grandpa Andy) has quietly stretched into eight — and honestly, I’ve stopped checking the flight tracker. When they land in OKC, I will know.

Nobody made a bad decision here. This was a collaborative disaster — a joint venture between Mother Nature, Spring Break crowds, and whatever dark energy the TSA stirred into the blender this year. Credit where it’s due: it takes a village to strand a family.

They were already down badly before the delays started. The baby’s ears hurt, and she wailed the whole first flight. Their Orlando-bound plane got rerouted to Jacksonville due to the weather. At that point, the vacation feeling exits the chat. Their luggage allegedly went to OKC, but actually took a personal detour to DFW and got a motel there. Hotel scrambles. Gate changes. A baby who does not care about any of this and simply wants her schedule honored.

Parenting is a full-contact sport under ideal conditions. Doing it in an airport terminal, without your gear, running on cold coffee and evaporating optimism — the difficulty multiplier goes sideways fast. I’ll retell their specific calamities once they finally drop off Ellie, if they can describe it without breaking into a cold sweat. What I know already would have had me snapping at anyone who got between me and my seat.

We Were Always a “Let’s Get This Over With” Family

My wife and I were never emotional travelers. Survive first, process later — that was always the policy. And somehow, across twenty-something years of family road trips, we processed a lot of flat tires.

We once drove from Texas to Ohio and caught a flat before we’d even cleared Tennessee. AAA swap, plug at a tire shop, McDonald’s to distract the kids with breakfast — standard chaos protocol. We hadn’t even left the parking lot when a second tire quit on us. We ended up in an elaborate multi-mechanic shuffle that eventually got us to Ohio, just a few hours behind schedule and significantly more familiar with local auto shops than any tourist should be.

Then there was the Carolina trip. We spent a night hunting for a hotel on the West Virginia Turnpike, finally falling into bed around 2:00 AM — only to wake up to another flat. The highlight was the tow truck driver who couldn’t fit all four of us in his cab. His solution? Hoist the van onto the flatbed with us still inside. We spent the ride elevated above traffic, waving at passing cars like we were the grand marshals of a very sad parade.

Even cruises weren’t safe. We disembarked in Galveston, ready to head home to DFW for laundry and yard work, when one of our tires embraced a nail with the quiet resignation of something that had simply had enough. We spent the next couple of hours eating Mexican food and watching the Olympics on a big screen while the tire got mended. Honestly? Not the worst afternoon we’ve had.

The Illusion That Makes It Bearable

Here’s what I keep coming back to, though. Every one of those tire stories was ours. We drove into them. We loaded the kids, took the route, made the call — and when things went sideways, we were the ones considering pulling out the jack before remembering our AAA membership.

Granting full trust to an airplane hands all of that to a system you can’t negotiate with. When it breaks, you’re just cargo in someone else’s problem. My daughter couldn’t reroute. Couldn’t drive around the weather. Couldn’t do anything but stand at a gate with a wailing infant and wait for a screen to change.

Yes, they skipped the long haul to Ohio. But when you’re watching the adults hit a wall while trying to keep a baby content in a terminal, those West Virginia flat tires start sounding less like disasters and more like a reasonable trade.

At least when you’re stranded on a turnpike, you drove yourself there. Her parents may need a while before they’re ready to find out if the skies are actually friendly. Ellie, for her part, would probably have been fine either way.

The “Pepper Incident” and Other Liquid Legacies

When I was growing up, my family was not known to waste much of anything. My kids realized long ago that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree on that one. We ate our “warmups” (leftovers), and one of the biggest tragedies of my youth was the infamous “Pepper Incident.” My mom had chopped up a batch of peppers and froze them alongside every loaf of bread and pack of buns in the freezer. Whether freezer bags just didn’t seal as well back then or it was a secret plot to get me to eat less carbs, the result was a catastrophe. For months, every hamburger or hot dog bun I touched had a distinct, inescapable “pepper vibe.” It ruined the protein and ensured I wouldn’t become a fan of peppers for decades. In fact, it got so bad I started opting for plain bread—which, in those days, my father bought in “old” bags at a substantial discount. If we didn’t freeze it immediately, that bread was destined to host its own thriving mold colony.

The Mystery at the Dinner Table

But I digress. My mother’s efficiency didn’t stop at peppers. She’d often drain the juice from canned fruits because the recipe didn’t require it. What do you do with a cup of random fruit juice sitting in the fridge? You pour it into the Kool-Aid container with whatever flavor was already there.

Dinner became a game of Russian Roulette for the taste buds. I wasn’t one to hold back. After the first sip, I’d ask, “What exactly did you mix up for us tonight?” My mother didn’t mean any harm; she was just being efficient. But those flavor potpourris made an impression—one that would eventually haunt my own children.

Upping the Ante: The Bus Stop Games

When my sons were in elementary school, they took a shuttle bus to a pickup location near our home. To show them I was thinking about them, I’d bring a snack and a drink. The snack was the easy part. The drink was where I “kicked it up a notch.”

The game was simple: “Guess What You Are Drinking?” At my disposal, I had various fruit juices, every Kool-Aid packet known to man, and a set of food coloring bottles. I’d create concoctions that looked like pond water (minus the floaties) but were guaranteed to be drinkable. This was before the pickle juice craze, so I kept it somewhat civil.

The heart of the game was “taste-budding out” the flavors dancing over their palates. I’d offer partial credit—when you’re mixing two types of Kool-Aid, a splash of pear juice, and blue food dye, you can’t exactly expect perfection. They participated because they knew I wasn’t required to bring a snack, and perhaps because of the unspoken rule: If you don’t drink today’s mystery, there might not be one tomorrow. (I never did mention that part to their mother.)

The “Fun Grandpa” Era

I’d like to say I made everything fun for them growing up, but I didn’t. Like anyone, I had my cranky days. But as I spend time with my granddaughter now—occasionally offering a capful of Gatorade as a “chaser” after her bottle of formula—I hope I lean heavier into the fun side of the ledger.

If you can’t be a perfect parent, make sure you mix in enough quirky and fun to help the natives forget the days you didn’t quite “nail it.”