Family

Wedding Mode

I am charming.

Not year-round. Catch me on a random Tuesday in February and there’s a decent chance I’m avoiding eye contact at the grocery store while pretending to study soup labels. But give me a wedding where one of my children is getting married, and I transform into a socially acceptable version of myself.

This weekend, the charm was dripping off me like sweat at an outdoor reception in Oklahoma.

Conversations? I could talk to anybody about anything. Politics, brisket temperatures, whether people under thirty still know how to parallel park—I’m in. People walked away convinced I was fully engaged the entire time. I probably was mostly engaged, but these varicose veins keep me from being fully ambistrous.

Yes, I looked it up. “Ambistrous” means being able to do something equally well sitting or standing. My brain can socialize indefinitely. My legs start filing formal complaints with management somewhere around minute thirty-seven. (Or was it those dress shoes?)

Normally I wait for people to find me. This weekend I was seeking them out, starting conversations on purpose, approaching strangers with something resembling confidence. This goes against every part of my being on most days—and, honestly, most years—of my life. But give me a wedding where I’m acquiring a son- or daughter-in-law and something in me rises to the occasion and says, “Today we will appear emotionally healthy.”

DIY wedding? Doesn’t shake me much. My wife wisely withholds enough of the plan to prevent me from offering what I call efficiency analysis and what others might call being difficult. If I don’t know the plan, I can’t optimize the plan. That’s marriage wisdom right there. And if my legs begin filing formal grievances, I wave the “functioning mutant” flag, find a couch, and cheer everybody on from a seated position.

Some people mistake this charm for pure sincerity. That’s not exactly right. It’s more like a carefully managed energy budget—burning today’s charm on credit from future me. The curtain can get thin. Those who know me know exactly which questions drop it.

But there’s a rare category of person who reverses the drain entirely. Someone who returns sass properly. Not cruelty—playful disrespect wrapped in affection. The kind that says, “I see you and I think you can handle this.” Conversational ping-pong. A way of saying, please don’t make me carry this alone.

One of the best surprises of the weekend was meeting Valerie. Not her real name, but it fits. In our family, she became known as the cougar. That’s the story as I received it, and I’m not fact-checking it now.

The origin goes back ten-plus years, when our son worked at the Chick-fil-A in the mall. Valerie was a mall walker who stopped afterward for a Dr Pepper. She wasn’t built for small talk. She’d ask whoever took her order something real—a question with follow-up potential. Our son passed her screening. If he didn’t know an answer, he’d look it up and have it ready next time. And knowing my son, there was some mild smart-mouth commentary included free of charge. All those years of me aggravating him had finally become an investment portfolio.

They stayed in touch. He visited her. She and her husband visited him during their three-year camper-living stretch. Phone calls when visits weren’t possible. This weekend, they came to his wedding.

What got me was how naturally she fit. She sparred with my other kids, my brother, and me like she’d known us for years. Nobody played it safe. Sometimes she’d get me with a good line and I’d fire one right back. You could see exactly why they kept up with each other—she’s the kind of person who refuses to let you be mediocre. If you weren’t going to show up as a real human, she’d have moved on to the next register.

But our son made an impression. A durable one. He earned that relationship by being fully himself, over and over, starting at a fast food counter before he was old enough to vote.

Forty-eight hours ago I had never met this woman. Now I’m a little jealous my son ended up with his own cougar grandma.

Me? Still charming, in short bursts. But I’m old enough to know I’m past the window for acquiring one of my own.

I’ll just keep the one I married.

She Didn’t Want Me There

My wife woke up at 6:30 screaming into her pillow from a nightmare. I told my son—two days out from his wedding—that it was either a bad dream or the crushing realization that she still shares a bed with me. He laughed and said I could self-deprecate with the best of them. I’ll take what I can get.

The real blow came an hour later. She needed my Sam’s card to buy rehearsal dinner ingredients, then followed it with, “I appreciate you, but I don’t want you to come.” Since the card lives on my phone, I was simultaneously needed and unwanted—emotional support livestock, essentially. She didn’t want me wandering beside the cart providing observational commentary on industrial-sized cream cheese or calculating the GDP of the pie aisle. She wanted peace. Focus. Things I occasionally threaten without trying.

Because she took my phone, I became a middle-aged Amish man sitting in the living room wondering where my digital life had gone. No audiobook. No bank account. Just me and my thoughts. Her apology later had all the warmth of a hostage video, but that’s Year 36. Nobody’s trying to impress anyone anymore. You’re just trying not to create paperwork.

What she’s conveniently ignoring is my personal growth. Earlier this week, a woman approached me in the Sam’s parking lot—new job starting tomorrow, two kids, needed rent money, and mentioned she was a Christian. I gave her something from my wallet with one condition: “If you aren’t really a Christian, this is a pretty bad thing you’re doing.” Compassion and spiritual accountability in one transaction. I’m basically a weird Baptist Batman.

I also spent half a day driving store to store hunting overripe bananas for banana bread for the Indian relatives coming in for the wedding. More than one store told me they’d just thrown the old ones out. I kept going. Thirty-five years ago that news would have triggered a level of self-righteous frustration usually reserved for HOA presidents. Now I absorb adversity with maturity and grace. Mostly because I’m tired. Growth should be measured in hesitation, not perfection.

My wife knows mornings are my best hours—when my verbal filter still has structural integrity. She knows that placing me near a pallet of cheesecake ingredients before 10 a.m. creates unnecessary risk exposure. She was not wrong to leave me home.

But the universe has a sense of humor.

My son mentions that his mom called because she can’t log into the Sam’s account. In my most supportive tone I said, “Tell her to call my phone.” Silence. Then I grabbed his phone, because apparently nobody appreciates timing. My wife informed me she had been calling my phone several times before realizing the vibrating device she kept hearing was in her own pocket.

After a couple of six-digit verification codes and some light mockery to keep the marriage oxygenated, she got logged in. She didn’t want me there. She needed me anyway. That’s probably marriage in its purest form.

There’s a currency in long marriages—emotional debits, financial credits, historical grievances filed away with perfect recall. I’m wired for all of it, which isn’t a quality I’m proud of. But somewhere in 35 years, Judy figured out how to make me softer without turning me into someone I wouldn’t recognize. She never tried to fully tame me, which was wise, because I’d have been unbearable in captivity.

I didn’t marry someone fragile. I married someone strong enough to argue with me, laugh at me, and occasionally still choose me anyway. She might wake up some mornings screaming from dreams I apparently star in—but she keeps crawling back into the same bed.

I’m counting that as affection.

The Budget That Lived Briefly

Judy set a wedding budget. Then she exceeded it. By how much is still unclear — probably double, possibly more, definitely enough that when the DJ called asking for his balance, her response was “Oh, I forgot about that one.”

I’ve been married long enough to know what that sentence means.

The original number was $2,000, plus we’d cover the rehearsal dinner — a reasonable, grown-up figure that apparently functioned more as a conversation-ender than an actual plan.

Here’s what I did with that budget: nothing. My wife said she had it handled, and I believed her, the way a husband learns to believe things when the alternative is a much longer discussion. I am a man who does well with specific instructions. “Pay this person on Venmo for the cake” — done. I noted “cake” as wedding-adjacent, did not open a spreadsheet, turned off my critical thinking like a responsible partner, and performed the task.

What I did not do was connect the cake to the flowers to the cheese cubes to the small jar of gherkins now living permanently in our refrigerator. Somewhere along the way, the wedding became a slush fund — gentle, loving, entirely intentional — designed to cushion our son, who has been mostly carrying this thing himself. His bride just finished her doctorate. She’s looking for work. The traditional “bride’s family pays” rule did not survive contact with reality, and Judy quietly decided we’d pick up the slack without making it a whole thing. Hard to argue with, honestly. Tracked? Absolutely not.

I stopped looking at the credit cards. If I don’t look, the gherkins are just groceries.

Now here’s where I become the punchline.

A couple of years ago I had what I generously called “success” with algorithmic trading bots. Then came the other part. I let the situation run longer than it deserved, checking the account periodically, hoping something would turn around. This week I finally closed every bot that was “unlikely to ever recover and make profit,” which was all of them. Everything is now in a normal, managed, boring retirement account. The math is simple: more went in than came out.

Judy’s response: “I wish you had never put money in that thing, but I’m glad you’re done.”

No lecture. No monthly callback. Just — glad you’re done.

So when the DJ called, and Judy said she forgot about that one, and I felt that small hot flicker of “we had a budget” — I thought about the bots. I thought about what it looks like when someone decides not to make you pay for something indefinitely. And I closed the credit card tab.

We were careful in our earlier years, because we had to be. That discipline is part of why a blown wedding budget is uncomfortable now instead of catastrophic. We earned the right to be a little imperfect with money, and we’ve both used that right with some enthusiasm.

She keeps terrible track of wedding expenses. I once handed real money to a robot that lost it. Neither of us is keeping score.

That’s probably what a long marriage eventually becomes — you run out of the moral high ground you thought you were standing on, and then you just have each other, some leftover gherkins, and a wedding that’s going to be really nice, rain or shine.

35 Years and the Keys on the Table

My wife and I hit 35 years of marriage yesterday, which feels less like “against all odds” and more like, “Well, if we both managed not to die yet, this checks out.”

We said “Happy Anniversary” yesterday morning with the same casual energy you use when you say, “Hey, we’re out of milk.” Not because it doesn’t matter—because it’s so baked into daily life it’s almost ordinary now. Slightly surprised we both lived this long? Sure. But once we cleared that hurdle, the anniversary part felt attainable.

In less than two weeks, our son gets married. Watching him prepare has made me realize how wildly underprepared I was at the starting line. Back then, I was still trying to untangle my father’s death five years earlier—carrying a grief I didn’t fully know how to name, let alone process.

My son is walking into this differently. He and his bride did real counseling—discussed expectations, conflict styles, cultural differences, and finances. The counselor was raising issues my son hadn’t even considered yet. They have a follow-up appointment scheduled after the wedding, which is the relationship equivalent of actually reading the warranty instead of tossing it in the trash. That sounds less like young love and more like two adults who want this thing to work and are willing to admit they might need help to keep it working.

Our premarital counseling involved a pastor named Maynard. I believe there were one or two sessions. Judy doesn’t remember anything life-altering, and my memory is basically: we met, he talked, we nodded, somehow we’re married. We made it 35 years, so either Maynard was a quiet genius or we survived on stubbornness and grace. I’ve never met another Maynard since, which tells me either the world could use a few more of them—or it wisely decided one was enough.

Our wedding itself was less “special moments” and more controlled chaos.

We didn’t have a choreographed dance. Most of the reception was speed-walking table to table, shaking hands like we were running for office and the polls closed at midnight. I barely remember any of it, but we hired a videographer who documented the whole thing like wildlife footage, so apparently we were there.

What I do remember—because people will not let this story die—is the keys.

During the toast, one of Judy’s bridesmaids stepped to the microphone, started out normal, then veered into chaos. She announced that Judy had apparently shared her apartment key with many different men over the years, and before we officially began married life, it was only right for those keys to be returned. Any male who had one was invited to come forward.

We thought it was a cute joke. One key, maybe two, a laugh and move on.

Instead: wave after wave of men and boys walked up. My brother worked at a truck rental company and had access to approximately every unused key in North America, which helped the prank scale well beyond reason. By the end, there were 50-plus keys on the table.

Then my grandfather shuffled up, dropped his key down, looked at Judy, and said, “Really hate to give this one up.”

He had a knack for the perfectly-timed ornery comment. The laughter was loud—and that’s the moment the whole reception was building toward, even if none of us knew it at the time.

The limo, for the record, abandoned us. Photos ran long, the driver had another appointment, and we rolled up to our own reception crammed into the back of a bridesmaid’s car. The schedule for the afternoon weddings creeping into the morning ones.

Now we’re helping plan their wedding, which means fielding ideas from people like me.

My wife started listing our son’s history of hobbies for her speech, and the list kept growing—frisbee golf, photography, coffee perfection, baking the perfect cookie, 3-D printing, and a brief affair with improv classes. So I suggested: why not do an improv skit at the wedding instead of a dance?

They actually tried it. The prompt word was “cabbage”—apparently that’s how improv starts. Our son launched into miming eating cabbage, got about three lines in, and decided this was not how he wanted to be remembered on his wedding day. Too much pressure. Not enough guarantee he wouldn’t end up performing indigestion in front of both families.

My wife got new material for her speech. And we got a preview of how this couple is going to handle parental suggestions for the next several decades: consider it, try it on, then set it down and back away when it doesn’t fit. That alone gives me hope.

Which brings me back to yesterday, and this 35-year mark.

Neither of us is the same person we were when we walked down that aisle hoping the limo would stay. There’s been loss. Quiet fights—not the loud kind, but the ones where the real problem was all the words we didn’t say until much later. Decisions one of us made that the other swallowed with a tight jaw. Health seasons and money seasons, a few blessings we both know we didn’t earn.

We didn’t always have our priorities sorted. We’re getting better at asking which choices will still matter five years from now, and letting that answer steer.

Retirement is out there on the horizon, getting bigger. I’m looking forward to stepping through that door and seeing what’s on the other side—maybe a little slower, maybe with more doctor’s appointments, but still us. The journey has been good. The companion has been better.

And if somewhere down the road, our son looks at his wife the way I still look at mine—half amused, half amazed he got this lucky—I’ll consider that proof we did at least a few things right.

Not because we had it figured out. Just because love stuck around long enough to grow up with us.

What We’re Actually Trying to Say

Two weeks before my son’s wedding, I’ve finally understood something I probably should have figured out years ago: inside every grown kid is still a person quietly hoping their parents will recognize the adult they’ve become. They want you to see that they turned out okay, even if they’re still improvising half the time.

So consider this my unofficial set of guidelines for how parents are trying to relate to their kids once marriage enters the picture. I’m writing from the parent side, but I suspect the kids will recognize themselves, too.

Saturday night we celebrated my son’s birthday at Hall’s Pizza Kitchen in downtown OKC. I’ve been downtown more in the past month than almost all of last year. Apparently, it takes wedding errands and playoff basketball to transform me from “man who enjoys staying home” into “local culture enthusiast.” My therapist would call this growth. I call it parking anxiety.

My son asked everyone to wear Thunder shirts. Half complied enthusiastically. The other half wore neutral colors—the universal signal for “I support the team emotionally but not enough to own merchandise.” I respect the honesty.

The table divided naturally: vegetarians on one side, meat lovers on the other. My future daughter-in-law’s family held the vegetarian end. Our side looked like we were preparing for winter hibernation. My son sat in the middle like a United Nations translator working to prevent an international incident involving sausage toppings. He chose wisely. The pizza, and the seating arrangement, reflected exactly where he is in life right now—one foot in each world, trying to keep everybody fed.

Conversation stayed polite but surface-level. Partly language barriers, partly two families still learning each other’s rhythms. Our future daughter-in-law handled everything gracefully. But at some point I noticed her attention drifting toward her side of the table, her family, her people.

Not wrong. Just different from how she usually is with us.

First guideline for parents: don’t panic when your child’s attention shifts toward their new family. They’re trying to hold two worlds at once. That’s genuinely hard, and they didn’t get a manual either.

I still experience my own version of this in my 60s, which is either reassuring or mildly alarming depending on how you look at it. When I’m with my mom or my siblings, some earlier version of me quietly reappears—somewhere between the Andy who’s been married 35 years and the one who existed before my wife’s civilizing influence showed up. She has done considerable work on this project and deserves full credit.

She does the same thing when we visit her family. There’s an unspoken arrangement: for a few days, her attention goes to people who knew her long before I did. I survive this temporary reassignment by walking a lot and reminding myself I’ll be relevant again once we cross the state line heading home.

When your kids bend back toward their families of origin after they’re married, it’s not a betrayal of their spouse or of you. It’s just old gravity still doing its job. Give it a little room.

When our oldest daughter got married, I wasn’t ready to be demoted. For years, I’d been the first call for every problem, every decision, every minor household catastrophe involving emotions or leaking plumbing. I had plenty of experience in both categories and was fully prepared to stay on retainer indefinitely.

But if we’d stayed her crutch, her marriage wouldn’t have the strength it has now.

She and her husband figured things out. They built the habits they needed. Our restraint—as unnatural as it felt—turned out to be the actual gift. She and I have a close relationship now, but it’s built on mutual respect rather than parental management. She’s no longer just our child. She’s a wife, a mother, and an adult running her own household.

I didn’t always want that. Selfishly, I’d have kept her eleven years old a little longer—mostly because eleven-year-olds think their dads are funnier than they actually are. Growing up was entirely her idea, and honestly, she handled it better than I did.

Not every family navigates this transition gracefully. Some parents keep treating married kids like supervised interns who need approval before making medium-sized decisions. Others read healthy distance as betrayal and make sure everyone knows it at Christmas. Some adult children never quite untangle themselves from their parents’ expectations and spend years quietly furious about it.

Everybody ends up frustrated, and Thanksgiving becomes an endurance event.

Here’s how I have found it works when it goes right: parents move from authority figures to mentors, then consultants, then—if everyone handles themselves reasonably well—friends. That shift requires humility from all sides. It also requires parents to understand that support and control are not the same thing, even when they feel identical from the inside.

On the in-law question—and every married person eventually develops strong opinions about this one—the only real requirement is that roles get respected. You don’t have to love your in-laws. You don’t have to enjoy every pizza dinner. You do have to honor their place in your spouse’s life, which is a meaningfully different and more achievable standard.

I’ll admit something: I’m very slow to weigh in on situations involving my wife’s side of the family, regardless of what I privately think. Partly because it’s not my call. Partly because her read on the situation is always more nuanced than mine—she has twenty-plus years of context I’ll never fully have. And partly because if I don’t initiate anything, I don’t have to manage the aftermath.

The guideline is simple: you’re not the sheriff on your spouse’s side of the family. At best, you’re a consultant brought in occasionally for a second opinion. Most consultants learn quickly that nobody actually wants their opinion on the family drama from 2014.

More weddings are coming in our family over the next few years. Some of those kids live farther away, which means we won’t have the same regular proximity we have with the ones nearby. Judy and I are adjusting to that reality at each encounter, and we don’t have it completely figured out.

What I do know from our own marriage is that over the years, the pull of my past has gotten quieter. The life Judy and I have built together feels more like ours and less like something we inherited or stumbled into. That’s not a rejection of where we came from. It’s just what a marriage does over time when you let it breathe and tend to it honestly. Eventually, you stop navigating by someone else’s map.

We want that for all of our kids.

We want them to build homes that reflect who they actually are—not extensions of us, not performances for anyone else. If they want six kids, we’ll show up and mean it. If their household goes fully vegetarian, we’ll eat beforehand and smile the whole time. We have opinions about both scenarios. We’ll keep most of them to ourselves.

They’re not obligated to edit themselves into a more comfortable version of themselves so the older generation doesn’t have to adjust. We’d genuinely rather deal with who they actually are.

There are values we hope they carry—faith, integrity, the willingness to keep choosing each other on the days it’s hard. We’ll be honest: we pray for all of it. But we’ve also learned that emotionally healthy people, people who know who they are and have done the work of figuring that out, tend to find their way toward those things more reliably than people who were handed a checklist. So emotional health comes first. Everything else we hope for has a much better chance of showing up behind it.

I had some misspent years sorting out my own feelings about the parents in my life—biological and in-law both. I don’t want that for our kids. We want to fill whatever role they actually need in a given season, not become the reason they avoid hard conversations or the reason they’re having one too many of them.

They’re also fully accountable for their own decisions. We didn’t raise them to invite chaos into their lives. The drama is optional. An emotionally healthy life is mostly a series of quiet choices to avoid the unnecessary ones.

What we’re actually trying to do—and we’re imperfect at it, regularly—is learn how to let go without disappearing. How to stay present without crowding. How to cheer loudly for the lives they’re building, even when those lives don’t look exactly like the ones we imagined.

That’s the guideline. That’s the promise.

We’re still learning, too. Hopefully that part’s obvious by now.

The Scouting Report

My wife plans our vacations. I show up. She books the excursions, maps the sea days, and treats the whole operation like a project with deliverables. I am the deliverable. So when she said we needed to scout Bricktown Brewery before Thursday’s call with the event coordinator, I understood my assignment.

Getting out the door first required a small act of theater. Our daughter was coming to pick up Ellie, but she had to walk the dog first. To be ready the moment she arrived, I had to get myself changed, which meant deploying every distraction technique available to a grandfather who did not want to be late. No closets were involved. Barely.

Downtown OKC at 5:00 is not gridlock, but it’s a reminder the city has grown. We made it in about 25 minutes from the south side, including the obligatory backup at our subdivision. On the drive, I thought about what my other son said when he was up for the wedding shower: “Oklahoma is like a scaled-down Texas.” I get it. Texas is crowded and very sure of itself, and I miss parts of it. Not that part.

Parking across the street ran nearly $17 for two hours. Convenient, noted, never recommending it to family members who drove 12 hours and already think Oklahoma is a flyover state.

The windows of the brewery were covered in Thunder graphics. OKC up 1-0 on the Lakers, the city doing its collective thing. Depending how the series goes, there might even be a home game that weekend—but even without that, late May in Oklahoma is always worth celebrating for the simple fact that tornado season is almost over.

Inside, we were seated immediately. We asked about specials. Our waiter had just received a text that apparently required his full attention, so we got something between an answer and a guess. We ordered chicken sandwiches anyway—hers with slaw, mine Nashville hot—and moved on.

While waiting on our food, my wife went upstairs to inspect the event space. Her checklist: could 8-9 tables fit comfortably, and would there be a microphone for announcements? The microphone question matters. She’s the polished one. If you want clean and professional, you hand it to her. If you want a slip of the tongue and at least one rabbit trail the audience has to wade through, you hand it to me. I’ll be involved if necessary. She knows this about me.

She came back down with photos. Plenty of room. Then came the menu conversation—proteins, vegetarian options for about 10% of the crowd, which menu pages to photograph before the call. She took pictures of everything. I suggested tenders. She didn’t reject the idea.

We paid with a gift card from one of our hockey boys. I can’t remember if it was after we helped him through totaling his car or after Judy wrote his college recommendation letter—probably the letter. Her recommendations are tight and punchy. Mine tend to wander into the fourth paragraph before making the point, which is why she writes them and I don’t.

On the way out, she made her notes for Thursday’s call. Cheaper parking options. Menu decisions. Headcount confirmed. As we drove home, we noticed how close the river walk was to the parking lot—a possible quiet end to the night before the wedding, weather and family chaos permitting.

Somewhere under Mother’s Day and our son’s birthday, our anniversary will pass this weekend without much ceremony. But tonight we had a meal together in a city we’ve grown to love, watching Judy do the thing she does—prepared, thorough, thinking three steps ahead—and I thought about how all that early penny-pinching gave us this. A good town. Kids nearby. A son getting married.

Thirty-five years. I genuinely don’t know how we got here, and I’m not entirely sure why she stayed. She says it isn’t pity. I’m going with sense of humor. It’s the only explanation that holds up.

What Grandpa Did in Norman

My son-in-law had a saxophone recital this week. My future daughter-in-law is defending her doctoral dissertation. These are significant life moments, and the family is rallying around both of them with appropriate enthusiasm and support.

I was with the baby.

To be fair, Ellie’s other grandma was in town for the recital, and she graciously babysat Ellie during the day so I could have some Andy time. This left her with a clear conscience when I accepted the recital shift. All of us attended the dinner portion of the evening, which was the part I was looking forward to anyway. The pizza was good.

The recital was held at OU, which meant Ellie and I spent an hour roaming the halls of a building not designed with either of us in mind — me like a slightly confused mall Santa, her like someone who has never encountered a carpeted ramp and intends to fix that immediately.

We walked a lot. With Ellie, walking means holding both her hands while she does something between a march and a controlled fall. Her legs can’t quite keep up with the ambition, but viewed from the side, the illusion of running is convincing. She seems to enjoy it. The grandpa executing the maneuver gets winded faster than he’d like to admit, so we don’t overdo it.

One of the hockey boys had left a neon yellow golf ball in their room, and once I introduced it to Ellie, every white ball I’d ever collected on my walks became an afterthought. We found a carpeted ramp — one of those long, gentle slopes that make stairs optional — and developed a game. She’d release the ball from the top. I’d stand below and try to kick it gently back up toward her. She’d decide, with visible deliberation, whether to crawl up to meet it or scramble down after it.

At one point the ball rolled toward her from above and she spotted it over her left shoulder. Something clicked in her baby brain and she decided the correct response was to lead with her right leg, which required a small full-body flip. She didn’t intercept the ball. But she committed to the plan completely — a tiny, determined engineer working a problem she hadn’t quite solved yet.

I lost the golf ball somewhere in all of this. I ordered a six-pack of colored ones on Amazon that night.

When two college students passed by during our ramp experiments, I mentioned something about developing her eye for the putting game. They smiled the way young people smile at old men doing inexplicable things with babies. Politely. With their whole faces.

We found a bench and ate. Cheerios, and some apple-strawberry star-shaped things that dissolve before they become a choking hazard. I favored the method where the snack is secured between my lips and Ellie retrieves it with her fingers. As the session went on, her hands got progressively damper. Baby slime. Nothing toxic.

A man walking the hallway stopped and watched us for a moment. “First grandchild?” he asked. I confirmed. He nodded like he knew something. “She’s the one who’ll pick your nickname.” Then he kept walking.

I would like a nice nickname…

The motion-activated faucets in the bathroom are not designed for a man holding an infant with one hand. You do what you have to do.

When my wife texted that the recital was over, I handed Ellie off to her assembled fans and faded into the background, which is where I do my best work. By the time dinner wrapped up, we were four hours in and dangerously close to disrupting my pre-sleep routine. The pizza held up its end.

Today is the dissertation defense. I was encouraged to bring Ellie, but it only takes one wrong moment — one well-timed shriek during a committee question — to make that a memorable afternoon for the wrong reasons. She has worked too hard for that. And frankly, I’m not sure the room needs both Ellie and me in it. There may be some older professors present with limited social skills, but they’re not variables I can control.

Phase two of Grandpa Goes to Norman happens from home. Better snack inventory. Bibs within reach. No motion-activated anything. No college students watching me lose a golf ball.

And maybe, if I keep spoiling her at the current rate, she’ll give me a decent nickname.

The Knight Takes a Different Street

If you read last week’s post, you know I wandered into two strangers’ yard, dispensed unsolicited landscaping advice, and left feeling like I’d done something useful. I also gave them hockey tickets, because apparently I was in a generous mood and hadn’t yet learned my lesson.

The tickets didn’t work out.

I was at the grocery store Saturday afternoon when she called. Their HOA had issued an ultimatum — something involving condemnation proceedings, HOA jail, or possibly being forced to live in their dispensary. I’m fuzzy on the exact bylaws. The panic, however, was real, and the solution was an emergency run to Tulsa for a trailer full of sod. She felt terrible about the tickets and wanted to make sure it was okay if someone else used them. I told her, of course, and that she was being more conscientious about free tickets than I ever would have been. Her guilt was running at a much deeper level than the situation required.

Knowing one of them has a bad back, a sod run sounded like a terrible idea. But they had a plan, and me adding unsolicited opinions to their plate wasn’t going to serve any purpose. Good on them for having a plan at all.

What I didn’t know was that the universe had already logged my next move.

Easter evening, I went for a walk — solo, audiobook loaded, no agenda. My son and his fiancée went a different direction. I made a small adjustment to my route. I now understand this as my first mistake.

I turned onto their street just as they were staring down the second of two pallets in the trailer. Four pallets total, two days of work — this was just a fraction of the pain, and they were already operating on fumes. I had options. A tactical retreat was available. Reversing my path before eye contact was made remained technically possible.

I did not take my options.

“I wouldn’t be much of a gentleman if I left you to finish this by yourself.” They tried to wave me off. I borrowed some gloves and got to work.

The first several rows went fine. I loaded the hand cart; they wheeled it over and unloaded; and then, I grabbed a couple of loose rolls in the meantime. We chatted. I asked if their friends ended up liking the game. They didn’t go either. The tickets had now failed two sets of people in one evening, which felt like a record. They kept thanking me, and since the only adequate response was to actually finish the pallet, I stayed focused on that.

Sod operates on a cruel law of physics. The pallets used a standard Lego stacking principle — two rows of five left to right, two rows of five up and down — and the lower I went, the heavier each roll became. This may have been the physics. It may have been me. I didn’t investigate too closely. The trailer walls felt like they were narrowing. The ceiling felt lower than it had been. I was taking longer breaths between rolls, doing a controlled squat my knees were filing complaints about, and wrestling each roll into position so it wouldn’t unravel on me before I could get a grip.

By the last two rows, I’d stopped pretending to be efficient. I just shoved them to the back lip of the trailer so they’d be easier to reach. I told myself this was strategy. I let that stand.

When the last roll came out, it about killed me. The good kind, I think.

I asked if they needed help with the pallet itself. They did not. They thanked me at a volume and sincerity level that was probably appropriate to the situation and possibly flattering to my ego. I started the walk home.

My clothes were dirtier than an Easter stroll should produce. My gait had become something I’d describe as a waddle, which my “muss-kulls” — what I call my muscles when they’re tired, overused, and acting thick — were working to correct one awkward step at a time.

Judy looked at my socks when I came in. “What happened? Are you okay?”

I told her none of it was blood. I told her I’d rather be known as someone who helps than someone who watches. I believe that. I also believe there’s a line between good neighbor and slightly creepy yard stalker. Unloading sod for people I’ve shaken hands with exactly once is, at minimum, unusual.

Their landscaping nightmare isn’t close to finished. They still have to till the dead grass, put down topsoil, grade the whole thing, and actually lay the sod. But my work in their yard is done. I know a route adjustment that’ll save me considerable time and laundry. Should the knight in me feel the pull to rescue the maidens again, I’ll choose a different street — just to remove the temptation.

A man has to know his limits. Especially on Easter.

Amateurs

We hit every red light on the way home from the last regular-season hockey game. Every single one. It was nearly 10:00 on a Saturday night, and the lights had not gotten the memo

My wife, in a tone that does not brook dissent: “What incompetent traffic engineers.”

This is not an unusual comment from her. We both share the impulse, actually. I come at it with sarcasm. She comes at it with how she would fix the problem. Neither approach accomplishes much, but both get to the root of who we are. I default to humor. She sees a problem and intuitively knows how to solve it.

If she could clone herself, she’d dispatch a copy to every corner of society plagued by inefficiency. We’ve had car-ride conversations where she single-handedly fixed healthcare, immigration, and the tax code before we reached the driveway. I realize the world is a lesser place for having only one of her — but if there were an army of her fixing the planet, I’d still only be married to the original. I can barely keep up as it is.

So I couldn’t let her traffic comment go without a small test. “We’re good at making brisket in the oven but not on the smoker,” I said. “Does that make us incompetent?”

Her reply, patient and obvious: “No, dear husband. We are smoking amateurs. We are not incompetent.”

This is the woman I love. Her humor is surgical. It doesn’t land with the same splash as mine, but it challenges me every time — and it’s a daily reminder that I don’t have a corner on wit in this household.

She had also handed both of us an escape hatch before Easter Sunday arrived.

We’ve attempted brisket on the smoker three or more times this hockey season. None of them were shoe leather exactly, but they involved more chewing than I prefer. Yesterday we swallowed our pride, pulled out the oven bag, and went with the hard-to-fail method. Six-plus hours, then a little time in the crockpot while we’re at church.

We may be amateurs in the backyard. At the table today, we’re professionals.

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.