Hockey Players

The Policy Has Been Revised

After an evening watching a disappointing football game, we went to bed at 10:30. To keep our commitment to our hockey boys, we turned the front porch light on so they could find their way home without taking out my roses along the front walkway. We have been doing this quite often lately. Friday night, they needed to watch the team they share the rink with play before heading out for food. Last night was also about food, but with a little more wardrobe involved.

Both of the junior hockey teams we have billeted for have a tradition of rookies dressing up as girls for a team dinner. The reason for putting considerable effort into shoes, dresses, wigs, and whatever else they can find is simple: the rookie who looks the best avoids paying his portion of the ridiculous food bill the veterans have intentionally inflated by ordering food they have no intention of eating. Our Alaska boy won this year. His $50 investment in a dress, shoes, and wig probably saved him about $300. The worst-dressed rookie pays double. The guys with beards apparently start the competition about three goals down.

Back to my pre-bed routine. For some reason, my nose decided to start bleeding. This wasn’t one of those casual little nosebleeds where you grab a tissue, wipe your nose, and get on with your life. This one earned the coveted two-tissue award. I asked Judy which towel I should use so I wouldn’t bloody up my hand towel. My white hot tub robe also received some unexpected splatter. Apparently, my nose had decided that bedtime was a good time to redecorate.

Judy’s response was very casual. I know why they call her “Dr. Mom” and not “Dr. Wife.” There was no frantic call for medical assistance, no dramatic assessment of my condition, and certainly no attempt to save my life. She basically let me bleed. To minimize any overnight leakage, I suggested grabbing an old towel to put over my pillow. She fully supported that plan. The usual “goodnight kiss” was answered with, “I don’t want to kiss you tonight.”

Nothing says “in sickness and in health” quite like your wife deciding that, for the moment, you are a communicable disease.

The next morning, with a strong desire to get my walk in before church and another 100-degree day waiting for us, I got up to find the towel on my pillow completely unblemished. Apparently, my nose had called it a night. I made the coffee and toasted some of Judy’s day-old, home-baked whole wheat bread, one of her evolving hobbies. There are worse ways to start the day, although I was beginning to wonder whether I was living with a doctor, a baker, or someone who was simply waiting for me to bleed out.

After my walk, I told Judy my nose seemed to be on the mend. I also expressed some concern about what had caused such an enthusiastic nosebleed. Her nosebleeds have all but stopped 5 years ago, so I was hoping mine would follow the same path. Maybe it was simply the heat, the low humidity, or some other weather-related nonsense that our bodies apparently feel obligated to complain about.

Of course, I couldn’t resist mentioning the possibility that my blood pressure was raging and that perhaps I was headed toward a stroke or some other exciting cardiovascular event. In the past, when I have brought up the possibility of dying from high blood pressure, Judy’s response has been, “If you go before me, I won’t remarry.”

It has always been one of those reassuring little marriage statements that somehow manages to be both loving and insulting. Apparently, though, the policy has been revised.

Knowing I was still fragile from the previous night’s trauma, Judy looked at me and said, “I have changed my mind. I think I will remarry.”

I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to discuss your replacement while the current model is still standing in front of you. But apparently, there is a grace period for these things.

The good news is that my nose seems to have returned to normal, and I have no reason to believe I’m about to fall over dead. I plan to be around for many more years. There is even a decent chance I will outlive Judy. After hearing her revised position on remarriage, I’m beginning to think that may not be the news she was hoping to hear.

But I was reminded of something this weekend: if you’re going to spend a lifetime dishing it out, you have to be willing to take it when the tables turn.

Even if the tables turn while you’re wearing a blood-speckled hot tub robe, sleeping with a towel over your pillow, and wondering whether your wife has already started browsing for your replacement.

Marriage is a beautiful thing.

Apparently, We Had Plans

As a rule, my wife and I don’t plan to be gone every evening, with every day of the week becoming progressively more exciting and culminating in a series of weekend events worthy of numerous pictures and social media postings. We are more the “What series do you want to watch tonight?” people. So when the hockey boys had a “meet and greet” at a local restaurant where all the season ticket holders, billets (us), and boys were invited, we decided to sit this one out. I am not always looking for that particular hockey vibe. Fortunately, a couple from church had been talking about having us over for dinner for several weeks, after an earlier invitation was canceled because of illness. So, without actually thinking, “Let’s use this night to kill two birds with one stone,” that is pretty much what happened. We could have a pleasant evening with another couple, have conversations about things other than hockey, and do it in a house where, when my conversation meter reached capacity, I could theoretically just stare at something on the wall. Our boys knew what we were doing and had already decided whether they would grab their warmups at our house or at the restaurant. That cleared our dinner-prep schedule, so we made the ten-minute drive and arrived at 6:00.

Our hosts live on an acre, which immediately made the evening more interesting than anything I could have found on television. I went out back and talked with the husband while Judy and his wife had a good conversation inside. The highlight for me was the buffalo hide hanging in the garage that their daughter was tanning herself. It is eventually destined to become a rug in the middle of the living room, assuming it survives the tanning process. Before it gets there, however, it needs one more step that involves something called “smoking the hide.” I am not sure exactly what that entails, but I know enough about home projects to recognize the beginning of a sentence that ends with, “Well, that didn’t go quite as planned.” The husband seemed happy to support his daughter’s project, although he was less enthusiastic about his workshop being temporarily converted into a buffalo-processing facility. The deer hides they had done previously were apparently much easier. A buffalo, it turns out, brings considerably more hair and considerably more buffalo to the project. She had already been warned that Dad’s shop was no longer in the tanning business.

Dinner was chicken thighs with the bone in, risotto, and roasted broccoli, and it was really good. The hostess did mention, “It might be a little salty.” My immediate response was, “I’ve never had it before. It tastes fine.” The part of my brain that occasionally insists on honesty eventually agreed with her. The chicken gravy poured over the risotto did not exactly move us in the opposite direction, either. Still, it was a good meal with good color balance, and I ate two chicken thighs, so apparently I was not suffering. Had my mother-in-law cooked it, I probably would have been a little more honest. The hostess also reminded me of something I had apparently said when she asked at church how I would feel if she invited us to dinner. According to her, my response was, “Well, can you cook?” Apparently, she saw through my crusty exterior and decided to take the risk. She was rewarded with an enthusiastic second helping and only moderate criticism of the sodium content.

It was not the kind of meal we would normally make for the hockey boys, but that has less to do with the food than with the fact that I am already tired of eating the extra warmups they refuse to eat. The husband did his part by scraping everyone’s plates as he carried them toward the sink and eventually the dishwasher. I apologized for not being a chicken-skin eater. There was no obvious penalty, so I assume I remain welcome. Their fictional “upstairs maid” is the husband. In our house, the frequently vacationing “dish fairy” is Judy.

At some point during dinner, the conversation turned to marriage, and the hostess told us about the first thirteen years of theirs. They had made themselves crazy trying to come up with gifts for every minor and major holiday. She wanted good gifts, and he apparently had trouble determining what qualified as a good gift. By their thirteenth anniversary, they had reached the point where the whole thing had become more work than celebration. So they lived their thirteenth anniversary like any other day. They went about their business and didn’t even realize what day it was until they heard a “Congratulations” on their answering machine as the day was winding down. That was apparently the moment they realized they had spent thirteen years creating a tremendous amount of busyness for very little return. From that day forward, their marriage became a little saner. There is probably a lesson in there somewhere, although after thirty-five years of marriage, I am still suspicious of any lesson that involves buying fewer gifts.

Eventually, it was time to deal with the peach pie that had been sitting there staring at us from the dining area. The peach was good, and the ice cream was an excellent supporting actor. My only suggestion for future guests would be to ask how large a piece they want before cutting it. One-eighth of a large pie is not a serving. It is a commitment. Both Judy and I are good guests, so we cleaned our plates. That does not mean we were grateful for being made quite that full, but we did our part to maintain the illusion of good manners.

The most contentious portion of the evening came when we started talking about books and television shows. I mentioned that I thought the character of Reacher on Amazon was basically a shallow gorilla. The hostess did not take that particularly well. I also mentioned that Lee Child, the author of the Reacher books, has talked publicly about smoking marijuana while writing. Judging by the reaction from our hosts, this was apparently not information I needed to bring to the table. I felt the elbow from Judy even though she wasn’t sitting next to me. I explained that I thought the characters often make a poor transition from books to television, which did not improve my standing. Eventually, I agreed to read the first two Reacher books and report back. Judy did not identify any other major problems with my performance that evening, so apparently the invisible elbows were doing their job.

Just as the Reacher impasse appeared to be settling down, we got a text from the hockey boys. Two of their teammates were coming over to use the hot tub. Since it was almost 9:00 and four hockey players plus a hot tub creates a mathematical equation I did not want to solve, we decided it was time to say our goodbyes. It had been a good evening. Our first “date” with this couple had been a hockey game in late winter, and the follow-up was much more relaxed and insightful. Between their camping schedule and the arrival of the twins, it may be 2027 before we manage another one. At least we now know where we stand on buffalo hides, pie portions, and Reacher.

When we got home, the four hockey boys settled into our back porch area between the hot tub and the fire pit and proceeded to hang out for another hour and a half. At one point, I had to tease the boy from Michigan. “So, if I go to Michigan, do I need to set the clock back an hour and a second?” He seemed a little frustrated with the question and, more importantly, with the fact that this was even a topic of conversation. I eventually left him with this: “We can squabble about Ohio State and Michigan, but have no doubt I will be cheering for you when you have your Warriors jersey on.” Apparently, there are limits to my loyalty, but they are not quite as narrow as my opinions on college football.

As Judy and I did our pre-sleep reading, the boys continued their animated conversation on the patio. With our bedroom right next door, sleep and four late-teenage hockey players were never going to coexist peacefully. A little after 10:30, Judy turned off her light and commented, “It is about time they end the party.” And it did. Somehow, her womanly will continues to force us males to submit to her wishes, even when she is lying in bed and the males in question are several feet away on a patio. I am not sure how this works. I just know it does.

For a night that was supposed to be our low-end-of-the-excitement-spectrum evening, it turned out to be a pretty busy one. We had dinner with friends, learned about buffalo tanning, debated the proper amount of pie, offended someone over Reacher, argued about Michigan, and hosted four hockey boys late into the evening. And somewhere in all of that, there was a reminder that adults and late teenagers (i.e. young adults) who are not related to each other can actually live together, laugh together, jab at each other, and occasionally even learn something from one another.

The boys will keep playing hockey, eating breakfast with us on the Fridays of home weekends, arguing about sports, and figuring out how to live with a bunch of other guys. They will eventually move on to different teams, different cities, different jobs, and whatever comes next in their lives. The friendships they are forming now may end up being more important than anything happening on the ice. Learning how to share a house, give each other space, work through differences, and still enjoy being together is part of growing up that doesn’t show up on a hockey schedule.

For Judy and me, there is something pretty special about getting to watch that happen up close. We didn’t set out to become the parents of a bunch of unrelated teenage hockey players, and I’m still not entirely sure how we ended up with four of them on our back porch at 10:30 on a Thursday night. But these are the kinds of evenings that tend to become memories long after the hot tub has been drained, the breakfast dishes have been put away, and the boys have moved on to whatever comes next. Maybe that’s the real benefit of having a house that occasionally feels a little too full. Sometimes the best parts of life are the things you never planned for.

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.

The Strategic Value of Corn Hole

After dinner and a dessert consisting of homemade ice cream and baked goods last night, Judy and I stared at each other at 6:30. I could feel myself moving toward a conversation about how unexciting we old people are. Then it happened. My daughter suggested, “We could play some corn hole.” This is what we had done last year, and it was the perfect solution to the boredom that was threatening to take possession of our home.

The corn hole paraphernalia was right outside our back patio door. With such easy access, it was hard to believe it had probably only been moved once since last Labor Day, when I did a sweep of the back porch. A quick inspection of the bean bags was concerning. Apparently, they had not been designed to sail 20-plus feet in a light Oklahoma wind. Fortunately, the remaining bag in the corn-hole corner contained four red and four blue bags of appropriate weight. We were in business.

Last year, the primary competition had been Judy and me against the two hockey boys we were hosting at the time. Judy and I didn’t exactly dominate, but apparently those boys had not yet discovered their full bag-tossing potential. This year, our two new hockey boys arrived with a considerably more polished game. At least, that was the story they told us about all those graduation parties.

Frankly, I was just glad my daughter had suggested doing “something.” Saturday and Sunday, our hockey boys had scrimmages against the team we used to host hockey boys for in Texas. There were moments of potential, but they lost both games. The wins and losses weren’t really important—focus on the word “scrimmage.” What mattered was what the coach saw during their limited playing time. Our returning player played in both games. The other two are still working to earn their spots, so each had an opportunity to catch the coach’s attention.

Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, is expected to bring more cuts. The boys got a little surprise last night when the group chat told them when to arrive and reminded them to bring their suits. During the regular season, the boys are shown on the big screen wearing their suits and announcing where they are from while “Enter Sandman” plays somewhere during the pregame festivities. Apparently, junior hockey has decided that announcing a teenager’s hometown while he stands in a suit to the soundtrack of a heavy-metal song is the appropriate way to introduce players. With the possibility of cuts hanging over the house, playing a few rounds of “toss the bean bag into the little hole” seemed like a pretty good way to avoid thinking about what surprises Tuesday might bring.

Our two new hockey boys proved to be formidable competitors. Both had developed a near-frisbee approach to throwing the bags—one left-handed and one right-handed. The rest of us relied primarily on an arced approach to reaching the Ohio State-flavored boards. For the first match, I was paired with our returning player, who was also an arcer. Having been told the proper distance was 27 feet, I took nine steps between the boards. Whether nine of my steps actually equaled 27 feet is questionable. What was not questionable was that arcing a bean bag that far made me look like a very weak corn hole player. Or perhaps my muscle memory was simply more familiar with corn hole boards that were much closer together.

The frisbee throwers quickly became the favorites and showed no signs of giving up their advantage until they beat us. The next game, Judy teamed up with my daughter-in-law. Judy insisted the boards be moved closer together, which allowed them to hang around considerably longer than we had. The frisbee boys continued making a compelling case for their technique. We played about six matches over roughly 90 minutes, and honestly, it was some of the best time we have spent with our hockey boys so far. For an hour and a half, nobody was thinking about who might get cut, wondering what the coach was thinking, or worrying about who might be coming back to take someone’s spot. We were just throwing bean bags, arguing about distance, and discovering that two teenagers apparently know how to play corn hole better than the people who own the corn hole set.

Once we put everything away, we filed back into the house. Our kids had already left while Judy and I attempted to put a final hurting on the frisbee boys. The hockey boys headed upstairs to shower, while the old people headed for the first-floor shower facilities. While we watched some TV, the one boy who doesn’t have a vehicle came downstairs looking for a snack. He settled on Oreos. Judy had a full tray of brownies sitting there that we would have loved for him to eat, but knowing he had to face the coach the next morning, we decided not to make him responsible for any of the adult problems in the house.

I casually told him, “If you have any reason to get picked up early tomorrow, just let me know. I’ll be around. Ideally, you can forget about this whole conversation.” He gave me a big smile with just a little stress around the edges. He understood.

Both Judy and I have mixed emotions when cuts are imminent. We hate to lose any of our boys—at least this year, we like all of them enough to genuinely hope they stick around. But there is another side to it. If a player is going to spend the entire season on the bubble, knowing the coach doesn’t expect to play him much, sometimes the kinder solution is to cut him and let him move on to whatever comes next.

Every other day, the boys come home from practice with another example. “This guy from last year got cut from his USHL team. He’s coming back.” Or, “This guy wants to leave his Canadian team and come back to the Warriors.” If the coach has a choice between keeping a bubble player or bringing back someone who has already proven himself, it isn’t difficult to imagine which direction he is likely to go.

Our boys will always be welcome in our house. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe staying here is always the best thing for them. If the better opportunity is somewhere they can develop, play meaningful minutes, and avoid spending an entire season picking splinters out of their seats, then that gets my vote. Fortunately, I don’t get a vote. I get to be the appreciative dad—the guy who gets to watch these boys chase something they care about, provide a little food and a place to sleep, and remind them that regardless of what happens in a coach’s office, they have a home here. And, occasionally, I get to throw bean bags at them.

I am grateful I didn’t begin a hockey journey a few decades ago, when I might have had to live with old people who were this competitive about corn hole. This morning, I also decided there was no reason for me to get out of bed before 7:00. Part of that was simply because I could. The other part was that I didn’t want to risk running into the boys too early and having to say, “Good luck,” again. There are only so many times you can say “good luck” before it starts sounding less like encouragement and more like a funeral director wishing you well on your way out, so I stayed in bed. Sometimes being supportive means making yourself available when someone needs you. And sometimes it means strategically avoiding the kitchen until after 7:00.

Retirement Is a Full-Time Job

I am having a real time problem. Retirement was supposed to hand me buckets of free time. Instead I’ve traded one calendar for four, plus a grocery list that never ends.

On the bright side, I’m collecting misadventures faster than ever. Documenting them is where I keep losing. So here’s the current lineup of things eating my hours, in the order they occurred to me.

The hockey boys are back, appetites fully intact. They eat well, generally. What we’ve learned is that “eating well” comes with fine print.

For years we blamed their parents for this. A childhood of fast food runs between practices will shape a palate. This year’s contribution to the family vocabulary is the classic “I don’t eat tomatoes” and “I don’t eat cheese,” which after some gentle interrogation turns out to mean no whole tomatoes and no cheese specifically on tacos or hamburgers. Somehow that’s more specific while creating more questions.

We’re navigating it. What we haven’t solved is quantity, since we’re still cooking for our local kids too, and it’s only the start of the second week of practice. Once the warm-up leftovers start surviving in the fridge instead of getting fought over as second dinner after nine o’clock, that’s our signal it’s safe to go back to boring.

Then there’s the billet coordinator, who giveth and taketh. Really, it’s the coach making every call. The coordinator is just one of the minions relaying it with a cheerful “yes, sir.”

All of our boys made it through the first cut and played in the intrasquad scrimmage. One didn’t show well and was on a plane to “Plan B” the next day. The bed sat empty exactly one night before a non-tendered, non-drafted player got invited to move out of his hotel and into ours. I got a little scrappy making that happen, and I regret nothing.

We don’t do this for the money. It doesn’t hurt that there is some, and in exchange we feed these kids well and let them load up the wifi with all of their devices. And, if feeling extremely generous, we even let them control their own thermostat at night.

In three weeks I’m scheduled to acquire two more granddaughters. My daughter is finishing her last week of Zoom consulting, and everyone has quietly agreed it’s better to have grandpa on standby than to have her explain to a client that she needs a minute for baby maintenance.

So my calendar now includes clementine distribution and teaching a toddler exciting new ways to play with toys she already owns, mostly because grandpa needs the entertainment. This is genuinely on my top ten list of things I want to be doing with my life. It has been fulfilling, but grandpa needs a little variety there, too.

The last item is the one I complain about the least: getting to know these hockey kids while I still have them under my roof. Dinners run long. Plans get pushed to make room for them.

Any of them could be gone tomorrow or here through the end of the season, and I’d rather spend the time now than look back in April wishing I had. The billet fees cover food, laundry access, and the basics of keeping a teenager alive. I haven’t run the actual math, but I’d bet money we don’t turn a profit on any of it.

Somewhere between retirement, travel, and grandkids we apparently can’t say no to, the hockey hosting is going to get squeezed out eventually. Whenever that day comes, I want to have done it well and left these boys wanting more, not counting down the days until we stop showing up.

Nobody handed me a vote on how this fall’s schedule filled up, and I wouldn’t trade a single piece of it. I’ll find the time somewhere. Probably by writing shorter posts about it, which defeats the purpose, but here we are.

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.

A Plod Instead of a Skip

The “funk” happens 6 to 8 times a year. The variables change, but the result is usually the same. I do more of a plod than a skip.

I still get the “must get dones” done. The “nice to get dones” wait their turn.

I can fake upbeat for a while if the kids are around. I don’t bother faking it for my wife. She knows me too well, and pretending to be cheerful when I’m not is a lot of unnecessary work.

A bad funk also dulls my humor and makes my brain feel like it’s swimming uphill through molasses. I can still function. Everything just takes more effort than it should.

Naturally, I decided the best way to handle this was to analyze all the reasons I might be in a funk. Because nothing lifts your mood like conducting an internal investigation into your own bad mood.

One contributor is my current battle with the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I like my fantasy to have a predictable magic system. Once I understand the rules, I expect the author to follow them.

For the first four books, my son’s enthusiasm kept me going. By about 25% into Book 5, I had to admit his positive review had carried me farther than my own enjoyment.

I probably could have quit sooner, but I let optimism run high. The premise was clear after book one, and each book since has been a little more of a struggle. Vacation was good for the series, since I could read 10% or more in a day. Now the daily trickle isn’t enough to move the story forward fast enough to keep me engaged.

So I have two problems: frustration with the book, and frustration with finding something else to read. I considered starting something new, but talked myself out of it. “Andy, you don’t want to learn a new world’s rules right now. You want something you already understand.”

Well, it wasn’t the best decision.

Now I may have to wander between a couple of books before I find one that fits, with a plot simple enough that I’m not spending three chapters remembering who everyone is. First-world problem? Absolutely. Apparently the funk has standards.

Another contributor: I gave blood the other day. The blood center’s follow-up email announced, “You have a new badge.” Naturally I had to check.

Instead, I found out about the badge I didn’t get.

But I also found something that made me smile. Between double-red donations in Ohio and Texas, I’ve never had an accurate lifetime total. After moving to Oklahoma, I started giving through the Oklahoma Blood Institute instead. I logged into my old Carter BloodCare account this week and found out I’d donated more than seven gallons there alone.

That’s a lot of me being voluntarily drained and sent home with a cookie.

One of my Facebook friends is past 20 gallons. I have no idea what my Ohio total adds up to, so my real number could be higher than I think. Just finding the seven-gallon figure moved my funk down a few percentage points. Apparently even my blood donation history is conspiring against my bad mood.

Then there’s the cold.

A cold makes my brain run slow whether I’m in a funk or not. Add in the lack of sleep, and the result isn’t exactly peak performance. I can plow through what needs doing, but the list has to shrink to keep the frustration manageable.

And then there’s chess.

My son and son-in-law both play at Chess.com. I’ve taken the Duolingo approach: too shy for real people, so I play the AI. I generally hover around 800-900 ELO.

Every time I get close to 900, hope creeps in. Maybe I’m getting better. Maybe I’m finally figuring this out.

Then the AI decides it’s had enough of my nonsense. Does it call me a loser? Of course not. It just does some voodoo with its queen and cleans my clock in under a dozen moves. Once it’s beaten me back down to 800, it puts its “idiot hat” back on and lets me win a few with my low-end strategy.

I don’t have the commitment to go deep into chess. I just want to keep my brain active. Unfortunately, the “you are horrible, maybe you’re not horrible” cycle accounts for a surprisingly large share of my funk.

This is clearly another first-world problem.

Then the hockey boys started arriving Saturday. The last arrived Sunday afternoon.

Thirty-four boys made it through the July camp that picked the roster pool. Now they’re competing against each other and against 17 more boys for a final spot. Fifty-one boys chasing a limited number of spots is a good way to wreck a teenager’s sleep schedule.

The late arrivals were probably off the coach’s radar for one reason or another. But what if they deserve a spot too? I’d hate for one of our boys to get cut because a late-comer showed up and pushed him off the roster.

The older I get, the softer I get. If the boys are in my house, I’m cheering for them. Next Friday night, when the cuts happen, our house could lose one of three beds. I feel for them, living with that uncertainty.

As my wife put it: “They are young. They can handle it.”

She’s probably right. I’m glad I’m not still young, though. I wouldn’t want my life’s direction hanging on something my older brain knows won’t matter in five years. Getting cut from a hockey team isn’t going to determine the rest of anyone’s life.

That doesn’t mean I won’t hate seeing any of our boys go.

Somewhere in the middle of writing all this, something strange happened. My mood improved.

Maybe it was the seven gallons of blood. Maybe it was laughing at my own chess career. Maybe it was admitting how invested I am in a house full of teenage hockey players. Or maybe it was just getting all of this out of my head and onto a page.

Whatever it was, the funk started losing its grip.

That might be the real lesson here. You can’t be satisfied with every part of your life every day. Some days are just plod days. The book frustrates you, the chess computer questions your intelligence, the cold fogs your brain, and teenagers remind you that life can turn on someone else’s decision.

But there are good things happening around us too. Sometimes it just helps to stop and notice them.

So I’m going to address the envelope, put the funk inside, and send it back to the return address.

Unfortunately, I know who lives there. Eventually it’ll find its way back to me. It usually does.

But for now, the shift has begun, and I’m going to enjoy it. Besides, I’ve got a book to quit reading and an AI chess player to lose to.

The Washer That Tried Its Best

We are about to hit the two-week mark without a washer, and I want to be very clear: this is not a hardship narrative. Nobody needs to organize anything. We have children nearby who are more than happy to earn nonspecific parental approval points by letting us use their machines. We’ve already run three loads through our daughter’s washer, and she now leads the family leaderboard by a comfortable margin. She doesn’t know what the points are for, and we don’t know how she’ll cash them in, but somewhere there’s a spreadsheet that leans slightly in her favor.

The real story here is that our washer lasted as long as it did.

When the hockey boys arrived in the fall, the washer was—by all available evidence—normal. Quiet. Cooperative. Not auditioning for the role of bucking bronco at a cowboy bar. But somewhere along the way, it decided it wanted more out of life. A second act. And once it committed to that dream, it went all in on every single load. Jeans, towels, delicates—didn’t matter. If it went in, it came out after six rounds of thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

Naturally, we blamed the hockey boys. “Those boys are trying to cram two loads into one,” we said, as if we were seasoned forensic laundry experts. It felt good to believe. It gave the chaos a villain.

We tried all the classic home remedies. Lean it forward. Drop it back. Hope gravity and optimism would realign the drum. I didn’t research any of this, of course. Judy probably talked to someone on the phone and then got ambushed by several reels on the subject—assuming she’d already burned through the videos of toddlers missing t-ball pitches and animals losing their minds over garden hoses.

We did warn the hockey boys about overloading. They nodded, then returned to their natural habitat: upstairs, headphones on, video games absorbing all earthly sound. They would drop a load in and disappear, completely insulated from the consequences. Meanwhile, if we forgot to close the laundry room door, it sounded like something had gotten in and wanted out badly. Six cycles of thump-thump-thump-thump-thump will make you question how many seconds you have left.

The more unsettling development was our own adaptation. When our son came over and heard it, he’d stare at us in genuine disbelief—two people sitting calmly on the couch, our only concession to the impending structural failure being a single, unhurried click up on the TV volume. The machine had become part of the family. Not a pleasant family member. More like the uncle who starts every holiday dinner with, “Now don’t get mad, but…”

By the time the season wound down, we knew. Post-hockey-boy life was going to include a new washer.

So for date night, we went to Home Depot. Chick-fil-A handled dinner. The appliance aisle handled the foreboding. Judy walked the lineup like a judge at a talent show, hoping for something that would at least surprise her. Instead: a lot of meh and buttons that seemed to require a minor in engineering. She was disappointed. I was, if I’m being honest, strangely relieved.

We made the decision that only people our age can make with a straight face: let the monster keep haunting its corner of the first floor as long as it was able.

We’re hoping for a repeat of the air fryer situation. We didn’t realize how dead the old one was until the new one showed up—and suddenly reheating a slice of pizza no longer took longer than ordering a fresh delivery. That was a genuine revelation. The bar for the new washer isn’t high: mostly we just want it to sound like an appliance and not an escape attempt.

The hockey boys will probably still find ways to provoke it next season, but we have the summer to recalibrate our noise expectations before we slide back into the familiar soundtrack of domestic chaos.

Now we just need the thing to actually arrive. Home Depot already pushed it back a week, and someone’s delicates are starting to form geological layers in the laundry basket. The text says Tuesday, 2–6 pm—which in delivery company language translates to “remain in your home and abandon all hope of making plans.”

We don’t do mountains of laundry around here. The cooking has scaled back, and the dishwasher spends most of its life wondering if it still has a purpose. The machines in this house are creeping toward semi-retirement, honestly.

At our age, you stop pretending everything is fine when something is clearly broken. You don’t make a fuss. You just sigh, adjust, and text your kids to see who’s home and whose washer is open for hosting. We’ve already built all the character we need. Now we’re mostly interested in functioning appliances.

I don’t call it lazy. I call it convenience-inclined.

Is that so wrong?

The World’s Most Disappointing Sports Fan

I was raised in central Ohio, which means I was issued an Ohio State Buckeye fan card sometime around kindergarten. I still follow the team. Sixteen years after leaving the state, I still know enough to have opinions.

I am also a terrible fan.

Not the kind who paints his chest in freezing temperatures or argues with strangers online who type exclusively in capital letters. I mean terrible at the actual job description.

If Ohio State is winning by 35, I find something else to do. Some people call that enjoying a comfortable victory. I call it “having access to a remote control.” And if the game is close, I get personally annoyed that they aren’t dominating. My ideal game is apparently exciting enough to hold my attention but not exciting enough to threaten the outcome. I recognize this is irrational. I have made peace with it.

My fair-weather tendencies hit new heights during Game 6 of the Thunder-Spurs series.

My wife and I faithfully watched the first quarter. Then we remembered our son is on his honeymoon and the HBO Max subscription attached to his account expires next month. This created urgency. The Thunder would understand. We switched over to The Pitt.

Our plan was simple—watch for a bit, check the score, return in the third quarter if Oklahoma City was still in it. Professional sports teams have benches. We were simply taking advantage of ours.

When we checked back, it was clearly a two-episode night.

For what it’s worth, we didn’t miss much worth watching. The Spurs outscored OKC 32-13 in that third quarter, including a 20-0 run. Our emotional support from the couch would not have changed the trajectory.

My son Jeff, for his part, is a real Thunder fan. His father-in-law figured this out before the wedding, watching Jeff sweat through games and pace and shout at the TV like his voice was patched into the coaching staff’s headset. At some point, he quietly pulled us aside to ask whether Jeff was betting on the games—because in his experience, nobody gets that stressed unless there’s money involved. Apparently, cricket fans are calmer. Jeff wasn’t gambling. He just genuinely cared. I continue to find this fascinating.

Here’s my most embarrassing sports opinion: I think other cities deserve a turn.

I like the Thunder. I own the shirts. I wear the hats. But I also think championships are more interesting when they move around. Maybe OKC gets a good two-year run, raises some banners, and then hands it off. Let another city have the “wait, we’re actually the best?” feeling for a while. The big markets will be fine. The big markets have been through this before and will be again.

The same logic applies to the junior hockey league our boys play in. The Lone Star Brahmas have won the South Division of the NAHL three years running and took the Robertson Cup one of those years. They’ve earned every bit of their confidence—they’re good, they know it, everyone else knows it. But fans from other South Division teams apparently aren’t allowed to feel neutral about it. You’re supposed to convert and cheer for the Brahmas as your regional representative, and if you don’t, they take it personally. The league gets healthier when different towns get to feel something. More fan bases believing they have a shot makes for a better sport.

Tonight is Game 7, right here in Oklahoma City. I’ll watch.

Well, mostly. The middle portions remain negotiable.

What I actually want is a contest—teams that refuse to say uncle, favorites made uncomfortable, nobody handed anything before the clock hits zero. In a best-of-seven, you don’t have to be the better team all month. You have to be the better team tonight. That feels honest.

I’ll accept whatever verdict the court delivers, assuming the referees don’t completely ruin it. Even a terrible fan is allowed one irrational opinion.

ABC’s Wide World of Sports used to open with “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Most fans spend their time trying to avoid the second part. But the agony is what makes the first part worth anything.

Even if I did miss it because of a TV show.