Bye-Bye, BTE — August 13, 2022 - Johnny Boy Marketing

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
So Long, Kid 👨‍👦
Steak Celebration🥩
Chip & Joanna 🪚

Regular readers of my drivel know that I’m kind of an emotional guy, which is like saying that Jack kind of could have fit on the spacious floating door with Rose in Titanic.

So. Much. Extra. Space.

So it should come as no surprise when I say I found myself fighting back tears as Boy The Elder drove down the driveway and back toward Columbia, Missourah, today to start his junior year at Mizzou. BTE has been home most of the summer while interning at a flavor company about 35 minutes away. It was good to have the Core Four back together under one roof, and as I watched him drive away, it hit me how much things in life are changing.

We’ve moved around the country a lot in that boy’s lifetime. He’s lived in Ohio, Minnesota, Missouri, Florida, back to Missouri and then to yet another house in Missouri — and he’s only 20 years old. Despite all the crap I’ve gone through with my health and how I acted largely because of it, he’s a really, really good kid. He’s smart, kind, a tremendously hard worker at whatever he does, and, most importantly to me, he’s growing to be a good man. He understands that he needs to walk on the part of the sidewalk closest to the street when he’s with his girlfriend, that he needs to work hard now to enjoy good things later in life, that family matters.

There’s a good shot he’ll be under our roof again next summer, as the place where he interned this year seems to want him to come back next year. Hell, he’s going to be home next weekend; he and I go to an IndyCar race Saturday night. But it’s not the same as when he’s here here.

In the not-to-distant future (cosmically speaking, anyway), he’s likely going to be engaged. His girlfriend is awesome and I cannot wait to welcome her officially as my daughter-in-law. Soon, him being here will be called a visit and not “coming home.” That’s sometimes hard to wrap my head around when I think of the little guy I held on the day he was born as we watched our first sporting event together, the Kentucky Derby.

Change can be hard, even if it’s good.

I could go on forever, but suffice it to say that I’m proud of the kid.

Last night, the Core Four met at Outback steakhouse to celebrate Boy The Younger. I called for the celebration after BTY made the Midwest Rebels baseball team, ending a months-long saga of finding him a squad for him to improve his skills led by people of character and integrity.

His last situation ended rather ugly, to say the least, as his coach threw him off the team when I privately told him not to attempt to steal home with my son when the batter didn’t confirm the “take” sign, as I’d seen happen multiple times that season and that afternoon. To me, my job is to keep my kid safe, and if the coach was going to be that reckless with other kids, well, he wasn’t going to be reckless with mine. Baseballs smashed into faces at close range can hurt people.

In the wake of a private text, the coach pulled my son out of the game in the middle of an inning and threw him off the team, yelling at me and waving his hand and telling me to get out. That is 100%, iron-clad, undeniable fact.

From there, lots of angry words were said, many of them by me, as this supposedly Christian man and supposedly Christian organization acted in very non-Christian ways. Did I say angry, hateful things? Absolutely. I regret there were younger people around who might have heard them. Yet I do not regret standing up for my son and recognize without a shadow of a doubt that nothing angry would have been said had the coach not acted like a petulant child and took his immaturity out on a kid. That, I will never forget and never forgive.

As you can imagine, the entire experience was hard on BTY, though he handled it gracefully and with a maturity beyond his years. I would expect nothing different from him. That’s just how he is.

He then had to go through tryouts for multiple teams simply to do what he loves — play baseball. He did his thing on the field while Wifey Poo and I did ours behind the scenes, researching the leagues and the coaches to do the best we could to ensure nothing like what happened last time happens again. In the Rebels, it sure seems like we’ve found a place that knows what it’s doing, has people who know how to coach and employs actual decent human beings, regardless of their religious affiliation.

And so last night, we celebrated. BTY picked the place. We shared a Bloomin’ Onion (because of course) and downed some steaks. It was good and, to me, it marked the end of an unfortunate ordeal. So we move forward with a new organization and see a bright future in the game for BTY. He loves baseball. He’s an ideal teammate. His new coaches are already seeing that.

I’m happy for the kid.

For years, I believed I wasn’t the most handy guy when it came to fixing things. So bad were attempts early in my marriage to do things around the house that I just stopped trying, much to Wifey Poo’s consternation.

Things began to change last year when we prepared to move from our subdivision out to our Humble Country Home. There was stuff that needed to be done to get our place ready to sell, and my cheapness overcame my lack of self-confidence. In the process, I realized something: I can pretty much do anything, as long as I have Youtube and the right tool.

So in the past year, I’ve installed a kitchen faucet. I’ve put in a smartlock on our front door. I’ve fixed this and repaired that and actually been … handy.

This isn’t just inside the house, either. I’ve figure out ways to jury-rig a gutter downspout so that it actually stays on during heavy rains and doesn’t get blown off, allowing water to pool and flood our basement. I’ve cut down trees and fixed garage fire tape and changed my car oil and a variety of other things.

Today, I finished trimming off branches of a huge cedar tree in our yard. The original plan was to cut the tree down. But after I lopped off the dead and annoying lower branches — and cut down the five full-sized trees hiding underneath — well, the result is that we’ll actually have a great outdoor shady sitting spot, once all the crap underneath is cleaned up.

But I wasn’t done. Wifey Poo has been hankerin’ to redo our kitchen pantry to provide more shelf space. That was on our agenda for today. She came up with a great idea to use the existing shelving in new ways to create a boatload more storage space. All I had to do was trim up some of the shelves. Again, cheapness emboldens me.

So I tested out my circular saw on some old wood to make sure I could cut precise straight lines, Wifey Poo set up the sawhorses, we found some of my father-in-law’s old C-clamps, and 20 minutes later, we had two precisely cut shelves ready to be repurposed.

Wifey Poo said that it made her feel like we were Chip and Joanna Gaines. I’m not quite sure who those two folks are, but I know they mean something to her, and I know it means something even more to her to see that she has a husband who now believes in himself when it comes to this stuff.

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Bye-Bye, BTE — August 13, 2022

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