Hockey Players

Dinner Is Served. If You’re Home

After our hockey boy numbers dropped to an abysmal one, Judy and I had to examine ourselves and decide how we felt about the situation. Emotionally, we enjoy having a few boys around. They keep life interesting and prevent me from getting bored, which is important because Judy’s work has rendered her incapable of sustaining some of the conversations I would otherwise inflict on her. More boys also give us more motivation to cook. There are practical benefits to having a few extra people around, even if they do occasionally consume food at a rate that suggests they are preparing for hibernation.

The biggest challenge is knowing how much food to make. We have developed a protocol for the hockey boy who treats our house as a convenient place to sleep and do laundry while maintaining an active social life elsewhere. We will cook for you when there is a reasonable expectation that you will be home for dinner. A morning conversation in which you announce your dinner plans carries very little weight. The only reliable confirmation is your return home by 4:00 p.m., preferably accompanied by a declaration that you are taking a nap. At that point, we can reasonably conclude that dinner might actually happen at our house.

We appreciate that the boys have social lives and are exercising their social skills on a regular basis. However, their social outings do not cause the extra food we prepared to disappear when they check in just before bedtime. So, if their feelings get hurt because we’re feeding them something prepared in the microwave or air fryer, they might want to consider giving their words a little more value. When “I’ll be home for dinner” no longer requires an implied “unless something better comes along,” we’ll know we can cook for them without filling the refrigerator with containers of food that eventually become part of a science experiment. We are adapting.

The Grandkids Have Opinions, Too

The hockey dinner challenge is complicated by our efforts to cook a couple of meals each week for our daughter’s family. We want to give them some variety while providing Ellie with food a toddler can successfully feed herself. Soup isn’t a great choice unless the objective is to see how much of it can end up everywhere except inside the child. Pasta can work, and corn will always get her vote. We also get some pleasant surprises. Who would have guessed that Ellie would enjoy dipping her meatloaf bites in barbecue sauce? We may have a future food critic on our hands, although her current reviewing process seems to involve eating something and then demanding more of it.

Between the hockey boys and the grandkids, we’re doing our best to keep everyone fed. The difference is that Ellie hasn’t yet developed the ability to tell us she’ll be home for dinner and then disappear for six hours. We’ll see how long that lasts.

We Don’t Do Drama

Whether we have one boy or three, our rule about drama remains the same: we don’t do it. That doesn’t mean drama never tries to find us. Hormones spike, relationships get complicated, and people occasionally experience crises that seem to require the participation of everyone within driving distance. We simply don’t invite it into our home.

After seven years of billet parenting, we’ve heard enough stories to know that some houses experience considerably more turbulence than others. I can’t speak to every rumor or confirm every story, but I can listen when our billet son describes things happening in other homes and wonder how adults manage to make a young hockey player’s life more complicated than it needs to be.

A recent golf outing sponsored by the team provided another example. Words were exchanged, or people were accused of saying things, and the resulting complaints found their way to the coaching staff. The coach was expected to have conversations with players accused of disrespecting others, and his list of potential troublemakers began to grow. I don’t know all the details, but alcohol may have contributed to the situation. Give people a little alcohol, lower their inhibitions, and sometimes the event ends with a few more people convinced they’ve been wronged than when it started.

The boys are left to navigate the fallout. They have hockey to play, relationships to manage, and coaches to keep happy. The last thing they need is to wonder whether the adults responsible for their housing have the emotional maturity of the teenagers living under their roofs.

When the Billet Home Becomes the Problem

Our current billet came to us from one of those more challenging households. There still seems to be some lingering resentment surrounding his departure, and we’re hearing stories about disagreements involving the player, other billets, and the coaching staff. Whatever the full story, the situation has become another complication in a season that already has plenty.

Our billet coordinator has had her own challenges this year and seems reluctant to approve additional moves between billet homes. As long as a house isn’t considered dangerous, the boys’ requests to move may not get much traction. I understand that coordinating a hockey team and its billets isn’t an easy job, but I also think there’s a difference between a boy being unhappy because he doesn’t like the house rules and a player who continues to deal with unnecessary stress from the adults responsible for him.

This isn’t a billet mom deciding she’s had enough because a kid stepped over the line. We’re talking about a starting player whose life, for eight months, should be relatively straightforward: sleep, eat, practice, play hockey, and repeat. With some minor variations, that is the job. He shouldn’t also have to worry about an adult repeatedly demanding to know his exact location or trying to pressure a coach into reprimanding players over perceived slights.

These boys are young, and they still have growing up to do. That doesn’t mean the adults around them should be adding obstacles to that journey.

Natural Consequences Are Still a Thing

As a billet parent, I’m supposed to enforce a curfew. That requirement has always struck me as a little funny because I grew up without one. If my dad wanted to cut wood on a Saturday morning, I needed to be awake and ready to help. He wasn’t going to accept an explanation that my alarm hadn’t gone off or that I hadn’t realized what time it was. The wood still needed cutting.

I take a similar approach with our hockey boys. If they want to play for this team, they need to learn to manage the basic responsibilities of life. Set an alarm. Get yourself to practice. Know when you’re supposed to be somewhere. If you oversleep or miss something important, the coach is likely to be unhappy. That consequence might do more to teach you about responsibility than a billet parent delivering a lecture on time management.

If I were coaching a player who repeatedly couldn’t manage his schedule, I’d expect him to improve. If he couldn’t, we’d need to figure out what was going wrong. Moving him into a special-supervision billet home might solve the immediate problem, but it could also postpone the day when he learns to manage his own life. They won’t always have someone standing outside their bedroom door making sure they can tell time.

We’re happy to help the boys succeed, but we aren’t interested in enabling someone who refuses to learn the basics. There’s a difference between providing a stable home and becoming a full-service life-management department.

A Few Requirements for the Next Boy

If we’re going to add another hockey boy, we’d like someone who appreciates the advantages of living with us. We have a few expectations, none of which should require an advanced degree in human behavior. We’d like him to turn the thermostat back up after cranking it down at night to create a Minnesota chill-vibe in his bedroom. We’d like him to show up for dinner more often than he doesn’t. And if the grandkids are around, we’d appreciate a little willingness to play with them.

We’re not asking for much beyond that. Help clear the table. Refill your water and Gatorade in the refrigerator. Be reasonably pleasant company. If you can accomplish those things while managing to attend hockey practices on time, you may be exactly the kind of young man we’re looking for.

Of course, we have an opportunity to screen potential candidates at our Friday pregame breakfast. Some of the boys are perfectly happy, which is always encouraging. With only one player living with us, we’ve continued the breakfasts, and we had nine attendees last week, with a tenth being a realistic possibility. The more boys we house, the more are likely to attend. That also spreads my labor across more hungry hockey players instead of requiring me to produce roughly the same breakfast operation for a single houseguest.

There are advantages to having more than one boy, particularly when injuries and trades are part of the equation. I would hate to give up the breakfasts if something happened to our current player. Having at least one more boy around would give us a little insurance against the inevitable changes that come with junior hockey.

Last night, I told our player, “We’ll work on getting you a buddy.”

I think that would be good for him. He could spend more time with someone his own age without having to drive all over the place to find company, and he wouldn’t have to spend every evening hanging around with the old people. We do our best to be entertaining, but there’s only so much wisdom and questionable humor a young man should have to endure after a full day of hockey.

If the drama continues, we’ll deal with whatever comes our way. Patience will be important. Pushing the billet coordinator too hard could move us to the bottom of the list, and we don’t need to make a difficult job harder for her. Over time, the more stable homes will establish their reputations. We don’t need to toot our own horn. The breakfasts, the experience we’ve accumulated, and the way we treat the boys should speak for themselves.

Keeping the Bigger Picture in View

It’s been a tough year, but we’re hanging in there. Judy has stuck to her commitment to make the pancakes and eggs, and I’ve handled the meats. We continue to open our home, feed the boys, and try to make their time here a positive experience. If we focused exclusively on the frustrations of the moment, we’d have to conclude that this hasn’t been a particularly rewarding season.

Fortunately, we’re capable of occasionally stepping back far enough to see the bigger picture. Not every valuable thing we do in life feels valuable every moment of every day. And not every life we influence comes in groups of two or more. Sometimes the difference you make for one person is enough to justify the effort, even when that person is currently eating your food, monopolizing your refrigerator, and trying to turn his bedroom into a walk-in freezer.

We billet because we believe we can provide some stability during a period of life that can be difficult for young men. They leave home, pursue a demanding sport, and try to figure out who they are while living with people they barely know. We have an opportunity to make that transition a little easier. We can provide a comfortable home, some decent meals, reasonable expectations, and adults who don’t need to make everything about themselves.

We didn’t sign up because it’s easy, and we certainly didn’t do it because we needed someone else’s problems to work through. We are on a mission as long as this mission wants us here.

As long as that mission still wants us here, we’ll keep making pancakes, cooking meat, and trying to find another boy who understands the value of a good home. If the burden eventually becomes too much, we’ll look for another place where we can make a difference and feel that our efforts are appreciated.

For now, we have one hockey boy, nine breakfast guests, a refrigerator full of food, and the possibility of adding another player to the household. That’s enough to keep things interesting.

And if our next billet boy can tell us by four o’clock whether he’s coming home for dinner, we’ll consider that a promising start.

A Night in the Life of a Penalty Box Attendant

Saturday night was a hockey night. Friday night had not gone particularly well for the home team. A three-minute stretch early in the third period pretty much sealed it. After that, we decided the first break past the 10-minute mark would be our time to leave. We weren’t alone. With the team struggling, the people who stayed were probably doing so more out of loyalty than any expectation that the evening was suddenly going to turn around. The coach seemed to share our assessment. At 11:00 that night, one of the captains contacted the boys and told them they needed to be at the rink to help some young kids skate. This wasn’t a few guys volunteering for a community activity. It was the entire team. The coach had apparently decided the best way to disguise his frustration with a loss was to make the boys do community service while calling it a team bonding. I respect the creativity.

When Judy and I entered the rink Saturday night, we were hopeful the boys would be a little more locked in. In fairness, the coach had been bouncing the lines around quite a bit, and the other team had gotten its first victory of the season the night before. I was pretty confident our boys weren’t going to help them make it two in a row. After I cleared the ticket check with my season pass, I was approached by the guy who was now the billet dad for our recently departed hockey boy. He had a job for me in the penalty box. He was very focused on getting me properly set up for my new responsibilities, so there wasn’t much time for conversation. He took me into a room, handed me an official game vest and gave me some basic instructions. He also warned me that the entrance to the penalty box off the ice could be slippery. This was apparently important information. I tipped my Warriors hat at him before calculating that, based on my age and my newly elevated position within the organization, I should probably use the bathroom before the game started.

The penalty box is right there on the ice, so the view is excellent. The only problem is that the home hockey boys tend to lean out from the bench and occupy approximately 73 percent of the visual field. With a better view comes greater responsibility, and I was careful to keep that in mind. I had also forgotten about the smell. From our regular seats on the other side of the rink, I had largely forgotten what comes out of a hockey locker room. Really, “smell” doesn’t adequately describe it. It’s more of an atmosphere. A heavy, humid fog of fermented effort, sweat, equipment and several things that probably shouldn’t be combined in the same zip code. I hadn’t missed it, but I recognized it immediately. There was also no bench for me. I assume this was intentional. The penalty box is designed to make the boys feel guilty about their actions. I quickly discovered there is no guilt taking place in the penalty box. There is sitting, drinking water, laughing, watching the game and occasionally wondering why you were given a penalty. Guilt was not on the agenda.

My job description was pretty simple. When a boy came into the box, I handed him a water bottle and asked, “Do you want me to open the gate or are you going to jump it?” I was relieved to discover that, over three periods, I only had to open the gate once. Every other boy cleared it easily. In my mind, this was perfect. If they chose to jump the gate themselves, I couldn’t be blamed for putting them back on the ice too early. I had essentially delegated liability. There were probably three or four guys in the box during each period, so there was plenty of opportunity to practice my gate-management strategy. I was also responsible for the replacement pucks. This was a revelation. The pucks were stored on ice in a cooler. As I thought about it, this made perfect sense. A warm puck would bounce differently than a cold puck. Why introduce an unnecessary variable into a game where near-grown men are already skating around at 20 miles per hour trying to hit each other with sticks? So every period started with a fresh puck from the cooler. We went through about four pucks a period, which meant I was basically the cold-chain logistics manager for the Oklahoma Warriors. I had not prepared for this level of responsibility.

Beyond the water and gate questions, there was very little conversation. I had been told, “If they want to talk, they will talk to you.” If I knew their first name, I used it. Other than that, I was much more quiet than usual. That may have been the biggest sacrifice of the evening. The first period was pretty uneventful. The second period got worse. Or better. I’m still trying to decide. I did go visit Judy during the first intermission. I felt bad that she had to sit alone, although she was a good sport about it. She had actually snuck into the bench area before the game and gotten a picture of me wearing my official vest. I’m pretty sure she was documenting the moment in case my new career suddenly took off.

The biggest challenge after the first period was the photographer. During the first period, I had mostly been standing at the front of the box, watching the game at eye level. Then the photographer arrived and my job description changed from “penalty box monitor” to “avoid becoming a human obstacle in a professional sports photograph.” The photographer was constantly moving around me, and the only place I could retreat was toward the stats booth on my right. I could back up about a foot and watch the game through their somewhat cloudy plexiglass. This created a problem. At one point, the photographer was snapping pictures while a Warriors player was serving a penalty. Suddenly, I heard the Rhinos making a huge commotion. It sounded exactly like they had scored a goal. I did what any highly trained penalty-box professional would do. I opened the gate. The player looked at me. I looked at the player. He did not move. This turned out to be fortunate because there had been no goal. I had simply confused excited hockey players with an actual hockey event. The player had apparently decided to save me from myself by not immediately sprinting onto the ice. That was the last time I acted on instinct. From that point forward, I committed to only responding to the referees. No more gut feelings. No more reading the room. No more interpreting crowd noise. If a referee didn’t move, I didn’t move.

The same little cubbyhole that made me think a goal had been scored also made it difficult to see pucks that flew out of the rink. Most of the time, when I handed a puck over, I received a polite “thank you.” A couple of times, I had no idea what was happening until a referee came skating toward me. That was my cue. I also pulled pucks out a couple of times when they didn’t actually need them, all while trying to avoid the photographer, the boys waiting at the door and the sticks that seemed determined to occupy whatever space I was currently using. As the boys increasingly hogged the front of the box, my available space became whatever area wasn’t occupied by a hockey stick. More than once, sticks were resting across the front gate while I was wedged into the corner like I was part of a Kerplunk game. It was an impregnable trap, but it was a battle I chose not to fight. At one point, the photographer and I nearly shared our little space with a Rhino who took a hit right in front of us. That was exciting. But the real scare came when the puck hit my empty water bottle tucked into the front corner of the box. The bottle fell over. The puck slid into its place. And for a second, that puck just sat there looking at me. It had the expression of a puck that was disappointed it hadn’t been allowed to cause more trouble.

By the end of the game, I had survived three periods, several hockey boys, a photographer, approximately a dozen sticks, four million flying pucks and one gate that I now considered a professional responsibility. And, as is often the case, the thing I’m grateful for isn’t really what I did. It’s the opportunity the thing gave me. There were the little exchanges. The thumbs-up to the kid on the bench who had just scored. The boy who came into the box and told me, “I don’t always deserve a penalty, but I did that time.” There was the player who had been suspended and got to hear me say, “Good to see you out there again!” And there were a few boys who had to suffer through my highly sophisticated hockey analysis. “You guys are looking pretty good tonight.” I didn’t overwhelm them. That would be irresponsible.

But I did take the opportunities when they presented themselves. Because of our breakfast club, I have a little more permission to talk into the lives of these guys. The penalty box gave me even more. These boys have coaches. They have teammates. They have parents. They have plenty of people telling them what to do. I’m not trying to become another one of those people. I’m trying to become someone they’ll listen to when I have something worth saying. That’s the part I don’t want to lose sight of.

The penalty box gave me a chance to hear a little more of what they were saying, see a little more of what they were feeling and have a few conversations that probably wouldn’t have happened from my regular seat across the rink. For one night, I wasn’t just a fan. I was a fan with special privileges. Would I want the job every game? Probably not. I could see Judy sitting alone for an entire season while I played professional penalty-box monitor. But I did come away with something valuable. I learned a little more about the game. I gathered enough information to continue pretending I’m more hockey-smart than I was the previous day. And if asking better questions gives me more credibility with these boys, I’ll happily learn a few more rules.

I’d do almost anything in the hockey world to gain a little more permission to speak into their lives when something matters. Referee? Absolutely not. Those guys are hated no matter how good a job they do. Although, from the penalty box, I will admit something I didn’t expect. Sometimes it looked like the players actually respected them. Of course, I’d have to learn all the rules first. And that seems like an unreasonable amount of work just to be yelled at by teenagers.

The Billet Gods May Have Made Their Decision

Our philosophy with hockey players, and any other strays who may wander through our front door, is pretty simple: If we have an open bed, you are welcome.

We don’t always know how long that welcome will last. Some boys fit into our house easily. Others discover that living with us isn’t quite what they expected, and sometimes we discover the same thing. We like having people to cook for, though, and hearing, “Wow, that was pretty good. What was it?” will always score more points than, “I only eat pizza and hamburgers.”

After the rapid departure of our previous hockey boy, I tried to process things from his side a little more. For four years, his identity had been, “I am wanted by an Ivy League school to play hockey.” When that suddenly disappeared, I could understand why he needed to make a change. I stopped taking his departure quite so personally.

Then, because apparently the best way to deal with one hockey boy leaving is to put another one in his room, NEW showed up.

Our EX, who is also one of the team captains, seems to have been keeping track of the other boys by creating his own unofficial “billet happiness” spectrum. He apparently knows which players are happy, which ones are less happy, and which ones might be one bad dinner away from packing a suitcase. When he left Wednesday evening for his new home, he casually mentioned, “I was talking to another player who is really unhappy at his billet house.” I thought, “Great. I’ll believe it when I see it.” I assumed he was just trying to say something nice on his way out the door. A little verbal reassurance that his leaving wasn’t personal.

Then he texted me the next morning. EX gave me more background on a particular player and suggested I contact the billet coordinator about him. My text to her was simple: “Yeah, we are interested if this kid is looking for a place.” Her response came shortly afterward: “This wasn’t supposed to be communicated at all.” That seemed like a strange way to respond to someone volunteering to take a hockey player off your hands. Despite her frustration, she completed the transaction. By “transaction,” I mean she sent us his paperwork and let us know we could go ahead and contact him. Her terseness left me wondering whether she was simply having a bad day or whether there was more to the story than we were being told.

When NEW arrived before dinner that night, he volunteered to fill us in on “the rest of the story.” Before he got very far, though, his previous billet’s social media post told us most of what we needed to know. He showed it to us. We don’t follow her, so we weren’t exactly sitting around monitoring the situation. I repeated my commitment to him, although this was the first time he had heard it: “Our job is to feed you well and do everything we can to make sure you sleep well.” He took that commitment seriously. Especially the sleep part. He took a few liberties with the upstairs thermostat. Those Minnesota boys would sleep with the window open in the winter if you let them.

NEW arrived on a Thursday night, which meant Friday was a home game. That meant I would be frying bacon. Or at least I thought it did. Since we had been hockey-boy-less for 24 hours, the rest of the hockey breakfast club had already made alternate plans. Once that little hypocrisy was cleared up on breakfast eve, I quickly graduated to putting a few trays of bacon in the oven after my coffee in the morning. The breakfast club showed up, ate well, and then I made another questionable decision. I mentioned the de-commitment story involving our EX to the early arrivals. Their dropped jaws immediately told me I had stepped into an unsafe place. This was not my news to tell. I swore them to secrecy and hoped the statute of limitations on being a bad breakfast host was shorter than the hockey season. The chatter was good, the boys were grateful, and eventually they all left with full stomachs and eyes that had narrowed to barely functional slits. The rapid eye movements were clearly getting close.

The final piece of the story came during the hockey game. We met our EX’s mom a couple of weeks ago. She had a gift bag for the twins at the game. I had told Judy beforehand that I wouldn’t be surprised if she brought something for the girls. She struck me as the kind of person who took care of billet parents in an above-and-beyond sort of way. We talked with her for close to an hour. Early on, I asked the simple question, “How is he doing?” She opened up and told us more than I expected. Then she dropped the nugget that connected everything. “You know my son played a pretty big role in getting you your new hockey boy.”

My eyebrows went up. She explained that the billet coordinator had told EX that we needed to reach out to her if we wanted NEW. My quick response confirmed what I had already suspected. Whatever drama the billet coordinator had been trying to avoid was no longer avoidable. Not surprisingly, she was considerably less chatty with us at the game that night.

The verdict is still out on whether this will be our last year billeting. I had already looked at a few trips for February, but those may have to wait until at least next year. Billeting can be a little like dating. You end up with someone who looks like a good match, hope you’re compatible, and discover a few things after they move in that probably should have been included in the profile.

NEW has a lot going for him. He has lots of nieces and nephews. He says he will eat anything. He even says he always cleans his plate. And then there’s the big one: he would rather pack a lunch than go out for lunch every day. This makes him a very rare find.

We didn’t swipe left or right on any of our hockey boys. They just showed up, stayed awhile, and eventually moved on to whatever came next. We weren’t a great fit for our EX. He was dealing with his own stuff, and we were dealing with ours. But somewhere along the way, he decided we were a good, stable place for another kid. So he did a little greasing of the skids on his way out.

I kind of like that. The boy who left our house may have helped us find the boy who replaced him. Maybe that’s how this whole billet thing is supposed to work. You open a door for one kid, learn a few things, occasionally buy 47 pounds of food that nobody eats, and eventually another kid walks through the same door.

We still don’t know if NEW will be a keeper. For now, he eats what we eat, cleans his plate, wants to pack his lunch, has his own upstairs bedroom, and apparently sleeps well enough to keep the thermostat company.

After everything that happened this week, I’m willing to let the billet gods have the final say. So far, they seem to be saying, “Keep this one.”

The Hockey House Is Cursed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Protein Policeman

Sunday night was the first dinner Judy and I had with our hockey boy. He had gotten back from Minnesota by bus before sunrise and helped our other hockey player, who was leaving Sunday, pack a few things before going to bed. When he woke up, he woke in a house that had only one hockey billet living in it—the guy he saw in the mirror.

He talked to us about the previous week of hockey life before meeting one of the other players for breakfast. The team had lost all three games at the Showcase. He claimed the somewhat lopsided scores weren’t the result of the goalies. They were the result of defensemen who had lost their first love. They prefer offense to defense.

I was a little nervous about the responsibility that had been handed to me for dinner. I marinated the chicken like I always do. The remaining hockey boy was the one with the pork allergy, which meant this wasn’t just a matter of putting dinner on the table. Now I had a small food-safety operation involving a teenager, a grill and my reputation as a competent adult.

I had already sprayed a couple of types of oven cleaner on the cooking grates. I scraped and scrubbed them, trying to remove every memory the grates had ever had of touching a sausage or a rack of ribs. I heated the grill to “really hot” a couple of times to cook off anything that might still be left on the grates. At that point, I was pretty sure the grill was cleaner than most surgical equipment.

And beyond all that, it would make me physically sick if something I fed him caused a reaction. I didn’t want to be the guy who sent our hockey player upstairs for the evening because Dad couldn’t properly decontaminate a grill.

After 5:00, Judy put the smashed potatoes into the oven to bake. The potatoes had already been boiled, so they would crisp up nicely. Paprika, onion and garlic powder, salt and pepper made these things almost good enough to eat without ketchup. Judy and the hockey boy seem to think Chick-fil-A sauce makes them even better.

The roasted broccoli isn’t incredible, but it does round out the textures the meal offers.

In parallel with everything else, Judy threw together some dough for cinnamon rolls. It quickly became clear she had done something to spank the yeast a little too hard. She gave the dough some more yeast vitamins and hoped she could salvage them. One tray would be for the “three of us.” Until we get another hockey boy, that’s what we are. The other tray would be for the family that had just had twins—aka my daughter’s family.

Shortly after 6:00, we sat down for dinner. I had some reservations about saying a Christian prayer with our Jewish hockey boy. Yes, the pork allergy does add a certain level of irony to that sentence. But Judy showed no hesitation, and we prayed.

As he ate his first plate, I kept waiting for him to spasm and fall off his chair. Then he had a second piece of chicken. Then a third. He let me know that any ill effects would take a little time to show up, which was exactly the kind of information I wanted to hear while eating dinner.

I attempted to enjoy my meal while still dealing with taste buds whose sensitivity had been dialed back to almost COVID-like levels. Would I pass this test? Would his mom come down hard on me if I fed him something that took him off his game? After dinner, he grabbed a couple of waters and headed upstairs. He’d let me know how he was doing when he came back down.

That was reassuring.

Sort of.

After Judy’s transformation back into her normal self while the “dish fairy” cleaned up the kitchen a few days ago, the dishes were piling up again. We put the leftovers we actually observed into appropriate containers and put them into the refrigerator. It appeared the dirty dishes would get at least another day to thrive while minimizing the amount of usable space on our counters.

While our hockey boy watched football, played video games or talked to important people in his life, including his hockey advisor, Judy coaxed the reluctant cinnamon rolls into a fluffy enough form that they should bake up okay. She covered them with cream cheese icing, which made whatever yeast trauma they had experienced earlier largely irrelevant.

They were good, and our hockey boy even decided they were worth the calories. He also let me know I hadn’t served him any flawed chicken. The pork cooties from the grill had been successfully purged, and I was free from guilt.

At least where the chicken was concerned.

After watching our show—we’re in Season 5 of Modern Family—we went to bed and read for a while. At some point, we heard noise in the kitchen that involved the microwave. Was chicken being heated up? Was another cinnamon roll being consumed? Was he eating something else?

At least one of those questions had to be answered “yes.”

I didn’t think much more about it until morning.

I started the coffee and inventoried the cinnamon rolls. No obituaries were necessary.

Then I thought about the chicken.

I looked in the refrigerator and didn’t see the chicken pan. I looked around the kitchen, wondering where that pan might have ended up. Of course, it was at the bottom of the stack of last night’s dishes.

And the chicken was still in it.

It had been sitting there the whole time.

For more than twelve hours, my carefully prepared, grill-decontaminated, pork-free chicken had been conducting a completely different food-safety experiment.

If we’d caught it before bed, we might have salvaged it. At that point, though, the difficult but correct move was to throw it away.

I tried to express my frustration to Judy without pointing fingers. Ultimately, we share the kitchen, so I deserve as much blame as she does. The bigger downer, at least from my perspective, was that I had spent all that time preparing and cooking the chicken. I had already factored it into the meal plans for the rest of the week.

Fried rice? Barbecue chicken pizza? Rice bowls?

All of those plans would now have to be rejiggered around the chicken that no longer existed.

Darn.

Just because we’re old and have accumulated a little wisdom doesn’t mean we’re always wise. Sometimes we assume the other person has something handled because, in our heads, of course they do. A simple question can prevent twelve hours of perfectly good chicken from becoming garbage.

And if you’re afraid of being considered a whiny nag, there’s a choice to make. Would you rather take the grilled chicken you labored over to the trash can with your tail between your legs, or get a little pushback from your wife because you asked whether somebody put it away?

Maybe this is the reminder I needed to take my role as the resident protein policeman more seriously.

I just need to figure out what hat a protein policeman wears.

You Never Know What’s Around the Next Bend

Before leaving for Saturday’s walk, I had to outwait the rain. There are big promises in the coming days, and this little spritz this morning was just supposed to whet our appetites. I opted to finish up the French toast in the fridge rather than make whole-wheat toast. There is an equation I will likely need some AI help with: What is the necessary ratio of eating leftover food to making new food? Is there a variable for the number of participants on both the front end and back end of the equation? These are the questions that matter when you’re retired. I filled my wife’s coffee and heated the full cup for 30 seconds without adding any milk. No further barriers prevented me from leaving.

Before I reached the park to do my handful of laps, a car pulled to the curb right beside me. “Have you seen any dogs running around?” I hadn’t, so I replied accordingly. I thought it was wise that she hadn’t asked about a particular breed or flashed a poster at me. Maybe these dogs sneak under the fence or escape through the gate often. Getting too specific with people who aren’t dog people might result in a blank stare. This wasn’t her first dog-tracking rodeo.

As I entered my circular path, I painted a target on the backs of the two people ahead of me. I assumed they were mom and son. The target was figurative, although my competitive walking brain doesn’t always understand that distinction. When I’m walking solo, I choose my pace based on a complicated formula involving humidity, temperature and the intensity of my plantar fasciitis. When I share the path, I shift into high gear. I’d rather they eat my figurative dust than I eat theirs. Any pain I feel is secondary.

The first time I passed them was near the playground, where the dad and two other sons were “family-ing.” The next time I passed the playground, my lead was well established, and the youngest son, probably six, had just exclaimed, “I landed on my feet!” All the clues pointed to this being the first time he had let go of the swing chains and received a 10 from all of the judges. I didn’t stop to congratulate him, but I was rooting for the kid.

The rest of my interaction with the family was a little darker. As I wandered the path counterclockwise in my wide-brimmed hat and dark sunglasses, the young son separated from his two siblings and his parents. This put me between the parents and their impish child for most of a rotation. They yelled at him repeatedly, apparently trying to keep him from doing too much more wandering. The one time I passed him, I didn’t make faces or give him “cat claws.” I gave him an innocent smile that was mostly obscured by the hat. I’ve decided it’s best to save my scary faces for people who know I’m messing with them rather than unleashing them on complete strangers.

When I got back to the house, a quick look at my iPhone showed my wife was playing grandma at my daughter’s house. I hopped on my computer, where I was soon greeted by a text from our remaining “original” hockey player. He had requested a trade. He had done this earlier in the week, but the coach had talked him off the ledge. The coach’s recommendation was to wait two weeks and see how he felt. Apparently, two weeks had become an unnecessarily long period of time.

The request to help move the playhouse sitting on our front porch, acquired on a big-item trash day, to our daughter’s house for Ellie was denied. It sounds like he’ll be packing up and leaving immediately after they return from Minnesota tomorrow morning. So much for the playhouse.

I passed the unfortunate information on to my wife and the billet coordinator. Judy said, “Too bad!” The billet coordinator let me know there were a few people ahead of us on the “empty bed” list. I teased the coordinator, “Is our house cursed?” It isn’t, but it feels that way sometimes. Of our first three boys, two were brothers who wanted to stay together. Then we got the veteran who didn’t get as much playing time as he wanted last year and is now waiting on a trade. Our willingness to be flexible about which boys we received is probably part of the reason we’re down to one boy right now. Yes, I’m a little jealous of the houses with multiple boys who are getting plenty of playing time. On the positive side, we do have one boy the coach seems to like. He just can’t eat pork.

At some point, you have to laugh. The morning had started with a little rain, some leftover French toast and a walk where my biggest concern was whether I could pass a family before they reached the next turn. A couple of hours later, our billet situation had changed again. That’s life lately. I keep thinking I’m getting a glimpse of what the next few days will look like, and then something shows up and rearranges the furniture.

Today’s lesson is really just a reminder. If you think you can accurately anticipate what is going to happen over the next week, or even the next couple of days, you probably aren’t putting yourself in a place where you can fully live your life. I wish I had something more profound than that.

I ride the rapids every day I wake up. Some days, it’s a gentle ride. Other days, I wonder what else might come around the next bend. The older I get, the more I realize there isn’t much value in trying to anticipate every twist. You do what you can to be prepared. You make your plans. You show up. You enjoy the walk while you have it.

The rest is way above my pay grade.

And maybe that’s okay. I don’t know what the next few days will bring. I don’t know who will be sleeping in the extra bed, what plans will change, or what unexpected text will show up on my phone. But I do know I’ll wake up tomorrow and get another day.

At this point in my life, I’m learning to appreciate that part more than I used to. I just hope my retired brain does a better job navigating the rapids than the brain I had 30 years ago would have done. Of course, the brain change isn’t optional anyway.

Monday Had Other Ideas

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

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

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

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

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

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

That lasted about five minutes.

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

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

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

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

So much for the scheduled induction.

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

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

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

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

Then I remember the alternative.

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

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

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

Yeah.

I agree with that most of the time.

The First Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unofficial Billet Parent Oath

This feels like it could be called the “Billet Parent Oath,” although I don’t think there’s an official version. If there is, I assume it includes something about feeding teenagers, providing a place to sleep, respecting the rules of junior hockey, and accepting that you may suddenly become responsible for things you never considered when you agreed to let a stranger move into your house.

The hockey boys all come with their own backgrounds, personalities, habits, and varying abilities to interact with adults in a conversational manner. Since they aren’t our kids, they arrive as something of a box of chocolates. There is far more good in there than the initial uncertainty might suggest, but you never know exactly what you’re going to get. If we approached billet life expecting everything to go smoothly, we’d be crazy. We do it despite the unexpected. My wife thrives on it because she likes having problems to fix. I thrive on it because a hockey boy who can carry on a good conversation is worth a surprising number of challenges.

One of those challenges showed up this week at breakfast. We were preparing food for seven boys when I was reminded that one of our newest additions is allergic to pork. The biggest inconvenience that morning was remembering not to use bacon grease when we cooked the eggs. That sounds minor until you start thinking about how many meals in our house involve pork. Sausage in spaghetti sauce. Carnitas. Bacon. Various meals where pork isn’t exactly a garnish that can be politely removed after the fact. If he had simply told us, “I don’t like corn,” life would have been considerably easier. But an allergy is an allergy, and once a kid is living in our house, we’re going to work around it. We’ll figure out how to keep him fed, healthy, and on the ice.

The same thing applies to sleep. Hockey boys seem to have developed a remarkable ability to bank sleep. One of our boys this season takes a nap after our team breakfast, and I suspect he could sleep through a minor earthquake if it happened during his designated recovery period. Their schedules make it understandable. Some of their 10-plus-hour road trips have sleeping bunks, and after a sweep weekend they may spend the night at a teammate’s house to celebrate. Sometimes, apparently, the sweep is optional. Maybe they want to hang out. Maybe their teammate’s billet house has different rules. Maybe they simply want to sleep somewhere they aren’t expected to get up and do anything. Whatever the reason, we’ve learned that sleep is serious business. When the boys leave for a hot-day practice or game, I’ll bump the thermostat up a few degrees. When they come home and head upstairs to sleep away the afternoon, I’ll turn it back down. I don’t want to hear about inadequate sleeping conditions. Between the sleeping, feeding, and thermostat management, I’m running a very small hockey-themed hotel.

Then there are the things that have nothing to do with food or sleep. We become a sounding board when they’re trying to figure out whether a coach’s words match his actions. We can give them an opinion that isn’t completely saturated in the junior hockey world, although we’re careful to remind them that our opinions are still just our opinions. If they’re considering doing something that could have consequences, especially talking to a coach, we tell them to talk to their advisor first. They may call them “agents” in other sports, but junior hockey seems to prefer “advisor,” which sounds considerably less like someone who might show up wearing a shiny suit.

We also buy things. If they want spring water instead of filtered water, fine. If they want mozzarella sticks, we can make sure there’s a stash in the freezer with their name on it. If they want something very specific from Trader Joe’s, I’ll explain that Aldi has something that looks suspiciously similar for considerably less money. OLIPOP, however, is apparently where my billet-fee generosity ends. At some point, the boy needs to understand that I am providing room and board, not opening a beverage distribution company.

The fundamentals of our Billet B&B are actually pretty simple. We’re happy to make as much food as you will eat, and we want you to have a good sleeping experience. We don’t fluff your pillows or change your sheets for you. When you’re old enough to drive a car across the country to play hockey, you’re probably old enough to put your own clothes in a hamper. But as much as reasonably depends on us, we want your junior hockey experience to be a good one. Tipping isn’t required, although gift cards are always accepted.

We don’t do any of it for the accolades, but sincere “thank yous” from parents are always welcome. I know how nosey I would be about my own kids if someone else were taking care of them, which is why it amazes me how little involvement some parents have with the people living with their sons. The boys we enjoy the most tend to have parents who care enough to encourage the people taking care of them. It doesn’t take much. A text. A thank-you. A little acknowledgment that they know we’re trying to help their kid have a good year. Sometimes a few words from the parent of a particularly challenging hockey boy can recharge our patience just enough to keep us from declaring, “That is the last straw!” for another couple of days.

We may be the feet-on-the-ground parents while these boys are away from home, but it’s still a team. When they come into our house, we let them know our rules. If they stick around long enough, we usually find some middle ground that allows them to live under our roof without feeling like they’ve abandoned everything they learned from their biological family. Just because they aren’t your kids doesn’t mean they can’t learn something from you. And if they ask, I’m willing to be completely honest with strangers. With hockey boys, I can be honest, pretend I’m teaching them an important life lesson, and throw in enough self-deprecation to keep them uncertain whether I actually meant everything I said.

I am, after all, a sage.

A sage who freely distributes extra-thick bacon for breakfast on the Fridays of home-game weekends.

If anything can make your opinions seem more important, it will smell like bacon.

Waiting for the Next Brick

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

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

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

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

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

There’s just one little problem.

The immigration issue is still haunting them.

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

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

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

Then there’s hockey.

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

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

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

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

Which, in hockey terms, apparently qualifies as stability.

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

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

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

Toss. Catch. Lay.

Repeat.

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

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

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

Toss. Catch. Lay.

Of course, life doesn’t work that way.

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

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

Maybe there isn’t one.

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

For now, I’m just standing around watching.

Waiting for the next brick.