I was checking into the Ohio University Inn for my daughter’s college graduation earlier this month when I saw this lovely email.

It had been a couple of weeks since the frenzy of the book’s launch, and with things quieting down, this was just the kind of invitation I’d been hoping to start getting.

When I returned to Chicago, I didn’t hide my delight at this invitation, telling Monica, “This is especially excellent seeing that I have a lot of family in and around Boulder, who will be interested. (Four sisters and their kin.)” I asked her for more details, so I could consider whether to appear via Zoom, or turn the event into a little family visit.

Promptly, I got 19 happy paragraphs back from Monica, each of them reading like this:

For an in-person gathering, we usually host in a relaxed, social venue here in Boulder often a cozy café, wine bar, or community space that allows for an intimate but lively discussion. Attendance typically ranges from 25 to 50 engaged members, depending on the book and timing. The atmosphere is warm, conversational, and highly reader-driven not a formal presentation, but a genuine exchange of ideas. If you were able to join us in person, we would shape the evening around a discussion first, followed by a natural, informal Q&A with you woven into the conversation.

Yummy in an author’s tummy! I replied, “Wow, Monica, you folks don’t mess around! Everything below sounds absolutely lovely and I look forward to committing to this with you one way or another.” I chose one of the dates she offered based on my availability and also its correlation with our Father’s Day promotions. And I proposed a call, later in the week.

Monica replied affirmatively, calling my Father’s Day angle “brilliant” and saying, “Friday sounds perfect for a call I’d love that. Feel free to suggest a time that works best within your open windows, and I’ll make myself available.”

To which I replied, “I’m really knocked out by the thoroughness and thoughtfulness of your approach here and excited to connect.”

Now folks, I’m already once bitten. While promoting my last book, I got pulled into a long and mind-bending dialogue with some huckster claiming to be the documentary maker Michael Moore, who I was hoping would push it to his followers.

With Soccer Dad, I’ve already been approached by a few opportunists whose advances my publisher helped me head off. Scamming authors is like panhandling the homeless: as morally low as financially dubious. But apparently it’s a thing.

Also recently, I was invited to participate in a kind of SEO scheme through some soccer parent website. Guy kept telling me to just post a ton of stuff there, no matter the quality: “it’s as if someone else is telling google that your book is valuable. nothing else really matters. you want as many links as possible. it doesn’t even matter (per say) if people read it …” I wound up telling this plastic-eyepatch alley-man, “I didn’t write a book so I could become a bot.”

So as much as I was looking forward to visiting Boulder virtually or in person, as much as I allowed myself to accept the kismet of a Boulder book group embracing my book—hey, it wouldn’t be the first lucky thing that happened in my life—the fuzzy feelings turned to suspicion right away and Monica became “Monica” as soon as “she” wrote back: “Friday at 10:00 works well for me. And if you don’t mind, I’d actually prefer to continue our conversation here by email rather than by phone. It helps me keep everything clearly organized and intentional as we shape the experience together. I’m very happy to move quickly back and forth so it still feels fluid and easy.”

One of my Boulder sisters and I quickly discovered: Monica Rose was an elusive presence online. And, others had asked about Boulder Bookaholics being a scam. I wrote, “Monica, pardon me but this is getting a little strange to me, and starting to seem a little commercial. You don’t wish to talk on the phone? Also, I can’t find you online anywhere.” I pasted in a post about the possible scam. “Monica,” I e-cried, “say it ain’t so!”

And that, as the say, was the end of that.

What’s the lesson here? If you try to do anything in this life, people will try to take advantage of your undisguised desire—even if it’s something as dopey as writing a book.

Especially if it’s something as dopey as writing a book.

A prominent cultural critic of the modern youth sports scene, with whom I have happily become a regular correspondent, lamented to me in a dark winter month that there’s more going on in the world than youth sports—I think Minneapolis ICE shootings were happening at the time—and confessed she sometimes wonders if she ought to be casting her critical gaze upon more vital vistas.

I told her that depends on how she looks at it. Surely there are more important issues than youth sports. But there’s no more important question than raising children in America at a moment when our values seem pretty far afield to what our nation’s founders were thinking about, 250 years ago and what so many of our nation’s heroes have demonstrated ever since. And youth sports is a dramatic and relatively apolitical prism through which to view what we are teaching our kids about life.

I wrote, “You must know that when you talk about youth sports—especially on the spirit level you talk about it—you’re talking about American values, you’re talking about raising kids, you’re talking about love and the meaning of life.” I told my correspondent, who has been participating in this youth sports dialogue much longer than I have, to consider my email a pep talk. “Consider me pepped!” she replied.

Thinking about that exchange now, as I consider how long and how deeply I’ll want to be part of this conversation, assuming Soccer Dad has strong soccer legs, I’m reminded of one of my favorite speeches, an RFK stump speech from his presidential campaign in 1968. As Kennedy’s speechwriter emotionally explains in this classic clip from a podcast, Kennedy was annoyed by LBJ’s frequent citing of the growth in the Gross National Product as evidence of the health of the nation.

Why?

… the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

In the series of conversations about Soccer Dad that are beginning to drop into my calendar over this summer and into the fall and for however long after that, I hope I’m not talking too specifically about travel sports. I hope I’m ultimately talking about the health of our children, the quality of their education and the joy of their play. I hope I’m talking about the strength of our marriages and the integrity of the parents and coaches who people our kids’ childhoods: Our wit and our courage, our wisdom and our learning, our compassion and our devotion—if not to our country, specifically, to one another, at least.

If I can manage to be talking about that, I don’t think I’ll get tired of it anytime soon.