Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Friday Happy Hour Video: From Soccer Dad, on Mother’s Day

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I don’t go in for that “selfless mothers” trope any more than I go for the “teachers are heroes” routine. Pay the teachers and don’t make the mothers hide their light under a bushel, I say.

Yet, I just spent two years writing and one year promoting a book about how Scout’s teacher mom I raised her. And naturally, I called it Soccer Dad.

Yes, I dedicated the book to her, writing an opening note

about my wife, Cristie Bosch, who appears in this book far less frequently than she would if it were titled Soccer Parents. It’s called Soccer Dad because I write best when I speak for myself, and my own experience. My wife, of course, was my full partner in this soccer parenting effort, from getting Scout signed up to her first tyke’s soccer program to counseling Scout throughout her college soccer experience. Ask the bartender at the Ohio University Inn the evening after we dropped Scout off at college: Cristie and I shared the joys and the sorrows equally. We also sometimes differed in our emotional reactions to games and their consequences. But most of that tension was creative, and all of it helped the two of us see this strangely shaped project from another point of view. And another point of view—sometimes any other point of view—is often exactly what a soccer parent needs to maintain perspective in an often-warped world.

Ultimately, how we performed as soccer parents is probably just a measure of how we performed as parents. However well or poorly we did at both, Scout’s mom and I did this together, and I dedicate this book to her.

… and of course I was very happy she got some love by Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Kogan (and Trib photographer John Kim) in a piece on the book launch last month.

But still, it must be said: Cristie Bosch is a hero teacher, and also is a mother who gives more than she gets—as all mother birds do—and as Scout well knows.

Scout, who has flown off with her old teammates on a post-graduation tour of Europe, leaving Dadbird to hold down the Mother’s Day action around here. As usual, I’m scrounging for a last-minute gift.

I was touched by this moment a couple years ago, and I’m touched by it again, as we go into this weekend.

We’ll watch this together Sunday, and there won’t be a dry eye in our house.

Sales Mode: The End

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I mean, most of the people who I know well enough to really admire or even love, have by now read Soccer Dad and told me with energy and imagination that I wrote a book that is excellent and true and that it moved them, in one way or another. (Maybe some of them haven’t, but what kind of sad creep would focus on that?)

Also, my publisher (the individuals who work there having become part of the above-named group of people I really admire or even love) will soon tell me how many books I’ve sold to date.

Well how could the reality of the latter paragraph, however good it is, begin to compete in any meaningful way with the pure spiritual joy of the former?

There are many more conversations for me to have with other people about all this soccer and parenting stuff. But the happy heavy damage this project did to my soul: It’s all over but the shouting.

Speechwriting Expert Left Cold by Commencement Speech, Missing Whole Point

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Before my daughter’s commencement weekend, a friend told me, “Don’t drink too much.”

She should have advised, “Don’t think too much.”

But you have a lot of time to think, during a graduation ceremony at a school as big as Ohio University’s was, over the weekend. And what was I thinking during the commencement speech, by a rich OU alum and a 75-year-old “private astronaut” named Larry something?

I was dismissing it as a clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous clichés. Life won’t go exactly according to plan. “But that’s okay.” Everyone here will make mistakes. “But that’s okay.” But, Larry said, “You’re in total control of four things. Your attitude, your effort, your choices and your time and how you spend it. Do not be afraid to fail … because failure is the first step to success.” And so on.

A long time ago, my speechwriter pal Mike Long wrote a hard-bitten send-up of commencement speeches, which he said were almost universally “vapid, molasses-speed addresses.” This Larry guy’s speech contained at least half of Long’s litany:

The Story Without A Point
The Exhortation To Do Something Important That Never Gets Named
Vague Nonsense Lifted from a TED Talk
The Lesson About Hard Work From Someone Who Sits at a Desk
Non-Specific Demands to Change the World (e.g., “Be Mindful” and “Care About Others”)
The Authoritarian Impulse Presented As Caring
The “We Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants” Routine
Stuff I Wrote Down Last Night in the Hotel
The Straight-Faced Delusion That Everyone Here Is Going to Do Great Things
Political Self-Righteousness That Makes Half the Room Uncomfortable on a Day They Deserve to Enjoy
The Optimistic Portrait of the Future Overstated by the Rich Guy Who Will Be Fine Either Way
The Praise of Family Support Delivered Oblivious to the Plurality Who Had Little
Rank Hypocrisy Tolerated Because He’s a Major Donor
Rambling Improv From Famous Guy Who Imagines That’s Enough to Make Him Interesting
Ninety Seconds of Useful Stuff Stretched Out for a Half Hour
Metaphor That Goes Nowhere
Sanctimony
Stuff Mostly Cribbed From One Of Those Essays on a Chipotle Cup
Youthful Tech Start-Up Guy Who Didn’t Need College in the First Place and Wants You to Know It
The Thing That Happened to Me in an Exotic-Sounding Foreign Place Whose Importance to This Occasion I Will Never Make Quite Clear
Something About a Crossroads

Afterward, a few of my daughter’s pals’ parents asked Mr. Speechwriter Expert Guy what grade I would give the speech. “F!” I volunteered, cracking everyone up.

And so kept volunteering it, of course, until I volunteered it to one mom—a smart, wise, warm, loving and pragmatic mom of a daughter I admire very much—who hadn’t asked for my expert analysis. Well, it turned out she loved Larry’s speech.

As soon as I heard that, I re-understood something about these speeches that I’ve always known. At one of the most complicated emotional moments in a parent’s life—each parent in the 13,000-person arena is halfway through a large loaded margarita—

—of pride and hope and anxiety. Such a parent will cling, even to commonplaces and platitudes (and maybe especially to commonplaces and platitudes), like a drunk to a lamppost.

Commencement speeches are not, chiefly, intellectual exercises, any more than commencement ceremonies are college classes.

Dana, I’m sorry I said anything about the speech. You’re right. It was great. The whole weekend was great. Our daughters are great. Their lives won’t go perfectly according to plan … and they will make mistakes. But they’re in total control of four things ….