Life

The Remarkable Adventures of an Unremarkable Morning

There’s a meeting at 9:00, and I have a small window before I put on my babysitting hat. So naturally, I ate a bagel, drank two cups of coffee, and chugged the last of a quart of orange juice left over from last month’s wedding shower — because apparently cleaning out a refrigerator is a noble act of self-sacrifice rather than the most basic form of adulting imaginable. Nobody asked me to buy a quart of orange juice for a party. My wife bought the party supplies. My conscience would bother me no matter who did the shopping. I drank it anyway.

Then I scurried outside.

The 4.5-mile walk had to be done before 9:00. I already knew my meeting was starting at 9:05, minimum. Knowing he’ll be five minutes late has never once made me log into Zoom five minutes late. I don’t understand myself either.

The first obstacle was a forklift hauling lumber for one of the new houses going up on the other side of the neighborhood. Our side is the older part — mature trees, individual mailboxes, the kind of street where the mail carrier drives from box to box. The new side has consolidated mailboxes, one big cluster where you can knock out six streets in three minutes. Efficient. I’d be a disaster at it. The numbers would run together, and anything less than five mistakes per day would be a good day. Not my problem, because I don’t have that job, and this is why.

The forklift detour wasn’t much of a detour. What it actually cost me was thirty seconds of my audiobook, paused while a yard crew fired up a leaf blower to redistribute freshly mown clippings to somewhere other than the driveway. Somewhere, presumably, but I didn’t stay to confirm.

The wildlife situation required judgment calls I’m not sure I was qualified to make.

Oklahoma is flat. When it rains, the water has to go somewhere, and at the neighborhood level, that means toads and turtles living in the drainage areas, occasionally making ill-fated decisions about road crossings. I saw a baby turtle sitting dead center in the street. I saw a large turtle just off the curb. I stood there for a moment, fully aware that a decent person would move them.

I did not move them.

I have a thing — a completely reasonable and well-established thing — about touching animals that could carry germs that might somehow, in some freak sequence of events, find their way into my mouth or my granddaughters. I know how that sounds. But I grew up watching a turtle crawl under a sliding wooden door and disappear, and something in me was permanently shaped by that. The turtles were on their own. I am sorry. I walked faster so I didn’t have to see what happened next.

Four rabbits in the park. No squirrels — our trees aren’t mature enough yet for what I can only describe as “tree rats” to fully establish themselves. They have earned my dislike, and I won’t apologize. .

At the park, a young woman was doing sprint intervals on the soccer field within the walking path. I’d seen her the other day running full laps, and today she was going hard, then walking, then going hard again. I admire that kind of self-motivation — the kind where you show up and push yourself with no external pressure, just because. I don’t have that relationship with exercise. I walk because it’s a good time to listen to books and because I’d feel guilty if I didn’t. It’s not suffering, but it’s not ambition either.

The highlight of the entire walk — maybe the entire week — was watching the OKIE811 utility locator do his job.

I assumed these guys walked around spraying paint on the ground and bending over to stick the little flags in. Reasonable assumption. That is not what this man was doing. He was marking a gas line (yellow flags, per the Universal Utility Color Code), and when he finished the spray, he reached into his vest, pulled out a flag, and with one smooth downward flick of his wrist sent it arcing through the air so that it landed perfectly upright in the ground.

I applauded him inside my head as I tried not to stare.

I have no idea if the rest of his flags that day went in on the first try. Maybe he fumbled twenty of them the moment I turned the corner. But what I saw was a man who had mastered something so specific and so useless outside of his exact job that it became a kind of art. I thought about how many thousands of flags you’d have to throw before your wrist just knew the angle. Nobody is going to put that on a highlight reel. And I loved it.

The last stop was my son’s house. He and his bride are finishing up their honeymoon, so I let myself in through the garage, removed my shoes at the door (they have an Asian household — shoes stay outside; I assume the mounted cameras confirm compliance), and found all their houseplants arranged in the kitchen sink with their vines draped across the drying racks in what I can only describe as a botanical hostage situation. I’d like to think my daughter-in-law staged this deliberately before they left. The alternative — that the plants organized themselves — would require a conversation I’m not ready for.

I turned on the spray nozzle and gave them all a drink. They may be sun-deprived, but they weren’t dying of thirst on my watch. Small win.

The walk takes a little over an hour. I listen to my book, I sweat a little, I make no meaningful impact on local turtle populations. By most measures, it’s an unremarkable way to spend a morning.

But I keep showing up for it. A forklift reroutes me, a utility worker throws a flag like a tiny javelin, a turtle makes a bad decision at an intersection I hope he saw the other side of — and somehow that’s enough. More than enough. I’m not sure when ordinary started feeling like something worth paying attention to, but at some point it did, and I think that might be the whole thing. You live long enough, you stop waiting for remarkable, and you start just noticing what’s actually there.

That’s a pretty good trade.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.