“Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent”, “The Stories of John Cheever”

Talked about living in the suburbs. To live in the suburbs is to be a sports parent and among sports parents. Hockey parents are legendarily a unique breed. You could chalk it up to 6 a.m. games every Saturday, hauling the equipment back and forth from the rink, driving to weekend tournaments in Massachusetts, only to realize that you left the gloves at home. So my point of the week that I'm reading is pee Wee's Confessions of a Hockey Parent. By Rich Cohen. It's his memoir that follows the interminable season of competitive youth hockey in Connecticut, which starts in September, goes through March. Then you've got tryouts, which you have to pay separately for in April. Rich Cohen recounts how he lived vicariously through his Kids on Ice performance. He rode the high of every break away, suffered the indignity of every penalty. My book here today, if we can jump on to this on the suburbs as well, is a suburb that is long and gone. It was about a glass of vermouth at 10 a.m., and no one wrote about it like John Cheever. For those younger, this is 1954, two lifetimes ago and no one wrote about the angst. If you loved Mad Men, the ethos of Mad Men, yes, came 100% from the magnificent work of John. Suppressed people, beautiful, depressed people living in their homes in the suburbs. You're describing me. Be careful here. The answer is there was an element of that tension, and maybe it was depression, but it was mostly the post-World War Two struggle in the IG 1950s. I was looking this up and John Cheever lived in Scarborough on Hudson, which is between Briarcliff Manor and Austin. And Austin was the home of the fictional Betty and Don Draper in Mad Men. And at one point he rented a house that was previously occupied by Richard Yates, who of course, wrote Revolutionary Road, which itself was a big, you know, thing about soul sucking suburbs that, can you imagine go about this as it folds right back to Bloomberg money and personal finance we perceive now. And I would go with this. It just was easier then to be average or be above average now with the budgets in the bills. Yeah, it's really hard.