Life

The Giraffe Named Ellie

I arrived at my daughter’s house at 8:30 with the “Ellie-approved” stroller and no ambiguity about whether I wanted to be there. The night before, I’d said, “Are we going to see Ellie tomorrow?” She said, “Do you want to go to the zoo?” As if Ellie’s presence made the venue negotiable.

She drove. She recently quit her job to become “Mom of One with a 2 girl upgrade before October arrives,” and OKC morning highways are somehow the least chaotic part of her current life. I had no objection. I rarely fight someone else doing the driving — and when she stays at the speed limit, the car tracking app on my phone briefly believes I’m a responsible adult. When my wife drives, that same app apparently concludes I’ve been drag racing on the interstate.

At the gate, my daughter bought the membership: two adults and as many kids under 3 as you can account for at any given moment. The zoo seemed optimistic about that number.

I should be upfront about something. I’m not a zoo person.

I understand what zoos do. Children see animals, become fascinated with the natural world, and some of them eventually become veterinarians. I applaud all of that from a comfortable distance. I grew up near the Columbus Zoo, which is a good one. I don’t remember how many times I went as a child, and I think that tells you something.

What semi-retirement gives you, though, is availability — and decent enough eyesight to qualify as a tag-team partner for a daughter willing to tolerate your company. I’ve done this before. I’ve taken children to zoos before. I’ve come close to accidentally enrolling a son in the chimpanzee exhibit on a Mother’s Day in the early 2000s, and I only exaggerate that story a little.

My approach to animals is efficient. I look at a wildebeest, think something like, “That is a genuinely unfortunate head,” and move on. God apparently designed these creatures with total confidence. My wife and I cannot pick a paint color for a hallway without four trips to the hardware store, so the idea of just deciding to make a wildebeest is beyond me.

One thing the OKC Zoo has over the Columbus Zoo: at Columbus, the exhibits have large sweeping names like “North America.” At this zoo, they have a section called “Oklahoma,” which appears to contain enough variety to cover most of the continent. Having lived here awhile, I’ve stopped being surprised by that.

Ellie’s highlights were specific and, if you blinked, easy to miss.

The Cheerios in her stroller cup holders were the main event. She’d glance at passing animals, then return to the serious work of gumming the oat circles into paste. The animals were ambient. The Cheerios were the feature.

The flamingos got real attention — they were close to the path and practically fluorescent, and her eyes tracked them for a genuine stretch. For reference, thirty seconds of eye contact from a one-year-old is the equivalent of a standing ovation.

The dinosaur at the entrance barely registered on the way in. On the way out, she leaned back against my chest, looked straight up at the brontosaurus (I think), and smiled at him. I don’t know what she thought it was. The dinosaur didn’t smile back, but she held up her end of the exchange.

In my world, large reptiles are always “him.” I know this isn’t scientifically airtight, but I’ve been consistent about it for decades, and I’m not changing now.

The whole trip ran about three hours. My daughter ran the operation; I pushed the stroller and kept the headcount accurate, both of which I managed.

One of the giraffes is named Ellie. I’d go back just to point at her and say, “Look, there’s the other one.”

Our Ellie fell asleep before we made it out of the parking lot. When babysitting, she can convince me sleep is a hobby she hasn’t fully committed to yet — she’ll run the living room like she’s training for something and still have energy when I don’t. But three hours of flamingos and Cheerios and stroller traffic, and she was gone before I finished a sentence.

That’s why we took our own kids to the zoo, too. It’s not something you say out loud at the time, but everyone knows it. The animals are fine. The nap is the whole point.

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?

Hot Tub 3.0: I Finally Got It Right (Mostly)

I take my hot tub water to Leslie’s for testing every week. Sometimes monthly, when I’m feeling particularly confident in my abilities as a hot tub owner—which, as it turns out, I should not be. Cyanuric acid has never technically failed me on those tests, but it shows up on my report card the way my kindergarten teacher’s notes did. Not quite a problem. Just a little glare. A suggestion that maybe you could do better.

This week’s test was unnecessary. I knew the water was fine. I went anyway, because I had a plan, and I needed the ritual of confirmation before I could commit to it. The plan was simple: Andy empties the hot tub for the third time, but smarter than the last two.

That is a low bar.

I bought the Purge, which is a product designed to flush the pipes and biofilm before you drain. The night before, I added it to the water, ran the jets briefly while I sprayed out the filters, and watched in mild horror as bubbles cascaded over the sides of the tub and started a very serious attempt to take over the backyard. Five minutes of filter-spraying produced enough foam to threaten the pergola. Eventually it settled down, and I buckled the cover back on to hold the temperature at 95 degrees like the instructions said.

Morning comes. I stretch the hoses toward the street, drop in the submersible pump, flip the switch, and stand there feeling like a man who has his life together. Then I pick up the Purge instructions to give them one last look, and I find a line I’d skimmed past the night before.

“Run the hot tub pumps to flush out the pipes before emptying the tub.”

The pump is already running, but the water level is still high enough. I flip on the jets, let them circulate for a few minutes, and quietly note that catching this before the tub was half-empty probably counts as personal growth.

I ate breakfast. Did some unimportant things. Came back about an hour later.

The hot tub has seating recesses built into it, which is what separates it from being a very expensive, very shallow bathtub. Those recesses, however, do not drain on their own. When the water level drops below the seats, you’re left with little puddles of the exact stuff you were trying to get rid of, like a hoarder who survived the eviction.

This is where the wet/dry vac came in. It’s lived in my garage for years, hauled from Texas, where its entire career consisted of vacuuming acorns. This was its first water. I hosed down the sides of the tub, vacuumed out each seat recess, dumped that water into the lowest point where the pump was still running, and repeated until there was almost nothing left.

Then the pump hit its depth limit, and I had a thought that felt, in the moment, like genuine engineering: drop the pump directly into the vac tank and let it empty that too. No hauling. No sloshing a heavy vac across the yard. The pump did the work while I supervised, which is my strongest skill.

For context on why this matters:

HT 1.0, I dealt with the entire hot tub using five-gallon buckets, hauled by hand, over and over, and never got within a foot of the bottom. HT 2.0, I had the pump, which helped, but I was lazy about the seat recesses and left behind enough shingle granules to form a small gravel path. (The hot tub sits under a pergola with gutters. Rain still finds a way. It always does.) HT 3.0 ended with clean pipes, almost no residue, and no buckets. It was the first time this process felt like something a competent person might do.

I went for a walk while the tub refilled. About an hour, I figured. When I got back, I thought, “I’ll let it fill a little more while I play online chess.”

Chess, apparently, required my full and extended attention. By the time I turned the hose off, the water level was higher than intended, and when I flipped the fuses back on, the pump had to take a couple of dry gulps before the water reached it. A minor thing. Noted for 4.0.

The water temperature at fill was 73 degrees. It takes time to climb back up to soak-worthy, but by evening we were both in the tub, my wife and I. 35 years of marriage, celebrating with chlorinated water and clean plumbing.

There was a problem. The water was a little high—my fault entirely—and my wife couldn’t sit in the recesses without the water reaching her chin. I offered to remove myself from the equation. My body, as I may have mentioned, takes up a meaningful amount of space. She said no, it was fine.

That is love. Gargling hot tub water voluntarily so you can spend a few minutes together outside. She has many good qualities. Being married to me is just one of the things she tolerates.

Hot Tub 4.0 will involve filling through the filter housing to avoid the dry-pump issue. I’ll read the directions first next time. Maybe.

For context on why this matters: I documented the original bucket disaster—The Hot Tub Hero—if you want the full humbling backstory. HT 1.0, I dealt with the recesses using five-gallon buckets, hauled by hand, over and over, and never got within a foot of the bottom. HT 2.0, I had the pump, which helped, but I was lazy about the seat recesses and left behind enough shingle granules to form a small gravel path. (The hot tub sits under a pergola with gutters. Rain still finds a way. It always does.) HT 3.0 ended with clean pipes, almost no residue, and no buckets. It was the first time this process felt like something a competent person might do.

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.

The Freezer Reckoning

Our son got married last weekend, and the hockey boys cleared out about six weeks ago, and somewhere in there I started walking around feeling like a man who had just solved a very complicated equation. Fewer people. Less food. Maybe I’d finally figure out what a normal grocery run looks like.

I have not figured that out.

What I’ve figured out is that our three freezers — the kitchen one, the garage one, and the chest freezer that operates mostly on faith — contain a fairly accurate biography of the last several months of our family’s life, and that biography is not well-organized.

The honest version is that I did this. I buy a ten-pound tube of hamburger because that’s who I am, probably during some kind of Sam’s Club fever dream, and then I brown it and portion it into freezer bags I’ve flattened out because flat is more efficient. Except they’re not flat. They have ridges. They develop personalities. They stack the way things stack when the person doing the stacking is optimistic but not precise. Over time they’ve been joined by what I can only call the Chicken Bag Cousins — bags from three different cooking sessions, a couple of optimistic grilling sessions that nobody finished, reheated once and found wanting, frozen again on the theory that Past Me was looking out for Future Me. Future Me has since learned that Past Me was overconfident. There’s also a respectable quantity of brisket, some sausages I can’t fully account for, and enough frozen banana halves to suggest I had real smoothie ambitions that I haven’t quite followed through on. My job is to rotate all of this back through the kitchen before it becomes archaeology. I am failing at that job.

The problem isn’t just volume. It’s that everyone eating out of these freezers wants something different. My wife is dieting, so there’s browned turkey in there for her taco salads. My son’s new wife is vegetarian, so we’ve got black bean burgers, vegetarian pizzas, and somewhere north of a dozen sweet potato and bean burritos she can heat up when whatever I’ve made for dinner doesn’t work for her. The hockey boys left behind pizza rolls and mozzarella sticks the way other people leave behind furniture — just part of the place now. And then there’s me, standing in front of an open freezer at 5pm, trying to figure out how to turn any of this into something that resembles a meal.

My daughter gets a tour about once a week. I open the chest freezer and make my case. “Wouldn’t sloppy joes be good? I’ve got the beef right here, already browned.” Last visit, she left with a few things and agreed in principle to two dinners next week, which I’m counting as a genuine win. Our granddaughter Ellie is less useful — she’s refusing to grow teeth at any kind of reasonable pace, which I respect as a personal choice but doesn’t help with the chicken situation.

The cruise is in mid-summer. That’s the finish line. Every freezer-excavation dinner between now and then is doing something — keeping us honest, keeping us from buying more food we don’t need, keeping my wife and me from just staring at each other while eating tonight’s protein selection and pretending we planned it that way. The dining room on the ship is going to feel earned.

I grew up in a house where you didn’t waste food, and that’s still in me. Some of what’s in those freezers isn’t exactly what I’d serve company, but it deserves better than the trash, so we eat it, and we move on. It’s a strange thing, eating your way through a freezer that was packed for a different version of your life — when the house was full, when I was buying for a crowd, when nobody thought twice about four frozen pizzas on a Tuesday night. The house is quieter now. It’s a good quiet, mostly. Our son is happy and our daughter’s family is close and Ellie is growing up even without the teeth. Things are good.

The freezers will catch up eventually.

Inherited Love, Acquired Like

After a wedding, you don’t just gain a son- or daughter-in-law. You gain a brand-new human you are now morally obligated to love, whether or not you’d voluntarily spend three hours in a car alone with them.

You love your kid. You love the person they chose. The spouse becomes an extension of your child, like an emotional annex. You don’t need a sociology degree or any other “-ology” to know that doing right by either of them is a good long-term investment. Love one, love both, everybody’s happy, Hallmark can roll credits.

But “loving” the new spouse does not automatically convert to an immediate “like.”

For the purposes of this little ramble, love means treating the spouse with the respect and honor your child would appreciate. They’re married now. They’re one. Your treatment should reflect that, whether or not you fully understand every choice this delightful new person has made and will continue to make with great confidence.

Like is different. Like is earned. Like is slower.

“Fake It” And Then What?

There’s that old line, “Fake it till you make it.” With in-laws, it becomes: fake it until you really love them. The initial love is inherited—you love your kid, so their spouse gets swept into the coverage area like a dependent on a health plan. Basic kindness and benefit of the doubt, grandfathered in by your affection for your child.

The “spousal like” is acquired. It’s not instantaneous. It shows up in oddly specific moments. You know you have it when you’re both stuck in a car together and the conversation just keeps going—serious to stupid, jobs to movies to “what is wrong with that guy’s driving?”—and you realize you’re not just being polite anymore.

Then there’s the social setting version, which is its own beast. One-on-one is not the same person who walks into a party. For some of us, parties are draining. A room full of small talk feels like being slowly pecked to death by well-meaning ducks. Give me a corner, a chair, and one solid conversation partner.

My married son is far too extroverted in a group for my taste. He works the room like he’s on a campaign trail. But he knows his dad, so we can drop out of the noise and settle into something real—serious enough to matter, sarcastic enough that it doesn’t turn into a lecture series nobody registered for.

The Introvert Who Won My Heart

My daughter has been married almost four years to an introvert. He doesn’t give you a lot to work with. Conversations are never hard, but they’re not the same elastic back-and-forth I have with my kids. More pauses, fewer punchlines, less verbal jazz.

But he won my heart anyway—by how he takes care of my granddaughter and looks out for my daughter. I wouldn’t volunteer for a ten-hour road trip with him. But I know he puts the women in his life on a pedestal, and that matters more than whether he appreciates my running commentary on the state of the universe.

That’s a kind of like that grows from watching, not talking.

The Many Versions of a Daughter-in-Law

My son’s new wife is a different kind of story entirely.

First she was simply our son’s girlfriend. Then the woman he wanted to marry, from another faith tradition—which added some complexity and a few extra conversations. Then she got baptized, and she became our future daughter-in-law in a much more layered way.

On top of all that, she spent the better part of this year as a near-aunt to our granddaughter, a doctorate candidate who crossed the finish line one week before walking down the aisle, a bride planning her dream wedding on a budget that kept shrinking in her imagination, and a person who loves her life in Oklahoma while missing parts of the family and culture she grew up in.

That’s a lot for one person to carry, and she carried it without visibly unraveling—which, having watched the whole thing unfold, I find genuinely impressive.

Now the wedding is over. Real life starts.

I’m looking forward to the spouse she’ll be once the adrenaline settles. I’m looking forward to watching them build rhythms and traditions and eventually a family of their own. And selfishly, I’m looking forward to the car ride where the conversation bounces between serious and sassy and neither of us has to work too hard at it.

But even if we never become natural road-trip buddies—if the rapport stays warm but never quite effortless—I’ll still be grateful if she loves my son well. If his heart got handed to someone who’ll protect it carefully for the rest of his life, she’s earned a lifetime pass.

She’s just starting. So are we, honestly.

Ellie’s Birthday, Plus Two

I found out I was going to be a grandfather to two additional granddaughters in the fall. I was fully aware of twins, but the granddaughter portion came out during the birthday party.

This is the birthday party of the granddaughter who opted to sell her birthday for future naming rights so her uncle and now aunt could get married on the same weekend. She didn’t sign the contract willingly, obviously, but at one year old your legal options are limited.

Our granddaughter Ellie was also involved in the reveal. After interviews with the attendees—each one asked to guess the genders of the twins and which baby would arrive first—my wife and I both went with one of each. I said boy first. My wife said girl first. Most of the other guesses were also one of each, with the arrival order treated as an afterthought.

When the boxes came out, they were labeled “Baby A” and “Baby B,” which sounds less like children and more like a pharmaceutical trial. I did a little research afterward. Doctors can actually tell which baby will come first, and those are the same designations they use. Ellie was held by her dad in one arm, with the Baby A box in the other. When the lid came off, Ellie grabbed a stuffed pink bunny from the bottom. Baby A: female.

Dad and mom had to distract Ellie from what had instantly become her favorite possession so her hands were free for the next box. The Baby B box was preceded by a few tears, which turned into another stuffed animal. I remember a toy that was definitely not blue—pinks and pastels throughout. My daughter tried to convince me it was definitely pink. Family memory is a generous system: it lets everyone be certain and still somehow disagree. Baby B also equaled female.

Gifts followed the reveal. Very much baby stuff. The largest theme was “she loves to play in the water,” so Ellie got a water station, floaties, and a few swimsuits. She had mastered the gift bag immediately—pull out the tissue paper, keep reaching until the bag surrenders. Wrapped gifts were harder. Her mom would start a tear in the wrapping paper, and Ellie would aggressively remove roughly seven percent of it before deciding mom could handle the rest.

The cake came last, which felt right. She timidly dug in at first, like she was unsure whether smashing dessert with both hands was socially acceptable. But once she realized nobody was stopping her, she turned into a tiny wrecking ball with frosting. Chunks were flying off the highchair. It was one of those proud grandparent moments.

The guest list leaned more heavily toward the groom’s side, though the bride’s parents had met Ellie a few weeks before and loved her immediately. Wedding logistics—flowers, a bridesmaid luncheon, the general chaos of a wedding weekend—meant the birthday party got wedged in wherever there was room. Ellie wasn’t old enough to know she was being cheated, which was convenient for everyone.

And it wasn’t even entirely her time. She had to start sharing the spotlight with her future sisters—a cruel introduction to life as the older sibling, but she’ll be better for it, and she’ll have two smaller people nearby who make excellent scapegoats.

One attendee summed up his relationship with babies honestly: “She is more durable now. I am not as reluctant to handle her.” He quickly added that the twins would be outside his comfort zone for at least a year after they’re born.

The gender reveal is worth putting on a calendar. Three granddaughters by fall, two of them already the proud owners of stuffed animals they won’t appreciate for another year. Grandpa shows up regardless of the developmental stage, the fragility level, or the noise output.

Ellie starts sharing the spotlight in the fall. She’ll figure out the scapegoat situation on her own. She seems sharp.

The Budget That Lived Briefly

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now here’s where I become the punchline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

35 Years and the Keys on the Table

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We’re Actually Trying to Say

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We want that for all of our kids.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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