fiction

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?

The Watch Situation

I used to wear a watch constantly. Not because I was punctual—there has never been enough evidence to support that theory. I simply liked having one.

I graduated through the full evolutionary timeline of affordable timepieces. Started with a small analog watch, moved into the glamorous future of digital, first an LED display that required pressing a button to reveal the time as though it were protecting classified information, then an LCD that felt like owning technology stolen from NASA.

Then came the stopwatch phase. I spent an embarrassing amount of childhood trying to stop it on an exact second rather than some renegade hundredth.

I’d hit the button. 10.13.

Again. 9.87.

Again. 12.04.

Eventually, after several minutes of concentrated effort, I’d finally land on exactly 10.00 and feel a sense of accomplishment wildly disproportionate to the achievement. Kids today have streaming services and unlimited entertainment. We had a stopwatch and imagination.

Somewhere after that I developed opinions about watches—never more than one at a time, but I cycled through several of them, each paired with a twist-o-flex band engineered specifically to remove arm hair one follicle at a time. Whether my sweat was corrosive enough to slay the watches before the bands finished the job is a question science has yet to answer. Either way, eventually something inside me snapped. Or maybe it was the band. Watches and I were done.

Was it the sweat under the band? The vanity of not wanting tan lines beyond my already well-established farmer’s tan? The first cell phone clipped to my belt like a middle-aged Batman? The details are lost. The important part is I quit wearing watches and never looked back.

Until I did.

More than half my kids walk around with smartwatches now, closing rings and tracking steps like it’s a competitive sport. I started thinking, I walk a lot. Maybe I should get one so I can receive official electronic confirmation that I am, in fact, moving. Without verification, how does anyone really know?

I also get accused—regularly and fairly—of being impossible to shop for. Apparently my habit of buying things immediately rather than letting them sit on a wish list for six months makes me “difficult.” So I thought: Father’s Day. Put the watch on the list. Prove I’m giftable. I even imagined everyone pitching in together, which was generous of me to consider.

Let’s be honest about what Father’s Day actually looks like at my stage of life. A phone call. Maybe a card. One gift from the daughter who has benefited most from my extensive unpaid babysitting services. The new daughter-in-law might nudge my son toward participation, but I keep expectations low. Low expectations are the bubble wrap of emotional life.

Before officially adding it to the list, I consulted my wife and my local daughter. Their responses were different and spiritually identical.

My daughter used to be in the “sure, Dad, get a watch” camp. Then she spent more time with me and quietly switched parties. Her verdict: “I think you’d get way too much information off that kind of watch. I don’t recommend it.” She wasn’t talking about technology. She was talking about me. Give me access to heart rate data, sleep scores, and recovery metrics, and within a month I’ll be convinced something has moved from green to light green and we need to discuss it with someone. That vote went straight into the “no” column.

My wife came at it from a different angle. She reminded me I’d already broken up with watches once and expressed full confidence I’d abandon this one in about two months. Not hope—confidence. Nothing says supportive spouse like betting against you in your own fitness journey.

So that’s that. My Father’s Day list is empty again, and I’m back to trusting my phone to track my steps and shame me into movement. I already get a little unhinged when I miss my daily goals. If you want me to work hard, make me compete against myself—I hate letting myself down, and I do it often enough that the stakes feel real.

With summer heat arriving, I’ve shifted my walks to 7-9 a.m. I don’t avoid all the misery, but it keeps my wife from worrying I’ll become a cautionary tale on the side of the road. And I get to start the day knowing I’ve given this body another reason to keep going.

Some technologies improve with age. I am doing my best to be one of them.

Wedding Mode

I am charming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll just keep the one I married.

She Didn’t Want Me There

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the universe has a sense of humor.

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

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

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

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

I’m counting that as affection.

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.

The Scouting Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Thermostat Chronicles

I found the paperwork for our smart thermostats a couple weeks ago, stuffed in one of those builder-special drawers that exists purely to hold things you’ll ignore for months. I let it sit there while the hockey boys finished their exodus—gave it roughly the same priority as calling the dentist or figuring out what that dashboard light means.

Yesterday I finally set them up. Took about ten minutes.

The downstairs thermostat runs on a theology, not a formula. Cool to 68 at night, off in the morning, coast on captured coolness until we hit 74, then grant ourselves a brief mercy breeze. My wife runs warm. She’s rejected blankets as a concept by 3am and is down to a sheet, while I’m doing a careful negotiation with my own fluctuating temps. Nobody is fully comfortable. We’ve made peace with this.

The hockey boys upstairs had their own thermostat—which is a sentence that should concern any adult paying utilities. Most days they were actually responsible about it. I’d conduct routine inspections anyway, like a very underpaid HVAC auditor looking for an offender. Most days I’d find it off and feel mildly ridiculous. The days I found it cranked below my downstairs temperature, I shut it off and sent it to thermostat jail. Once my eyes shifted into critical mode, I noticed just how messy a room can be and still qualify as technically livable. Apparently, 64 degrees and scattered laundry is peak comfort for teenage boys.

One of them stayed home sick once and ran the AC all day through peak afternoon heat. I stayed downstairs trying to remember I was their on-site parent. No app, no way to intervene—just a man staring at his computer, listening to the AC run in a room he wasn’t sitting in. Next season, boys. Watch out.

Texas was a different category of problem entirely.

Multiple thermostats, multiple HVAC systems—which sounds luxurious until you learn that the upstairs unit was hilariously undersized for several hockey boys and all the heat their lives generated. Setting the thermostat to 60 doesn’t make the AC work harder. It just makes you feel more desperate. The unit cooled at one speed, like a tired old man doing his best and being yelled at anyway. I bought two window units for the upstairs bedrooms. In a closed room they worked great—small icy caves of relief. In the bonus room over the garage, that cold air just got eaten alive.

More than once I found myself promising “the AC guy is coming tomorrow” like some kind of sweaty HVAC prophet.

Then there were the buckets. Window units pull a shocking amount of moisture out of Texas air. That moisture goes in a five-gallon bucket. The bucket fills once, sometimes twice a day. If it’s more than halfway full at bedtime, you dump it—unless you’re a teenage boy, in which case the bucket simply doesn’t exist for you as a concept. Water eventually got into a cabinet. When we sold the house I disclosed the general situation. I did not give the buyers a TED talk on what awaits anyone who tries to keep that upstairs cool. Some things the next owner just has to discover at 2am on their own.

I am still the thermostat guy. This is not changing.

New boys come in the fall. They’ll crank the AC and sleep under twelve blankets like they’re filming a winter survival documentary, and I’ll watch from the couch on my phone app—quietly, in stealth mode, without tromping upstairs to prove a point. I feel less like a spy when I don’t have to stand up.

They brought chaos and laundry and Chipotle bags and a house that felt like something was happening in it. When they leave it gets quiet in a way that takes some adjusting to.

I’ll take the higher electric bills over a quiet house every time.

She Stayed Home Anyway

Friday night was supposed to be a bachelor night. My son skipped his camping trip to celebrate his fiancée’s new doctorate. My wife was supposed to be at a women’s church retreat somewhere in southeastern Oklahoma, surrounded by people who say “I’ll pray for them” and “Bless their hearts” every few minutes, and mean it. A room full of actual personalities.

She canceled. She stayed home with me.

I have spent considerable time assembling a list of plausible explanations.

The weather. Earlier this week, an EF4 tornado hit north of OKC. The retreat was a couple of hours away. Most of those women have lived here their whole lives, which means they’d have known exactly what to do. Judy would have been in better hands with them than with her husband, who has graduated from watching tornado coverage on TV to calling it “fieldwork.”

The new job. She finished her second week and told me, “If I knew it was going to be that hard, I would have asked for more money.” The graceful glide into semi-retirement she’d been planning has been postponed indefinitely. A full weekend of singing and fellowship might have felt less like rest and more like a different kind of exhausting.

The wedding. Their photographer canceled this week — a death in the family, and the memorial service landed on my son’s wedding day. The caterer they’d lined up is closing at the end of June. Judy found out about both of these things Friday morning, and before the day was out, she had a list of approximately a dozen photographers to call and filed the situation under problems I can fix. This is her natural environment. When I eavesdrop on her talking to our daughter, I hear a woman who genuinely believes she can solve things, and who is usually right about that. A retreat would have taken her off the field during crunch time.

The house. Between saxophone recitals, a doctoral defense, and family dinners, deep cleaning has been hard to come by. Our son is still living here until the wedding, which means every room is in use, and Judy hasn’t been able to close a door behind her and declare it “clean” the way she likes. Saturday presented an opportunity. I recognize this possibility.

Me. Her first comment was, “You were certainly a factor.” She said it warmly, which is the charitable interpretation, and I’m going with that. I’ll acknowledge I’ve been crankier than usual this week — by evening, I’m running on low-battery notifications, more tired and capable of the sharp word instead of the kind one. I start most mornings reasonably enough, but the day works on me. Talking less or answering in vague generalities is usually the better move. The last remaining bits of common sense do what they can.

She’s always had a heart for a project. Apparently, I still qualify.

The truth is, I don’t fully know why she stayed. My best guess is it was the wedding stuff, and that I was a small contributing factor, and that she weighed a weekend of fellowship against the specific pull of problems she could actually do something about — and the problems won.

I am the guy who takes out the trash and reminds her we need to get to the bank Saturday morning. I am the gardener who calls the perennial company to get replacement plants sent, then makes sure they’re in the ground before we can go out for dinner. Our emotional lanes are pretty well established. The kids don’t bring their big life questions to me. They bring them to Judy, who has the patience to sit with the answers longer than I do. I give responses that are either too vague or too sharp. Not nearly as helpful.

So if she tells herself she stayed home partly for me, I’m not going to argue. I know she has a full world of people who make her feel needed. If I’m somewhere in that number, I’ll take it.

Whether it is with a toilet brush or a phone call, Judy will continue her mission to save the world. Mine is just to make sure she can.