Observations

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.

Maybe We’re Not Missing Adventure After All

There’s a certain kind of person who goes to a wedding in another state and thinks, “What a beautiful place. We should come back and kayak sometime.”

Then there’s us. We went to our son’s wedding and thought, “Did we remember to thaw the hamburger before we left?”

While we were basically quarantined at the venue, guests were out doing actual things — lakes, museums, zoos, little downtown districts with string lights. More than one person commented specifically on the lack of rain, which felt borderline miraculous given that the week before, Judy and I were mentally preparing for Noah’s Ark: Wedding Edition. Instead, the sun came out, people got mildly sunburned, and Midwesterners started wearing Thunder attire with reckless confidence.

One guest called it “Texas-lite.” Fewer cities, less traffic, but still that independent spirit with a side of, “You wanna go to the casino for a couple hours?” Honestly, that might be the most accurate tourism slogan the state has ever had.

The wedding yanked me out of my shell like someone grabbing a turtle and dropping it into a family reunion. I do better than most actual turtles — I walk four or five miles a day, Judy swims or lifts nearly every day — but the wedding forced us into a different category entirely. Socially active. Emotionally on-call. Logistically overbooked.

For one weekend, I became outgoing. Charming, even. I made conversation, asked follow-up questions, made eye contact for what felt like six consecutive minutes. That kind of performance takes a toll on a middle-aged man. By Monday I had fully reverted, quietly staring at a grocery list and wondering if we already had shredded cheese at home.

Here’s the question I keep asking myself: are we addicted to being needed?

All the local kids are married now. We have one grandchild here and two more on the way. Judy still works full-time. In late August, we become billet parents again for a couple more junior hockey players. When free time appears, our minds don’t drift toward “let’s disappear into the mountains.” They drift toward whether we’re stocked up on snacks before the kids come over, or whether Once Upon a Child has anything worth grabbing this weekend.

Judy ran the wedding as both head planner and mother of the groom. Centerpieces, linens, and boxes of “we might need this” colonized every spare room in the house. I’m fairly certain we lost a closet.

Even after the wedding, with friends still in town, Judy’s first reaction was not enthusiasm. The tank was empty. But the grill came out, lawn chairs appeared, people laughed — and at some point it just felt right again, the way it always seems to once you stop dreading the thing and start doing it. The storm shelter in the garage floor remains our unofficial tourist attraction. I’ve given that tour more times than I can count.

We’ll take our two-week vacation this summer. We’ll probably drive to see our parents in August while Judy works remote to stretch the days. We check those boxes. But I wonder sometimes whether we’re healthy because we don’t spend three weekends a month chasing adventure across Texas and Oklahoma, or healthy because emotionally we know we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing.

Not every morning do we wake up thinking, “Great day to reorganize everything around babysitting.” But when too many days pass without seeing the kids or grandkids, we look at each other around 7 p.m. and say, “I miss them.”

That’s probably the pattern until it isn’t. Someday the house will be still. No baby clothes to hunt down, no hockey kids rolling in, no one asking to see the tornado bunker. If we’re lucky — physically steady, mentally intact, still on the kids’ good side — we’ll buy that camper and drive around the country.

And if we’ve behaved well enough, maybe they’ll even give us their address.

Wedding Mode

I am charming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll just keep the one I married.

What We’re Actually Trying to Say

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We want that for all of our kids.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The First Day We Owned a Car

For nearly three years, we lived inside a corporate-sponsored auto utopia where cars appeared, tires got rotated, and nobody asked us about titles or GAP coverage. When my wife’s job changed, that ended. We looked at the cars, realized we liked them, and bought the exact same ones we’d already been driving. No test drives, no salesman with a clipboard—we already knew where all the cupholders were.

Because the cars came through her job, Judy’s the official buyer. Which meant either a power of attorney got signed, or she handles the plates herself. I prefer the second option.

The titles were taking a while. Wedding planning was not, because we were simultaneously finding a replacement photographer and helping the bride and groom absorb the casual bombshell that their caterer was closing a few weeks after the reception. Will the staff hold up? Will the food? I have no idea—I’m not paying for it, which is apparently the exact point where my opinion expires.

Judy emailed Toyota asking for a status update. That afternoon, the titles showed up via FedEx Next Day. I saw the email she sent. It was not the kind of prose that normally bends interstate logistics to its will, but somehow a file moved from limbo to “arrived” on Friday, May 8th. The paperwork had finally caught up to reality—we’d had insurance since the day we came off the lease, and technically owned the cars before the titles showed up, but this was the moment it was all official.

We headed southwest to Newcastle for dinner. When you spend your days with a grandchild, getting out and going somewhere becomes necessary for everyone involved. We picked an Italian place that was probably better than this review. The eggplant parmigiana leaned heavily toward breading, with the eggplant in more of a supporting role. Judy’s meatballs fully met expectations, which is really all meatballs are ever trying to do. The door had a sign: “Your first two breadsticks are Free.” They were fine. The dipping sauce was the real overachiever.

Walking out, the clouds had clearly decided Newcastle needed to be included in whatever was happening to the north.

Rain started as we got in the car. Then hail. And why do we call them hailstones? Stones sounds peaceful, geological. These sounded like someone upstairs had a personal grievance with our roof. We pulled off at the first exit and tried to dodge the bigger ones—the hail decides where it lands and you’re basically just emotionally participating in your own damage. Most of it was pea-sized, but every storm has a few overachievers.

The real problem was traffic. Our first exit east off 44 is everybody’s first exit east off 44, and the stop sign that’s normally fine turned into a quarter-mile line of vehicles getting assaulted by ice. No Batmobile button. No bulletproof mode. Just “accept everything the sky wants to give you.”

Through all of it, Judy narrated the car’s suffering. My poor car. What is going on out there? My poor car doesn’t deserve this. She was right, too—we’d driven those cars for three years without a single hail dent. The first day the paperwork made them officially ours, the heavens started freelancing as a body shop.

Eventually traffic moved. Judy declined to perform the traditional Oklahoma courtesy wave at the stop sign and took everyone’s patience as a green light. She shot home, pulled into the garage at speed, skipped the obstacle inspection entirely. We’re grandparents with bases for future car seats already stockpiled in there—none of them were harmed.

Back inside, hail was piled in the flower beds. The yard looked like the weather had thrown a tantrum. We got in the hot tub anyway, because if life lightly damages your property, the reasonable response is warm water and mild defiance.

Later, in pajamas, we noticed the FedEx envelope on the counter. The titles. Official proof we owned the cars. We’d driven them for three years through every Oklahoma storm without incident, and on the day the paperwork finally arrived—that.

I could decide life is unfair. Or I could go with the version that preserves my sanity: God has a sense of humor, and Friday was a gentle reminder about who’s actually steering. I’m glad he’s jovial. I’m especially glad he didn’t laugh harder.

Something’s Going Around

Yesterday I couldn’t pull a post together. Tried a few angles, threw them against the wall, watched them slide like wet spaghetti. Even Mr. AI couldn’t find the thread. I let it go — not a waste, just something to bank for later.

So here I am today, a little achy, coughing in the morning, wondering if something’s coming for me or if this is just what your 60s feel like on a Saturday.

My walks have been fine if your standard is “I checked the box.” Earlier version of me could do five or six miles without thinking about it. My daughter and I took some long ones during COVID. Now I’m listening to a book and ignoring the fact that my feet are staging a slow rebellion.

The shoes are partly to blame. Found a pair I loved — perfect, until this week, when they let some foot pain in like they’d been holding it in reserve. I have Good Feet inserts and a couple of things I ordered online. None of them seems particularly invested in my well-being.

Then there’s the Ellie factor. Playing on the floor with a granddaughter sounds simple. It is not. Getting down is fine. The problem is bending my knees during the playing, and the moment she grabs my finger expecting me to spring upright regardless of whether my leg is folded into an origami crane. She has places to go. The inspection waits for no one. She’s also figured out that closed doors are a lot less intimidating when one of the big people is backing her up.

The germs are probably hers, too. COVID made me paranoid — cart handles, my phone, anything touched by human hands. I’ve relaxed about most of that. What I can’t get ahead of is sharing a spoon with someone who has no concept of germ theory and does not care. I sample things off her tray to encourage her to eat. She samples my lunch with her eyes until I give in. That’s the deal. I’m a willing accomplice.

Oklahoma cedar season is technically over, but I’m not ruling it out. I lived in Texas 15 years and never touched an allergy pill — thought I was immune, that pollen and I had some kind of truce. It left me alone long enough that I got cocky. Now my daily regimen is not exactly intimidating: a multivitamin, an allergy pill, and a baby aspirin. Not a real aspirin. A baby one.

The aches don’t stop me from anything. They don’t usually last more than an hour. Still cooking meals, planting flowers, escorting Ellie from one approved zone to the next.

Whatever it is — age, pollen, shoes, shared spoons — I’ll keep sleeping well and showing up. She’s going to grab that finger again tomorrow whether I’m ready or not.

Humbled at the Exit

This morning started as a routine errand run. Somewhere between the hot tub and Sam’s Club, it turned into a humbling I didn’t see coming.

Four weeks of “scoop of this, scoop of that” Sunday night chemistry had produced a layer of something on the water that my wife found less than inviting. Fair. My self-appointed title of Hot Tub Chemist Extraordinaire was officially under review, so the first stop was Leslie’s for a free water test—which I will keep using indefinitely while buying all my chemicals online at half the price. I’m aware of the irony. I do like the woman who tells me I’ve been neglectful, and those few minutes of conversation aren’t nothing when your social calendar is on the quieter side.

Dry acid, some chlorine. Reputation partially restored.

Sam’s next, because the fridge needed actual food. My wife hosted a terrific wedding shower for our son’s fiancée, and the leftover situation had become a caloric hazard. My body was asking for roasted vegetables. Gas was $3.699, which felt like a small win. I loaded up on Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, Gatorade, and a case of water—placed carefully on the bottom of the cart by a man who had no idea what was coming.

I love the Sam’s scan-and-go app. There’s something satisfying about walking past the checkout lanes knowing you’ve already handled it. I scanned everything, flipped items for barcodes, did my due diligence. Before paying, the app asked me to count my items. I counted twice. Got 17, then 16. The app said 16. I had multiple quantities of a couple things, so I figured that explained the gap and moved on without a tiebreaker count.

The door checker didn’t wave me through like usual. She scanned the water sitting on the bottom of my cart.

“You didn’t pay for this.”

Not a question.

She moved toward the Gatorade next—I held my breath—but that one was on the receipt. Instead of escorting me to what I can only imagine is a folding chair near customer service where you sit and think about your choices, she added the water to my account on the spot. Civilized. Quiet. More dignity than I’d earned.

Next time I’ll probably just use the regular checkout. Or bring my daughter, who has a reliable way of keeping my gray-matter moments from becoming public events.

I always say I’m glad when God keeps me humble. Even more glad when it only costs me my pride—a lot cheaper than a speeding ticket.

Ellie at Almost One: Teeth Optional

Almost a year old and still no teeth. She’s not worried about it, and neither am I. Steak can wait.

What has changed is the noise. It used to be a reliable loop of da-da-da from morning until she crashed. Now she’s experimenting — new sounds, new combinations, little vocal detours I haven’t heard before. I started repeating them back to her. She either returns the exact sound or tweaks it slightly, like she’s filing a small correction on my pronunciation. The negotiation phase of our relationship has begun. Once the teeth show up, she’ll unlock version 2.0.

I haven’t personally witnessed the ten-step solo walk yet, but I’ve heard the reports. Credible sources. I’ve spent months extending my hand the moment she wants to stand, and apparently she doesn’t always need it anymore. I watch her parents stand a few feet away and wave her toward them like a tiny flight crew directing a plane to the gate. I understand the instinct. But grandparents don’t care about charts or percentiles — we don’t care about the milestones on someone else’s timeline. We care that the baby smiles and crawls toward us. That’s what recharges my battery. My job is to hold out the hand a little longer than is strictly necessary, and feel completely fine about it.

The toys lately are wood shapes and colored golf balls — not together by design, but they ended up together anyway because that’s how Ellie operates. Rings, stackable shapes, balls. And our coffee table, which has grooves along the side that are exactly the right size to wedge the wooden pieces into. I did not plan this. The coffee table did not consent. But Ellie spotted the opportunity immediately and has committed to filling those grooves every single visit, then yanking everything out with a satisfaction that’s hard to describe. I occasionally loosen a piece that’s too tight. Grandpa as silent co-conspirator. Works for both of us.

The Sleeping Grandpa Gambit

She still tries to rouse me when I’m pretending to sleep. I’ve gotten better at holding the bit longer — eyes shut, no reaction, even as I hear her crawling over to stage her intervention. She grabs a finger and pulls. I stay down. She reconsiders. Pulls harder. I’m not going to pretend I always win this one.

Naptimes are still neither of our favorites. Once she’s asleep, great. The part before that — where she looks at me like I’ve deeply betrayed her by placing her in the crib — I haven’t made peace with that yet. I’ve started the white noise a few minutes early, hold her with the blanket, wait for the signs. Drooping head. Eye rub. Sometimes she goes down without much protest. Other times she wakes up 40 minutes later standing in the crib at full volume, and I have to honestly ask: was she sleeping, or just considering her options quietly? Either way, I do my best and hope her mom arrives before the crankies fully set in.

Every day I babysit her, I want to give her a good experience. Her parents don’t tip, but Ellie’s smile more than covers it. When I have other things I’d like to be doing and she decides this is a perfect moment to inspect every room in the house or eat half an apple very slowly — I try to remember that most people don’t get this.

My patience isn’t perfect. It’s getting better. The sarcasm is not going anywhere, though. Judging by some of Ellie’s expressions lately, she’s already picking it up.

A One-in-Ten Kind of Day

You never really know which random Tuesday is going to hand you a chance to be a decent human. And if you’re wired like me—high sarcasm, low patience, questionable halo—you have to be ready when it shows up and taps you on the shoulder.

Today’s opportunity arrived courtesy of a baby who refused to sleep. The groceries were mine, so my daughter stayed home with the tiny insomniac while I got released into the wild alone. Two stops. Don’t screw it up.

I took the back way to Sam’s to dodge the traffic lights, pulled in, and noticed a man three spots over finishing his unload. A cane was sitting in his cart. He was starting that slow, careful walk to the return corral. I hopped out and called over, “Let me help you with that, sir.” He thanked me. I took the cart.

A couple of people nearby had clearly watched the whole thing. And then this voice showed up in my head: I am morally superior to all of you. Which is not the inspirational inner monologue anyone needs—and is exactly the kind of thought a genuinely good person would never have. I tilted my nose back down to its proper setting and went inside.

In the produce section, I grabbed my two bags of precut broccoli, because I’m either thriving or deeply committed to the illusion of it. The woman behind me laughed and said she should’ve grabbed hers from the back, too. We checked the dates—same. She was fine. We ended up talking for a few minutes about which vegetables she roasts and how. She was warm in that effortless way some people are, not polite-warm but actually interested. I thought about her the rest of the trip. That woman is one of the nicest people I’ve met in a while. I should be more like her.

I scanned everything on my phone, paid through the Sam’s app, and walked out feeling like I owned the building. Tried to look humble. Didn’t pull it off.

Back at the car, I loaded groceries the right way—heavy on the bottom, cold stuff together, like a responsible adult impersonator. When I went to return my cart, the guy parked across from me was just finishing his own unload. I hollered, “Send it my way, I’ll introduce it to the other carts.” He gave it a good shove and thanked me. As we were both getting in our cars he said, “I usually leave my phone in the cart.”

“If I’d found it,” I told him, “I probably would’ve given it back to you.”

We both smiled at the probably.

Winco was a quick second stop. I only needed a couple of things, which is why I wandered three extra aisles. My internal GPS runs on confidence and bad information. On the way to the meat section I passed an older couple—husband pushing the cart—and he looked up and said something I couldn’t quite catch. I asked him to repeat it. He did. Sounded exactly the same. I offered a vague “I hope that works out” and kept moving.

The woman ahead of me glanced back. “I don’t think his wife understands him either.”

I said—maybe to her, maybe mostly to myself—”When I get that age, my wife will probably pretend she doesn’t understand me just to make her life easier. Even when she does.”

We all want to age with dignity. To be seen. To still feel like we matter to the people around us.

I don’t always show up well. Today was maybe one good day out of ten. The sarcasm is always there, running in the background—it just needs to stay in my head more, and in my blog, and less in the faces of people who didn’t ask for it.

The folks I run into at Sam’s and Winco deserve a better version of me than I usually bring. Today I came close. I’d like to do it more often.