Family

The Hockey House Is Cursed

Sometimes, when you’re writing something, you get the feeling the end hasn’t happened yet. As I was writing my most recent hockey installment, that is how I felt. It just seemed like there were a couple of threads that hadn’t quite finished unraveling. My intuition isn’t always right, but when it comes to hockey boys, I seem to have developed a pretty good feel for when the next shoe is about to drop.

Our newest hockey boy has been with us for two weeks yesterday. While that easily works out to 14 days, he has not actually been here for 14 days. Less than a week after he arrived, he left for Minnesota for the NAHL Showcase. With driving time included, they were gone for more than five days. Now that the season is getting into full gear, the volunteering has started to kick in, too. So, while we have been a place for his stuff for two weeks, Judy and I have had exactly one true sit-down meal with him. Apparently, we are running a hockey-themed storage facility with occasional breakfast service.

Three weeks ago, our present hockey player was a potential captain of his NAHL team. He had what he thought was a good relationship with his coach, and he was excited about the season. He had been committed to an Ivy League school for almost four years, and even though there had been a coaching change at the school, he was excited to finish this season and start that part of his life. Then life decided it had other plans. He was traded more than two weeks ago, completely out of the blue. Then he caught a stick in the eye and needed stitches. If the stick had hit him just a little lower, it could have blinded him. So, even though the rules don’t require it, he wears a full mask instead of just a visor when he plays. Then he got stuck living with us and our somewhat boring form of existence.

Until this past weekend, he at least had a buddy at our house. That “buddy” told the coach he wanted to be traded over the weekend and left first thing Sunday morning. While our current boy had already started connecting with the other guys, that accelerated the process. Then came Tuesday’s big bomb. The Ivy League coach de-committed him. In English, he won’t be going to that school to play hockey. If he wants to play hockey in college, he and his advisor now have to start from scratch to find the right school. And he had nobody at our house to really discuss it with beyond Judy and me. With our exposure to hockey only beginning when we started billeting seven years ago, I’m not sure we were equipped to provide the kind of support he needed.

On the good side of the equation, he has played a lot of games in the NAHL, and he continues to get opportunities here. He was selected as one of the captains earlier this week. In only two weeks, he has established himself as an important part of the team. His coach let him know he has his back and won’t let him finish his junior hockey career without a D1 commitment. So, after getting the news, he let us know he was going to hang out with one of his hockey buddies for the evening. That eventually evolved into, “I’m just going to go ahead and spend the night at his place.” This is where the previous version of this tale ended. Except, apparently, it wasn’t the end.

There were clues that things were moving toward us having an empty house. The night before, I received a text from the man who is now the “billet dad.” He texted me, “I contacted the coach about him staying the night. The coach said it was fine.” I knew he was spending the night at the other house, but getting the coach involved did escalate the possibility that their house might become the permanent solution. Then there was the sausage. When I was at the store yesterday, I was picking up a few things to make sure my daughter’s family had some variety for dinner. I already had regular andouille sausage at the house. But knowing our billet boy might eat some, I grabbed turkey sausage as a substitute. As I put it in the cart, I actually asked myself, “Will it even matter?” At the time, I thought I was wondering whether he would eat any of it. Looking back, I think part of me was already assembling the evidence. Turkey sausage may have been my subconscious filing a missing-person report.

Since then, I received a call mid-afternoon from the billet coordinator. There was a poor attempt at small talk before I finally asked, “Good news or bad news?” Good news would have translated into finding out whether a new player was a fit for our house. Bad news would involve a player leaving. My pause earlier in the day suddenly seemed a little more prophetic. Judy doesn’t remember me mentioning it to her, but maybe she wasn’t paying close attention. “Well, it does seem like your house is cursed. With the news he has gotten lately, the coach thinks he should have a house where he has a buddy.”, said the billet coordinator. And so it went. We were told we had done nothing wrong, and I said our only concern with him was the pork allergy. It was cordial. Nobody was mad. Nobody was blaming anybody. But I can’t lie. It hurts a little.

Presently, we still plan on having our breakfast on game-day Friday. But if there are no replacement boys in the house two weeks from now, Judy has already said she doesn’t want to do it anymore. And I get it. After being assigned five boys and losing all five, it starts to feel like we are the hockey version of the last apartment available after the good ones have been rented. We have had some fine young men in our house. But based on the coaches’ evaluations, more than half of them weren’t good enough to play hockey for him. The other one didn’t get enough playing time, and the one who hasn’t quite cleared out his stuff yet wants a house with a buddy.

I understand that not all houses are for all hockey boys. Our tolerance for some qualities probably isn’t as high as it is at other houses. If we are rejected for that reason, I can take it. There are worse things than finding out that your house isn’t the right fit for a teenage hockey player. There are also fewer teenagers involved.

If this stretches out for too long, we can start planning our lives a little differently. Judy wanted to take a cruise this winter. If we go too many weeks without boys, it will allow me to start thinking we are ready to retire from the chaos and planning they bring into our lives. We can still go to all the games if we want. It is just different when you are watching games where it isn’t “our” boy or boys playing. If I don’t feel invested in the players, it is hard to feel invested in the whole hockey package.

After losing five kids, I am very jaded. Getting emotionally involved with another kid takes effort. Last year was easy compared to this. We had one boy for the whole season, and the other two split the season. Three kids. Very manageable. This year, we have already exceeded that, and we aren’t even six weeks into the season. So, if it seems like my opinion of billeting hockey boys has flipped to a “no” vote, it isn’t far off.

When things go smoothly, or at least have some amount of stability, it really isn’t a bad gig. I enjoy ratcheting my age back a few years and talking strategy and life with the boys. There is something pretty cool about having a teenager sitting at the kitchen counter one minute talking about hockey and the next minute asking you about life. But when they move on so quickly, the effort just barely outweighs the “Why bother?”

Tomorrow, my opinion may change. I know myself well enough to understand that another hockey boy could walk through our door, fit into the house, eat my food, make us laugh, and completely ruin this carefully constructed argument. Right now, though, it would have to be a pretty good fit to convince me to disrupt our lives again.

Next year was going to be our last year anyway. Maybe we are just meant to bow out a little sooner. It seems our kids and grandkids need us more than the local NAHL team does this year.

Two More Players

Yesterday, I had no babysitting duties and no expectations to spend time with my pregnant daughter. It was the big day. Those creatures she had been supporting for a few months were finally going to come out, breathe their own air, and circulate their own blood. Her headaches, swollen legs, and all the other things I had heard about secondhand would either disappear forever or eventually convince her that her house needed more humans to love.

This left me with a rare set of circumstances. How was I going to spend a long day without something involving my family? Of course, Judy is family, but she is a big girl and can take care of herself. After the morning routine, where I refill her coffee a couple of times, she puts on her headset and goes into work mode for most of the day. Until dinner, I am only slightly more important than a piece of furniture.

Grandpa 2.0 was planning a more relaxed introduction to the new additions. I was excited to meet them, but with our first grandchild, we may have been a little closer to the smothering end of the spectrum. This time, we were more chill. We had been doing the “old, but still nimble enough” routine for a few months, and we knew our daughter had a much better grasp on parenting than we did when we first became grandparents. She was going to be locked into full-on mom mode. Beyond some tag-teaming of Ellie and a few nights when Momma Judy would stay over to help get the babies on a schedule, my role would remain at home with the hockey boys. I had my own small population to manage.

So, what did I do with this rare free day?

I did one really dumb thing.

My email is hosted at Google, and I decided I would play IT guru and clean up a few things. My email was working fine, but Google suggested a couple of tweaks that would supposedly make things better. After dipping my toes in the water and not breaking anything, I dove in. The result was that my usual ton of slightly-better-than-spam emails became almost nonexistent. The actual spam dried up, too. The only emails making it through were being forwarded from my Yahoo account.

I don’t need spam emails to feel popular, and I don’t need much of my regular email either. With all my bills on autopay, I can go days without an important email. So, while I am a little mad at myself, I suppose I have given myself the gift of not having to create new rules for the new breed of incoming emails or spend time deleting them. I will take the gift and thank myself.

You’re welcome.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the guy who “lives” in the model home in our subdivision. With all the new construction going on, he told me about a pallet of rock that was free for the taking. I noodled on it for a while but couldn’t think of anything I could use it for. Then I noticed the tree near our mailbox was living with a ridiculous grade between the sidewalk and the street.

Obviously, the solution was free rocks.

I made two trips to gather enough stones to try to build a little stone wall around the tree. Many of the rocks were ugly, misshapen things, but as I dug through the pile, I found some pretty good ones on the bottom. Nothing worthy of its own photo shoot, but if I can pull this off, the tree should be happier. I also won’t have to buy any more “mulch glue” to keep the mulch from being sucked into the street. If the whole idea goes wrong, my biggest problem will be figuring out what to do with all the rocks I gathered. They’re pretty heavy, so it could become a multi-week project of selectively dropping them into the rolling trash bin. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Since the hockey boys had blown us off for sushi the night before, and Judy and I don’t love garlic bread quite as much as they do, we didn’t bother making it for our Italian meal Sunday night. That didn’t mean it couldn’t become French toast. Judy cut the leftover bread in half and set me up with eight slices, which would get me through two meals. There was still some leftovers from Sunday, so Judy ate that.

We like breakfast for dinner. It just doesn’t make for much conversation. When two people are eating different things with limited options, you can’t say, “Give me another small serving of watermelon,” or whatever else might fill that little empty space in your belly. The plates were cleared, Judy headed to her bike for a few laps around the neighborhood, and I put my AirPods in and listened to my book while doing what I hope was the last watering of the year. I’m happy the heat is gone. I’m also really tired of watering every other day.

At some point during the day, one of our brief interactions produced the question, “I’m really hungry for some custard. What do you think?” Judy didn’t disagree, so I pulled up a recipe that has appeared on my Facebook feed approximately seventeen thousand times. While I finished watering and she got back from her bike ride, she jumped in and made it. After it went into the oven for 55 minutes with a water bath, we climbed into the hot tub. After the hot tub, we had time to start watching our shows before we even had the custard. Did we already watch the second season of The Pitt? Darn. I was looking forward to that.

We eventually ate the custard.

We both had seconds.

It was a pretty normal evening.

Except that somewhere in the middle of all this very important business, we were tracking the progress of our daughter delivering twins. We had been getting updates by text. Pitocin. Epidural. A trip to the OR. More waiting. More texts. We didn’t know exactly how things were going, but we knew enough to know that things were moving.

And then they were here.

Two healthy baby girls.

Our daughter didn’t need a C-section.

Just like that, the most spectacular thing happening in our family was unfolding while I was fixing email, collecting rocks, eating French toast, watering plants, making custard, and watching TV.

I’ll take a month of boring. I’ll take a year. I’ll take years where nothing particularly exciting happens and still call myself fortunate if days like this occasionally show up.

At our age, things happen. We don’t sweat every detail. Our kids are adults now. We get to cheer for them and give honest answers when they ask. We get to watch them navigate their own lives without feeling like we have to jump into every problem and solve it for them.

Before the kids were adults, one of my fears was, “What if something happens to my wife or me?” Now they’re out of the house, building families, solving adult problems, and occasionally making us grandparents twice over in a single evening.

We get to cheer. We get to compliment them when they handle something well. If they have a rough time, we can ask, “What did you learn? What would you do differently if something like that happens again?” We get to meet them wherever they are.

If we did our job well, maybe that’s what this stage of parenting is supposed to look like. Less hands-on, more coaching. We get to watch our kids use the skills they learned while they were living under our roof and hope they realize we weren’t completely clueless.

And if one of the benefits of being a coach is getting to interact with the second team, I’m pretty excited about my new roster.

Two more players.

I can’t wait to meet them.

Monday Had Other Ideas

Monday started like it normally does. Well, not completely normal. As the sun rises later, my requests for blackout curtains become less of an issue. Sleeping past 7:00 is something I take full advantage of this time of year. If daylight saving time ever gets the boot like my married son wants, I don’t care to know what that will do to my sleep. I’m already lucky if Judy wakes up before me and makes the coffee once a week. Breakfast lately has been homemade bagels, thanks to Judy’s new hobby. They aren’t perfect, but they’re getting there. Some could rise a little more. We’re also still figuring out whether freshly ground flour, which requires the flour mill that was part of the hobby, plays by the same rules as regular flour. Yesterday’s experiment was cinnamon bagels. So far, nobody has been hospitalized.

At 9:00, I had my regularly scheduled meeting with a friend in Asia. He listens to me overtalk, and I try to ask questions that help him with his English. He thinks he’s getting the better end of the deal, but I genuinely enjoy our conversations. He knows all about our hockey players, the Oklahoma heat, and the upcoming babies. I know about his son’s health challenges, his mom’s gardening, and life as a college professor. We talk about spiritual things, too, but we could easily fill an hour with random questions and whatever happens to be going on that week. It’s an hour well spent.

After that, I was surprised when my daughter wanted to hang out with Dad/Grandpa for a few hours. This was supposed to be the day she was induced, and she was ready to get those babies out of her belly. She had skipped church the day before because, according to her, she had an overwhelming desire to have them born. She stopped for coffee on the way over and announced that she had now carried the twins longer than she carried her first child. If Ellie were a casserole, she seemed to be baked just fine. Our plan was simple: pick up a few groceries so we could feed the hockey boys before they left for the showcase in Blaine, Minnesota.

The Walmart trip went pretty smoothly, other than deciding whether Ellie wanted to push the cart from the bottom rack or be carried. The part that nearly brought me to violence was installing the “I am not a baby anymore” car seat in the back seat. Between the cumbersome seat and the retracting seat belt, it took me nearly ten minutes to get it attached to my daughter’s standards. There are moments when you realize parenthood doesn’t end. It just eventually involves more complicated car seats.

When we got home, my daughter informed me that she had basically nothing to eat at her house. “Surely you have more food here than we do,” she said. With church people planning to provide meals after the babies arrive and regular donations available from our kitchen, she had wisely left room for the coming food influx. Her cupboards had become a nutritional wasteland by design.

Ellie happily took care of the mashed potatoes, corn, and watermelon. My daughter helped eliminate some of the leftovers the boys had brought home from restaurants and never eaten. We had chicken, steak, and some good roasted carrots. I even patted myself on the back for clearing enough containers out of the refrigerator to create the possibility of cooking something new. I confirmed that my son and daughter-in-law had received their invitation to dinner and started looking forward to making some fresh leftovers.

That lasted about five minutes.

The hockey boys texted to say they were going out for sushi with another player. Suddenly, dinner depended entirely on whether our son was coming over. Eventually, his text arrived. We had someone to cook for.

For dinner, I was primarily the sous chef. I chopped the broccoli so it would roast properly. Sam’s has stopped carrying the bags of broccoli that used to cost around $4, and now the quality has gone down while the price has headed toward $6. I’m not sure what corporate executive decided that was a good trade, but I assume he doesn’t eat broccoli. Since Judy has officially designated me “The Meat Trimmer,” I prepped the chicken breasts for their Shake ’n Bake treatment. She handled the eggplant Parmesan. The rest of us enjoyed it. She did not seem particularly interested in joining us on that opinion. I also picked basil from our volunteer plant out back, and Judy pulled together my favorite pasta to finish the meal.

Even without the hockey boys, our son brought his appetite. There was a little pasta left, but everything else was within one meal of disappearing. We caught up over dinner, and I got the update that their trip wasn’t canceled, just delayed until the paperwork and travel schedule cooperate.

Meanwhile, after numerous questions about my daughter’s Monday night trip to the hospital, my repeated text response of “She’s getting induced tonight” became an innocent lie. It turns out there was a rush on delivering babies before fall arrives. There were no beds.

So much for the scheduled induction.

A scheduled induction is a great idea in theory. In practice, the hospital gets to schedule the schedule. I let everyone know the arrival would be postponed about 12 hours, give or take. Really, the babies will arrive whenever they decide the accommodations are acceptable.

Before bed, we got our final updates from the boys. Of course, the $400 sushi dinner was the best sushi they had ever had. Our age-out boy informed us that the peptides he had wouldn’t get him through Sunday, so he would have to reduce the daily dose a little until he returned. The other boy, who had been concerned about his playing time, let us know that he had talked to the coach and was told that if he still felt the same way in a couple of weeks, they would work through it. We mixed in some encouragement and affirmation, knowing we wouldn’t be up to see them off before they left at 7:00 the next morning.

A little chaos mixed with a little resolution. That seems to be how life works when you live close to some of your adult children and invite a few extra adults-in-training into your life. We pause our shows for updates. We adjust our viewing expectations. We listen to what they’re thinking and occasionally discover that their problems have become our problems simply because they happened to mention them in the kitchen.

Every once in a while, I find myself wondering, “Is this what we signed up for?”

Then I remember the alternative.

Nothing happening. Nobody needing anything. No car seats to fight, no hockey players to feed, no babies refusing to follow the hospital schedule, no refrigerator full of mystery containers, and no reason to pause the show because somebody just walked through the door with an update.

Boring may be somewhere in my future. I’m just not in any hurry to meet it.

I’d rather be disappointed that I didn’t get everything done than pleased with myself because I never left anything on the To-Do list.

Yeah.

I agree with that most of the time.

The First Weekend

The weekend’s hockey adventures turned out pretty well. The boys were on the ice, and despite a few penalties and the obligatory complaints about “the worst referees ever,” they came away with two wins. We also moved our seats about three spaces to the left from last year. We still have a blind spot on the ice, but our new position is virtually puck-proof. I consider that a successful relocation. So, after the first weekend, what do I want to remember?

As we were walking in from the parking lot, we bumped into a “hockey friend” who sat near us last season. I don’t think his tickets were actually near us, but he seems to share my appreciation for a good puck-proof seating arrangement. He had his four-year-old son with him. He had also grown out his hair and gotten a perm. I usually turn off my biometric identification skills on the weekend, so it took me a couple of minutes to figure out who he was and remember his name. His son had come to a few games last season, too, but he wasn’t talking then. Our friend brought him up to our seats, and he sat next to Judy. After we talked for a while, Judy decided I should move over so I wouldn’t have to talk through her. We continued talking, but his son kept asking, “Can I sit by your mom again?” That got a chuckle. Not a big laugh. Just enough to acknowledge that I had somehow become Judy’s child.

The breakfast club from Friday morning also had some success on the ice. I know the bacon had nothing to do with it, but maybe the pancakes with mini chocolate chips did. Of the seven players who attended breakfast, seven of the team’s nine goals over the weekend came from those who were there. With that kind of statistical evidence, I suspect the superstitious players will not allow me to discontinue the breakfast tradition. I may have accidentally created a responsibility for myself.

There was also a little confusion through text when we were trying to meet our new hockey boy’s parents. Eventually, we connected with them during the intermission between the first and second periods. Because we’re trying to be careful with pork products, they told us about a local restaurant that wasn’t quite as careful. They had ordered him calamari and cannoli. The calamari had been fried in the same oil as some pork products, and the cannoli contained gelatin with some pig-derived ingredients. Fortunately, everything worked out. The lesson Judy and I took away was simple: when it comes to feeding this one, err on the side of caution. His parents attend a lot of his games, so we’ll be seeing them throughout the season. I’m sure we’ll eventually get the food thing figured out, preferably before I accidentally serve him something that requires a family meeting.

While we were talking with them, the “official residents” of the seats to my right decided they were feeling crowded. They either shoved or gently pushed our seat cushions to the left. There was plenty of room, so it wasn’t really a problem. The problem was that I am a rule follower. My ticket tells me where my seat is. I like sitting where my ticket tells me to sit. There is a certain comfort in knowing that the seat cushion beneath me has been legally assigned to me. Judy reminded me that this was a small issue and one I could afford to “let go.” In theory, that is what I did. I moved the cushion and continued watching the game. I said nothing. I caused no scene. Internally, however, I may have opened a small investigation.

Hockey games qualify for the national anthem, and sometimes we get Jimi Hendrix’s version. Sometimes we get local “talent” singing it. Both games this weekend were just music. Judy and I did our best to provide a low-volume duet for the people around us. I don’t believe I heard any other supporting voices, so I’m assuming our contribution was appreciated. I suppose pulling off that hat was more effort than I realized. At least everyone stood quietly and put their phones down while the music played. At this point, that’s practically worshiping an object in our culture.

The babies are due Monday. Since they seem committed to baking as long as possible, they didn’t interfere with our first hockey weekend. If they had, Judy would have stayed home with our granddaughter, and I would have gone to support our boys. With a trip to a NAHL tournament later this week and no home games until early October, we may actually have a little time to spend with the new babies without hockey intervention. Of course, there’s another side to that equation. Our daughter may have her own ideas about how much she wants to share the babies while she tries to figure out how to fit two new people into the life she was already living. I remember what it was like when our kids were little. You can love them more than you can explain and still occasionally wonder when you’re going to get to finish a cup of coffee. So we’ll see how that goes.

The referees this weekend were about the normal level of “bad.” The ice had its own problems, too, which made things more difficult for the guys. Penalties happen. Referees call what they think they see. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they aren’t. When they see something incorrectly and the boys know it, the boys occasionally do a little self-correction of their own. They use blind spots and obstacles on the ice to disguise their interventions. I’m not a fan of the fights. They’re too obvious. I don’t like dirty play, either. I’d much rather see the boys play clean and let the game take care of itself. But I understand the temptation to provide a little behavioral correction when the people assigned to enforce the rules seem to have misplaced their glasses.

The first weekend went well. It wasn’t perfect, but both of our boys got assists. The team swept the other team, which is a pretty good way to start a season. There’s a long way to go. Will the rest of the season go this well? Will the coach tinker with things too much and accidentally complicate some of the chemistry that might otherwise develop? There’s plenty of time for things to get messy and get fixed again. That’s part of what makes the beginning of a season fun. Nobody knows exactly where it’s going yet.

For now, the boys are playing well, we have our puck-proof seats, breakfast appears to be producing goals, and I have been promoted to hockey breakfast coordinator. There are worse jobs. We’ll keep showing up, keep encouraging them, and keep enjoying the conversations along the way.

The hockey season will eventually become a collection of scores, standings, injuries, wins, losses, and things I’ve forgotten. I suspect the things I’ll remember most will be much smaller than that: a four-year-old asking to sit by Judy, pancakes with mini chocolate chips, a seat cushion moved three inches to the left that I definitely let go, and two boys getting assists. Mostly, I’ll remember a lot of weekends spent watching these guys become a little more like the people they’re going to be.

Waiting for the Next Brick

I have struggled to string together a series of events that have a solid thread. I think the thread is there, but as I’ve been bombarded with updates and nuances to my original telling, I’ve found it difficult to hold the passion and focus until the end. It’s not a slump in writing ideas. It’s a slump in knowing what to do with them once I have them. So today’s tale will start with no particular destination—unless you consider completion a worthy target.

My daughter’s twins are nearly fully cooked. Thursday was another weekly ultrasound in the parade of ultrasounds she has endured over the past few weeks. I get to play Grandpa for a little while and spoil her as she waits to hear the words she really wants to hear: “Today is the day.” She knows Monday is the day for sure, but she wouldn’t complain if the twins decided to move the schedule up a little.

If I were pregnant with twins and had endured 45 days and counting of 100-plus-degree temperatures, I’m not sure I’d be displaying the same level of calm she has. She has endured the support socks, the poor nights of sleep, the extra parenting duties while her husband starts the second year of his doctorate, and the minor inconvenience of carrying around two additional human beings in a space that was clearly designed for one.

I’m glad she didn’t watch me too closely when she was growing up. If she had, she probably wouldn’t be able to summon a fraction of this calmness. Yes, another great trait she got from her mother.

Meanwhile, my son and his wife have been planning a trip to India for nearly a year. They sincerely want to go, but immigration issues have complicated things. Now that they’re married and my son is considering a job change, they have an opportunity to carve out a month and check a pretty significant box that has been sitting on their list for a while.

There’s just one little problem.

The immigration issue is still haunting them.

Their trip is supposed to begin next week, and as I write this, they’re waiting for an appointment with an immigration officer. They need to make their case that they can travel and feel confident there won’t be problems when they return. Could they have done a better job crossing all their T’s and dotting all their I’s? Yes. Probably. My son is good at figuring things out, but he admitted he didn’t realize how complicated marriage could be when your wife isn’t a U.S. citizen.

Apparently, marriage comes with more paperwork than the greeting card industry lets on.

I’m still hopeful they can pull the trip together. But once again, I’m in the wonderful position of watching something important unfold without having much ability to do anything about it.

Then there’s hockey.

The guillotine blade came down on one of our billet boys again this week. The blade cut deep. We thought this kid was going to stick. Selfishly, he was a really good fit with our family, too. But it wasn’t to be.

Within a few hours, I was being offered the opportunity to take in some boys from the lower-skilled team. That would have meant having boys from two teams, which would have meant we would almost never have a weekend off. So that wasn’t particularly appealing.

The next day, before our chopped hockey boy even had his flight information, the billet coordinator called about another player. This one had already committed to a college to play hockey and has considerably more hockey experience than our other boy.

With the coach bringing in so many players and teasing the limit of the import rule, we’re hopeful it will be a good season. The new boy will take some adjusting, but we’re hopeful we won’t have another player cut for a few months.

Which, in hockey terms, apparently qualifies as stability.

So here I am, watching my daughter wait for two babies to decide when they’re ready, my son wait for a government official to decide whether he can leave the country, and our hockey players wait to see whether they get to stay in ours.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, I watched two guys laying bricks in our neighborhood.

The guy on top was standing on scaffolding, laying bricks on the front of a house. The guy below was stacking three bricks and tossing them up to him. The top guy’s feet were about level with the other guy’s head, and the bricks came up at just the right angle for him to grab them. The three bricks stayed together, making the whole process look almost ridiculously simple.

Toss. Catch. Lay.

Repeat.

I thought, “That has to be a pretty nice balance between speed and efficiency.”

And then I stood there watching them for a while and wondered why the rest of life couldn’t work that way.

Someone knows what needs to happen. Someone else puts exactly what they need in their hands. Nobody has to guess what the other person wants. Nobody needs an immigration appointment. Nobody needs an ultrasound. Nobody gets cut from the hockey team.

Toss. Catch. Lay.

Of course, life doesn’t work that way.

There are emotions. Guilt. Dread. Uncertainty. There are conversations where everyone knows what needs to happen, but nobody wants to be the first person to say it. There are situations where the most direct path would probably be the easiest, yet we somehow choose the scenic route through a forest of hints, assumptions, second-guessing, and paperwork.

I suppose that’s why I’ve struggled with this post. I’ve been trying to find the cleanest way to connect several stories that don’t have clean endings yet.

Maybe there isn’t one.

The twins will arrive when they arrive. My son and his wife will either make their trip or they won’t. Our new hockey boy will eventually become either another member of the family or another name in the long list of boys who passed through our house.

For now, I’m just standing around watching.

Waiting for the next brick.

The Unofficial Billet Boy Survival Guide

We have had hockey boys from all over the United States and even a couple of international locations. None of them have been perfect, although some have certainly worked harder at perfection than others.

With one of our boys leaving our household yesterday, it seemed like a good time to put down a few pointers for the hockey players who find themselves living in someone else’s house for a season. These won’t guarantee universal success, but they should increase your chances of becoming a favorite billet in our house.

Remember that your billet parents are responsible for you. If you want to spend the night at your girlfriend’s house, we are probably not the right billet house for you. We actually had one boy “move” to another billet house because the billet mom there didn’t care if he stayed at his girlfriend’s house instead of coming home.

If you choose to go down that road, I recommend buttering up your current billets first. Ask if they would mind making pizza for dinner. Maybe compliment the cooking. Make everyone feel like you are really connecting with them. Then, when the billet coordinator calls the next day to say you want to move, the whole puzzle will come together beautifully.

If you are under 21, there isn’t much wiggle room on alcohol in our house. My theory is pretty simple: you are here to play hockey. If you have other priorities, we probably aren’t going to be a great fit.

And if you decide to drink anyway and think you are being sneaky, remember that you are dealing with someone who has raised four children. I have seen things. I am also sneakier than you are.

We make a pretty serious effort to cook dinner every night. And if we fail at that, we usually beg you to indulge us on the occasional “warm-up” night where dinner might be less ambitious.

So if your mother decides to send a two- or three-pound bag of chicken nuggets to our front door without warning, there are only so many complimentary ways I can interpret that.

And if you don’t eat the dinner because you claim your ADHD medication makes you not hungry, but then order a meal from Uber Eats later that evening, I am going to notice. I may not say anything immediately, but I will notice. I have been doing this for a while.

We are happy to provide your water. And if you insist on spring water instead of filtered water, you are probably going to win that argument. No matter how many times I see the people at Sam’s Club peddling those five-gallon jugs, I will continue to walk past them.

I know you like your 16.9-ounce plastic bottles. You like being able to count them so you know exactly how much water you have consumed. That’s fine. But I do think you need to finish the bottle before taking credit for drinking it.

Turn off the lights.

This one varies by boy, but I have walked into the guys’ rooms and found as many as five lights on at one time. I am not judging. I am simply suggesting that if you can flick the switch on, you can flick the switch off.

Electricity is not free, despite what your bedroom may be telling you.

Technically, you can walk around the house shirtless. But out of respect for the women in the house, please wear a shirt.

The hot tub is an exemption.

I am not unreasonable.

We used to assign jobs. One boy would load or unload the dishwasher. Another would set the table. This worked beautifully right up until the boy with the job was taking a nap, out golfing, or otherwise unavailable for reasons that were apparently very important to him.

Hockey boys do a lot of napping.

So, to simplify things for the adults in the household, we have boiled our expectations down to two rules:

  1. Help clean off the table after dinner.
  2. If you make a mess or see something that needs to be done, take care of it.

This won’t get everyone on the same page, but at least it gets everyone pointed in the same direction.

Game-day breakfasts are a little different. We know the rules are going to slip sometimes, but as much as it depends on you, refrain from using inappropriate language.

There are younger fans around, and you are in a position to be a role model to them. There are plenty of role models in the world who curse without hesitation. Be willing to stand out and be different.

Besides, if you are going to spend the season in our house, I need to believe I have at least a little influence over you.

We know you like to shower.

I am not entirely sure why you need to shower before your nap, after your nap, and again before getting back on the ice, but apparently this is important to you.

Do what you have to do. Just don’t overdo it.

Hot water is not free, and I have yet to discover a hockey scholarship that includes unlimited water usage.

If it is here, it is yours to eat. That is typically what I tell the boys.

However, if you develop a particular affinity for something in the pantry or freezer, it might be helpful to let your billet parents know about it.

If you and your billet parent both develop a hankering for the same sweet or salty item on the same night, somebody may be disappointed. If I know what you like, I can at least keep an eye on it and try to keep it stocked.

This is one of the less complicated ways to keep the peace in a house full of hockey players.

Your parents and your billet parents are on the same team.

The best boys typically had parents who understood that. We are both trying to get their son through the season safely and successfully.

If there is an injury or a bout with the flu, we try to work together. I might say to one of our players, “Does your mom know about that injury? If you don’t tell her, I will text her tomorrow.”

We aren’t there to get involved in how they parent their son. We are there to provide some on-the-ground accountability.

Sometimes a hockey player’s enthusiasm can make him think that playing through something is more important than dealing with the thing he is playing through. That is where we can help.

I can’t guarantee that I have an infinite supply of wise words, but the next hockey boy I talk to will be far from my first.

Whether we are discussing a coach’s decision, a hockey situation, or whether he should eat more vegetables, I will probably have an opinion.

On the hockey stuff, I will defer to his parents and hockey adviser.

On the vegetables, he is going to have to develop a pretty strong resolve because we are not going to stop presenting them as an option.

Eventually, he may even eat one.

If you have your own vehicle, you may not always get a spot in the driveway.

And if your billet parents’ daughter is pregnant with twins and already has a toddler running around, be a gentleman. You may have to park somewhere else and walk a little farther.

This is not a complicated concept. You are young. Your legs work.

Pay your billet fees on time.

With the Warriors organization, billet parents pay the fees directly. When we first started with the Brahmas, billet parents paid the Brahmas, who then sent us a check. Now, we are paid directly by the parents, and we fill out a form online letting the organization know we have been paid.

A failure to pay on time comes with a warning. Multiple warnings come with penalties to the player.

But please don’t do what one parent did.

Her son had wanted to be traded for several weeks. We barely knew he had actually been traded before she sent us a Venmo request to refund the unused portion of that month’s billet fees.

Not surprisingly, this was not a hockey boy we were a particularly good match for.

It is unlikely that we would ever ask for a boy to be moved from our home. But it is also unlikely that we will shed many tears when some of them move on.

And that may be the strangest part of being a billet parent.

If you are going to live in our house for any length of time, you are going to spend some time marinating in our version of right and wrong. Where we think we can have an influence, we will. If we find ourselves pushing our ideals too far, we will back off.

It was our home before it was yours.

It will still be our home after you leave.

Even if every one of our boys gets cut, we aren’t going to lower our standards just to make sure we have hockey players sitting around the dinner table. Just like with our own children, the rules can flex. Some can be partially ignored. Every boy and every situation is a little different.

But the basic expectations remain.

Be respectful. Be responsible. Be considerate. Help out. Tell the truth. And, when somebody is trying to take care of you, recognize that they are actually trying to take care of you.

We wouldn’t be worthy of the title “billet parent” if we weren’t willing to roll up our sleeves, adjust the rules when necessary, and occasionally remind a hockey player that there is a world outside the rink.

And, despite all the lights left on, showers taken, chicken nuggets delivered, vegetables rejected, and questionable decisions made along the way, we really are glad to have them.

They come into our house as hockey players.

If we do it right, they leave having been part of our family for a little while.

When Hockey Boys Get Fired

Yesterday was the expected day when we might lose one, two, or, remotely, all three of our boys. The last scenario was so unlikely that I barely gave it a thought. Yet, in junior hockey, nothing is impossible. We do our part and let the hockey people do theirs. We keep food on the table, water chilled in the fridge, and a reasonably comfortable place for the boys to sleep. Sometimes, the rest is completely out of our hands. And sometimes, completely unrelated events have a strange way of tying the day together.

Per my commitment to myself, I stayed in bed until the boys had left. I took my walk, ran some errands, and still heard nothing that gave me any clarity about whether one of our boys had been cut. I was beginning to hope we might somehow avoid this particular round of cuts, but then the call from the billet coordinator came. We made a feeble attempt at small talk before she cut through it with, “When people see a call from me, they know it isn’t good news.” She was right. The most recent addition to our household was no longer a member of the team and would be leaving us soon.

Before the call, I had started cutting up vegetables for dinner. I was planning on cubed and roasted sweet potatoes with rosemary and broccoli when I realized I also had two and a half heads of cauliflower. Apparently, I had been preparing for a cauliflower shortage that never materialized. The cauliflower went into the oven after being made a little more roasting-friendly and sprinkled with paprika. It wasn’t likely to be wildly popular with the hockey boys, but our son and daughter-in-law would probably find it tasty.

Everything was somewhere in the roasting process when the call came about our player being cut. We let him know how sorry we were and were grateful that the coach was already working to help find him another team. Meanwhile, the vegetables were consuming most of our available roasting pans, so my wife improvised. She covered a round pizza pan with foil for the salmon. Since the other vegetables were still hogging the oven space, she put the salmon in at a slight angle. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution at the time.

It was not.

The angle turned out to be the catalyst for a great deal of excitement. Oil and grease from the salmon and its marinade leaked down into the bottom of the oven. My wife barely had time to notice that the oven was smoking before the situation graduated to a full-blown fire. Somewhere between the smoke and the flames, the vegetables were removed from the oven. Somewhere between the fire being doused with salt and the contents of a fire extinguisher, all of the interconnected smoke alarms started chirping together.

All of them except the one in our bedroom, which had been removed a few months earlier after deciding that replacing its battery was merely a suggestion and that chirping indefinitely was its true calling.

At this point, it didn’t matter that it was 100 degrees outside and somewhere in the mid-70s inside. We needed to get the smoke out. The front of the house was opened up to the elements, and the windows at the back of the house were opened to give the smoke a clear path to the great outdoors. Unfortunately, some flies apparently found our new ventilation system irresistible and decided to move in.

After a few minutes, the hockey boys finally emerged from their second-floor cave to see what the smoke alarms were singing about. The smell of smoke was not lost on them. I thought, “Stick to cornhole, boys. You don’t seem like firemen material.” One of the boys was making an airport run, so he missed all of the excitement. He may still have a future in firefighting.

As we worked our way through dinner, I gradually closed windows and doors, hoping I could get the house back down to an acceptable temperature by bedtime. Dinner itself was uneventful. Frankly, after seeing flames somewhere other than the grill, nothing else about the meal was going to seem particularly dramatic.

Our daughter and granddaughter left right after dinner. We wanted to make sure they were gone before we opened the oven. If there was going to be another round of smoke, we preferred to deal with it without a toddler in the middle of the operation. Fortunately, there wasn’t any more smoke. My wife, however, was not convinced. She went from room to room, convinced the entire house was still a disaster area. I suspected her clothes or hair might have been carrying the smell around, but my wife thinks what she thinks. Her nose had completely lost the scent by the next morning, so apparently the house survived its inspection.

My wife eventually ended the adventure by posting a picture on Facebook. Her initial comment didn’t seem to take responsibility for the fire, but in the replies, she owned the circumstances that created it. I have made enough mistakes in my life without having people assume this was another episode of Andy screwing something up.

Our hockey boy, meanwhile, had no one to blame for being cut from the team. The coach was working with his advisor to try to find a team willing to trade for him. Would he stay with us for a couple of days? Would he be in limbo until another team became available? We didn’t know. His problem didn’t have nearly as simple a resolution as our oven problem.

Once the fire was out, we could clean up the mess. We could remove the burned material, wipe down the oven, and eventually get things back to normal. We had some control over the variables. Once our hockey boy was essentially “fired” from the team, he had far less control over what came next. He had to depend on another team being willing to take a chance on him and find a place for his skill level. And through all of that, he would need to maintain a positive attitude while dealing with whatever other hiccups the season decided to throw at him.

That is where the two stories really came together for me.

We may have lost the use of our oven until my wife gets around to cleaning out the sins of yesterday. But when you are a hockey boy in our house, you are here as long as you need to be while you figure out what the next steps are going to look like. Our oven may have had a fire, and the team may have fired our hockey boy, but we aren’t going to burn our relationship with him while he figures out where he goes from here.

With no oven, our last meal with him may not be pizza.

But we’ll make sure it is a good one.

Talk To The Team

As my daughter gets closer to becoming the mother of three, I could not be more excited for her. Or more aware that I personally will do none of the work involved.

She has spent this entire Oklahoma summer—certainly the hottest one since we moved here—getting kicked from the inside by two little people who do not yet have names and somehow already outrank her in the house. Yes, I was gone for a few weeks of the summer. That does not mean I wasn’t sympathetic. I was rooting for her from wherever I was.

Of course, when your daughter has three kids, that means you have at least three grandkids. I would like credit for that arithmetic.

A friend sent me a video last week of his grandson getting ready to have a sibling. Since my friend already has other grandchildren, something ugly woke up in me. Not sadness. Something closer to a scoreboard.

I would love to tell you I am above comparing my family’s headcount to another man’s family’s headcount. I am not going to tell you that because it isn’t true.

The frustrating part is that there is nothing productive I can do about it. New kids don’t get born because Grandpa felt competitive on a Tuesday. If I want to add players to the roster, the actual work has to come from somewhere else entirely, and I am, at best, in a spoiling and snack-providing capacity.

I brought this up to my daughter while she was complaining about getting her ribs kicked from the inside and having trouble putting socks on her swollen legs. She listened to my grandchild-count predicament with the patience of a woman who has significantly bigger problems and said, “You need to talk to the other members of the team.”

The team.

Currently, the team has one active member, my daughter, and three others on the bench. Of those, only one of them are currently qualified to help me pad the stats, by my own arbitrary rule that I would prefer marriage happen first. I would welcome any grandkids, of course, but please forgive me for preferring that my kids get married before they start producing them. I don’t think that’s asking too much.

So, let’s talk about how I got here, competitive about something I have absolutely no control over.

I didn’t become a father until my thirties, which means I spent a good portion of my life watching other men become grandfathers while I was still working my way through the fatherhood portion of the program. My wife and I always assumed we’d be the kind of grandparents who leaked enthusiasm out of every pore the second a grandchild showed up.

Apparently, our other kids—the ones older than our pregnant daughter—either never noticed that enthusiasm or noticed it and decided it wasn’t worth compromising on a spouse to make it a reality.

Their loss, frankly.

Their siblings’ children are going to get the toys, the outfits, and the opportunity to have us visit more. There is a reason I didn’t lead with the visits.

More grandkids would obviously help my case when talking to my peers. It would also give me even less free time than I have now, especially since the odds of getting the other two kids’ grandkids within the ten-minute driving radius their siblings enjoy are pretty close to zero.

Realistically, it would mean my wife and I doing a lot more driving or flying to keep tabs on whatever new pieces of our extended DNA show up somewhere else. I’m willing to make that sacrifice, although I reserve the right to complain about the mileage.

So, to the rest of the team, if you’re reading this, I have no deceptive motives in mind.

We’ve already proven ourselves to be pretty good grandparents. We are soon to triple our grandchildren, which sounds much more impressive when you don’t mention that we started with one. Tripling again—or more—is something your sister is not going to be able to do on her own.

So, do everyone a favor.

Spare her body the record attempt. Go ahead and get married, have some kids, and give your sister a little competition of her own. She has set some lofty goals, but we have faith in every one of you.

And to the hockey boys: you have also been added to the team, although I realize your membership is temporary. We are only your parents for the season, which means in a few months you are going to leave, start your own lives, and—if everything goes according to plan—eventually contribute to your own parents’ scoreboards.

Just to be clear, I am not counting any future children you might have on my scoreboard. Those are your parents’ points. I have my own scoreboard to worry about.

We aren’t trying to rush you. You’ve got plenty of hockey, growing up, and other things to figure out first. We are glad to have you guys around, and we will be sorry when the season ends and you head off to whatever comes next.

But when the time comes, remember that your billet parents are going to be looking for ways to keep the family roster growing.

As much as we enjoy having you guys around, our focus has to be on boosting the score in Grandpa’s selfish little game.

So, if the Gruenbaums can’t cook and provide a bed for you next season, we hope you understand.

After all, there is a team to build.

The Eve of Controlled Chaos

Friday was an errand day—well, at least the morning was. With the hockey boys arriving this weekend, I had to finish up the grocery shopping. Earlier in the morning, Judy and I had discussed what the menu might look like for the first week. After that, we would have time to pick their brains and figure out what foods we could slide into the rotation without causing anyone to thumb their nose too high.

Our returning boy told us, “I like to eat everything.” So naturally, the first night he was here last season, we made a tomato pasta dish. (The things he liked was hence modified to be “everything except tomatoes.”) Our two Alaska brothers have already informed us that they dislike tomatoes and onions, and one of them dislikes peppers. The next few meals should help us get into the finer points of these dislikes. Is it the size? How they’re cooked? Or is it the flavor? Apparently, we are not simply cooking dinner. We are conducting a culinary research project.

The first night this year is tacos. Our carnitas have a few jalapeños beaten into a pulp, so we’ll get to test where the pepper line is. If the problem is flavor, they can fall back on brisket tacos. There is always a backup plan when you are responsible for feeding three teenage hockey players. It just happens to involve another kind of meat.

With my daughter within a month of her C-section—we are all rooting for the natural birth—I picked her and my granddaughter up so she could get out of the house and run some errands. It never hurts to have another adult available when a toddler decides to spontaneously melt down. This particular outing also resulted in one of my rare visits to Hobby Lobby.

I don’t shop at Hobby Lobby. Judy will buy craft items there, and on this day my daughter was shopping for birthday gifts for a church friend’s daughter. My granddaughter had her own opinions about what should be purchased, naturally. My daughter worked within her $25 budget and found a couple of things that seemed like they would actually feel like “her.” Ruth, my granddaughter’s code name for purposes of this blog, allowed Grandpa to push the cart while Mom did the math and performed increasingly sophisticated guesstimations about each gift’s position on the enjoyment spectrum.

As we checked out, we passed the inevitable temptation along the checkout aisle: Horehound lozenges. My daughter didn’t seem particularly excited to see them. I did. Not because I wanted any, but because they reminded me of my dad and the stash of horehound he kept tucked away in the kitchen cabinets of the house where I grew up.

Apparently, even a trip to Hobby Lobby can turn into a brief visit with your past.

The trip to Sam’s was more of a refrigerator “topping off” than a major shopping expedition. We’ll see which boys are still in our house next weekend. They started with 51, and we are told they will cut that number to 34 next weekend. Three of those 51 are staying with us, and there is also a boy trying out who happens to be the brother of a hockey player we had when we lived in Texas.

He is a goalie, so we are hopeful he makes the team. If he does, the billet coordinator has already promised that he will be “ours.” We really enjoyed his family when his older brother was ours. Most billet parents are fine. His parents were exceptional. When they came down for one of their son’s games, they were great fans and made it obvious how much they appreciated what we were doing.

That is part of the answer when people ask why we let young men stay with us when we could just eat out every night and avoid the whole cooking-and-parenting-adjacent experience.

First, we would cook anyway. We just throw a few more pieces of chicken on the grill. Second, most of the boys are genuinely appreciative. Yes, we’ve had a few entitled players enter our home. We tolerated them. And, regardless of whatever antics a kid might attempt, having parents we really liked tended to raise our tolerance level considerably.

There is a little chaos involved, but the boys also bring something we probably wouldn’t get otherwise. They are chasing a dream. Watching them work toward it gives us a reminder of what it looks like when something matters enough to work for. And when that dream takes a detour, we get a chance to help them figure out how to handle it.

The only truly “new” thing on this set of errands was voting early in a runoff primary. There were a series of tables I had to graduate through before I could finally get my ballot. At the first table, I signed an affidavit saying I wouldn’t vote again at another location during the remainder of the voting period. At the next table, I presented my driver’s license again, along with the affidavit. I believe they attached a label to it before sending me on to get my ballot.

At the previous table, I heard someone mention that about 120 people had voted. My ballot number was R103. I’m not entirely sure what the numbering system meant, but it made me wonder if the Republican ballots were winning the early-voting popularity contest. Then I remembered there apparently weren’t any Democratic runoffs, so that probably wasn’t much of a contest. The rules of the runoff simply meant the people participating were concentrated on one side.

There were only two state issues on the ballot, so I filled in the little rectangular boxes the old-fashioned way. No electronic ballot for me. I was told the ballot could be scanned with either side up. In my case, the scanner apparently preferred that I maintain my privacy and scan it face down.

I usually don’t take the “I Voted” sticker, but I thought it might entertain my granddaughter, who was already fighting a cranky mood brought on by incoming teeth or whatever other battle toddlers wage in their ongoing effort to preserve a good mood.

It did not entertain her at all.

Aldi’s was our final stop. We needed a few taco supplies—vegetable toppings for those who eat them and plenty of cheese because meat and tortillas need cheese to graduate to official taco status in all parts of the country. Tomatoes are optional.

By the time the errands were finished, I realized the day had been more than a grocery run and a few stops around town. It was the eve of another transition for our family. The boys arrive Saturday, and with them comes an eight-ish-month commitment.

We “get” to be parents again, but with some significant upgrades. They are mostly self-sufficient, although we may need to help with transportation from time to time. And if they screw up, we don’t have to blame ourselves for whatever parenting mistake supposedly caused it. We can help them navigate the challenge without taking their indiscretions personally.

If they have a great year and grow into better players and better young men, we get to watch that happen, too. Their parents deserve the largest share of the credit, without question. Our job is mostly to provide a home, feed them, encourage them, and occasionally nudge them back toward the idea that their priority right now is supposed to be hockey.

And if I ever need a reminder of just how good I can be at the nudging part, I can always ask my wife.

Yes, dear. You’re welcome.

Return to Sender

The house to the north of us is full of kids. Not all of them play soccer, but the ones who do have made it their life’s mission to kick a ball against our shared fence as often as humanly possible.

We have the pretty side of that fence. They have the ugly side. This works out great for them, because you cannot make ugly any uglier. Kick that ball as hard as you want, guys, that side was already at rock bottom before you got here.

Now, when I say these kids kick the ball against the fence, I don’t mean a gentle little dribble bumps into it now and then. These are high schoolers. The ball doesn’t roll into the fence, it arrives. Full windup, full commitment, like the fence owes them money.

One kick doesn’t do much. Kick after kick after kick, though, and the nails start screaming uncle. Or if they’re not quite screaming yet, they’ve at least developed an attitude about it. Not all boards are created equal, and apparently some nails just got handed inferior wood and told to make it work.

Eventually the boards give up, and my fence loses its smooth look on the pretty side. I wouldn’t call it “unsmooth,” exactly. I’d call it “those darn kids are kicking their soccer ball again, and would you look at that, the fence is not enduring this assault unscathed.” I like making things more dramatic than they need to be. We all have our flaws.

So every other month or so, I grab a hammer and go pound the boards back into shape. My carpentry skills are rudimentary at best. I know what the hammer is for in a theoretical sense. Hitting the actual nail head, dead center, on purpose, is a separate and much rarer skill that I have not acquired. The fence has three coats of HOA-approved stain on it, and around every nail that keeps losing its argument with a soccer ball, that stain is losing its luster right along with it.

The fence itself, though, is a manageable problem. I deal with it every couple of months and move on with my life. The real issue is the balls that end up in our yard, because now I have to decide what to do with them.

The neighbors directly to the north are a married couple, and they’re both police officers on two different local departments. I have decided this is not the household to walk up to and complain about a soccer ball situation. So when I’m out in the yard, or when I spot a ball sitting there the next morning, I chuck it back over the fence like a good neighbor. Sometimes, if they’re still out there playing, I even get a “thank you” for my trouble.

While my wife and I were traveling recently, my daughter-in-law took over plant-watering duty. I told her that if she found any balls in the yard, just toss them back over. She sent me a video of five balls sitting in our grass. Four soccer balls, and one mystery ball that apparently volunteered for the mission because they’d run out of actual soccer balls to sacrifice.

This past weekend, with the temperature sitting comfortably in the 90s, my wife and I were trying to enjoy the hot tub, which is its own kind of ambitious. While we were out there, I looked over toward the house on the other side of ours. Up until that moment I’d been fairly confident that every single ball that ever landed in our yard came from the police house. But a little doubt crept in.

The house catty-corner to us, the one with the slightly annoying weather station poking into our yard that we get zero access to the data from, had a soccer ball up on their roof, and they were making a whole game out of throwing it up there. I genuinely cannot think of a single scenario where a ball comes off that roof and lands in our yard. But knowing there’s now an active second source of soccer balls in the neighborhood does change the math a little. Not enough to unseat the police house as prime suspect. But it’s there now, quietly present, every time I pause before lobbing a ball back over a fence.

Bottom line: I’m glad the kids are active. I’m glad they’re outside doing something instead of staring at a screen. And honestly, for their sake, I’m glad they have so many soccer balls that launching one over the fence doesn’t mean the game’s over, they just grab another. I just wish the balls came with a mute button and a low-impact setting, so my fence boards could stop taking the brunt of teenage enthusiasm. But I know, I know. Another one of my first world problems, and I really should be grateful for it.