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.

I mean, you do have to enjoy the selling, and you have to appreciate the rewards that it brings.

Let’s take each by one:

First, the selling:

You have to like to follow up with people. Over and over. Like a dog without a bone, an actor out on loan. With each message to a non-responsive podcaster or a journalist getting more and more urgent. To the only important youth sports podcaster I hadn’t heard back from, I finally wrote: “The more interviews I do on Soccer Dad, the more I fret about not having heard from you. …”

Freedom being another word for nothing left to lose, I wrote this to a newspaper columnist who happens to be from the same region I’m from, who had agreed to have me send him a review copy of the book and then gone silent:

1. You despise the book. (Not likely.)

2. You have been gone from Northeast Ohio so long, and in such epistolary demand as a big-city newspaper columnist, that your manners have withered, and no longer require faithfulness in correspondence. (Also unlikely.)

3. You just don’t give a shit about the book and don’t have the heart to tell its author, who kindly sent you a copy after you put him through the wringer in an email exchange … that you can’t bring yourself to write anything about it—good, bad or indifferent. (This seems likely indeed. But give it to me, S——, I can take it. I grew up where you did, and embrace disappointment like an old friend from Cleveland.)

[Insert winky-face emoji here.]

You have to like writing shit like that. You also have to enjoy a “no,” like a bracing slap across the face. And you have to keep on coming in manic bursts, the wind power behind which surprise even you.

Second, the rewards:

My first book, An Effort to Understand, I sent to my high school English teacher Mrs. Greer, who was the first person not-my-writer-parents who suggested that maybe I should become a writer. She loved the book—and sent me her book of poetry, which I loved—and we had a great email dialogue—as it turned out, just a couple of years before she died.

Another high school teacher, a truly great history teacher named Mr. Yanko, appears in Soccer Dad because he was also the school’s golf coach. I tried out for the golf team every year of high school, and he cut me every year—the last year, laughing as I walked into the clubhouse. Well, Mr. Yanko is going to come to my reading at The Learned Owl Bookstore in Hudson, Ohio, in September. Now 85 and just retired from teaching, he also accepted my invitation to play golf while I’m there. “It is time for me to assess the state of your game,” he wrote with mock sternness that reminded me of the humor and made me more excited to see him again than I can explain.

Meanwhile, last week here I mentioned Carla Overbeck, a member of the 1999 U.S. Women’s World Cup champs who provided the inspiration for our family’s soccer dream. Overbeck and I were guests on the same podcast last week, and I got in touch with her afterwards and shared an excerpt of Soccer Dad that quotes her and told her I’d love to send her a copy of the book because she and her husband are sports parents too and I bet they can relate to the book too and she said she’d be delighted to read it and gave me her address! I told Scout, and she said, “Oh my gosh, are you so happy?!” Yes, I told Scout. I am so happy!

This is all before the book is out and a single official copy is delivered. A friend of mine heard me talking this way on the phone the other night and said, “I hope you’re enjoying this time.” Yes, I am. Because whatever else it is—and a get-rich-quick-scheme, it’s not—a book is a rare and grand occasion to connect with some people not in your life, who have unwittingly made your life better.

And that’s worth one hell of a lot, all by itself.