Welcome to my office, belatedly

  
     If I had to summarize the lessons of the Trump era in one sentence, I would say, "The Trump years were a painful lesson in the toxic danger of self-absorption, though many people were too fixated on themselves to notice."
     I'm as guilty as anybody—okay, not as guilty as those willing to scrap our democratic traditions, their own physical well-being and truth itself in service of a monster who whispers sweet nothings in their ears. But still pretty damn self-centered.
     Though I'm aware of it, and try to fight it, and occasionally succeed. I like to think that counts for something.
     For instance, in October, James Finn Garner, leading "Inside for Indies," a laudable effort to drive folks to independent bookstores for the holidays, asked me to give a tour of my home office. He didn't have to ask twice (well, okay, he did, but that was more from disorganization and delay than reluctance. I was glad to do it, eventually). There is something enticing about showing off your space. I definitely remember being in 7th grade, navigating the difficulties of Roehm Junior High School, and there being a hip young teacher, Miss Jones, a big 1973 afro, and I remember thinking, "If only Miss Jones could see my bedroom, she'd understand."
     Anyway, I showed off my office, in a video I shot myself, and the result was suitably low production value that I didn't see need to share it beyond the leaf-in-the-wind of Twitter and the raise-a-finger-and-clear-your-throat-in-a-riot of Facebook. Leading, after only 10 weeks, to a grand total of 177 views on Facebook, which give you an idea of the kind of small ball I'm playing here. Frankly, I was glad not too many people saw it, between my skipping the punchline in the 55-word story I read (the title is "Published") to my godawful attempt to read a Louise Glück poem.
     But a regular reader objected. A while back, and again this past week, Jakash writes:

     I asked about this once and you replied that you were considering it. I'll ask one more time and then never mention it again.
     Half of the commenters to your EGD post yesterday remarked about the photos of your old S-T office which accompanied it. (I was one of them, but still...)
     I think they, and certainly some other folks, would be interested to see that video of your home (and months-long primary) office that you filmed for that independent-bookstore supporting online series a while back. Maybe you don't agree, or maybe you have another reason for not wanting to post it. Which is fine, needless to say.

     Aw heck, if it's important to you, sure. So, with apologies in advance, you want me nattering on about books and writing in my home office for a dozen minutes, you can find it here.

Texas notes: I Don’t Believe in Ghosts

"Unhappy Ghosts Crossing the Styx" by John Doyle (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Rationalists are challenged by accounts of the irrational, like today's post by Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey. I think I'll shut up—an underutilized skill set of mine—and let her tell her story. Life is a mirrored disco ball, and not every facet has to reflect you, or me.
 

    BMX biker boys wowed us with their tricks at Fountain Square in downtown Evanston during endless summer days. We’d bike the few miles from our north Chicago neighborhood to the charming suburban town square to watch them pop wheelies and do loop de loops in the air. It seemed they were able to fly. We were smitten. Sometimes they’d flirt and we’d swoon. We’d finally tear ourselves away and race down Asbury trying to get home by curfew, and pedaled extra fast when passing the haunted house.
     It was a sleek white modern structure with no windows that we could see, and an abstract twisted humanlike sculpture on the front porch that scared us with its strangeness. The building that just didn’t look like a house seemed to have been dropped from Miami or somewhere else far away, cold and unfeeling. It did not fit in amongst the old rambling wood framed homes with wraparound porches set back on huge yards peppered with stately ancient oak trees. We decided ghosts lived there.
     One day, many years later, a friend of a friend asked me to dog sit for her Labrador Retrievers on that same block. The dogs and I ran around loving each other like Kermie and Miss Piggy. We ran through fields and took day trips to Lake Michigan. We’d wear ourselves out and then fall into heavy sleeps that prepared us to do it all again the next day.
     One night I left the pups and went to a meditation event at the local yoga studio. My friend offered me a ride home on his bicycle, and I hopped on. When we got back to the house we lay in the grass, stargazed and told each other stories until we got sleepy. He biked off and I went inside.
     After walking the dogs I wanted to spend extra time with the puppy Ella, a golden beauty. She would soon be locked into her own room to sleep, as she was prone to eating sideboards and whatever else struck her fancy when no one was looking. The old guy, Beau— a big chocolate lab— would get to come upstairs and sleep on the floor of the bedroom with me.
     We were in the TV room at the front of the house, and I was petting the dogs and half watching a show. Suddenly, Ella ran out of the room into the living room and started barking furiously up into the chimney of the fireplace. I figured it was a bird or squirrel and coaxed her back in with Beau and me.
     Just then I heard footsteps upstairs. Not “are those footsteps?” but clear, loud steps that sounded like they came from leather shoes worn by a man. I looked out the window to see if maybe I was hearing something from the neighbor’s place; after all, these old wooden houses were sure to carry sound. But no, that was not it. The house next door was hundreds of feet across a lawn and there was no way I could hear steps from that house.
     The footsteps stopped, then started up again. Ella barked. Beau’s ears perked up. I froze. I called a friend and told him what was happening. He was concerned and offered to come over, but he lived all the way in Hyde Park. Besides, the footsteps had stopped and of course they were just my imagination (I told myself).
     I was tired. I put Ella into her room and Beau and I went upstairs to sleep. I’d almost forgotten about the footsteps by then.
     In the middle of the night I woke up. For some reason I was sitting straight up in bed, and Beau was standing on the bed— very odd since he never got up on the bed at all. He was staring at me, and it seemed he was trying to tell me something.
     I looked over to my left. There they were. A translucent, man and woman in old fashioned ecru and sepia tinged sleeping gowns. They were petite in stature and their faces were serious, stoic. They just looked at me calmly, and I looked at them, paralyzed. After a few moments they turned and left the room. The walked out of the door and down the hall. Somehow I knew they’d be heading up to the attic, with an entrance tucked up into the hallway ceiling.
     I went back to sleep. The next morning I stripped the bed and brought the sheets down to the basement along with the towels I’d used during my stay. The owners of the house were coming home so it was time to clean up and clear out. Ella came into the basement with me and barked into every corner. I felt unnerved but went through the motions. I noticed what looked like a tree trunk in the center of the old damp concrete basement. I realized that a main support beam was, in fact, a tree trunk that had not been sanded down. It was beautiful and also added to the feeling of rawness of the innards of this ancient house.
     I decided I’d go to a Tai Chi class that day, taught at a local church by a man from China. He was renowned in the are for his masterful skills, and a sought out teacher. When I got there he welcomed me, as he does all new students, and I started my practice. When we finished he told me that the class meets for two hours more, in the library of the church, to study Taoist philosophy and the roots of Tai Chi. I joined them.
     I felt like I was in the twilight zone when I realized the topic of the day. Ghosts. They talked of ghosts like they were real and shared teachings of why ghosts exist and how to help them if they appear to you. Apparently they are there because they are not resting, and you can welcome them and perhaps they will feel free to leave this realm once they feel appeased.
     I’m not saying I believe any of this; that was just what was being taught that day, and the synchronicity was incredible.
     A few months later my friend— the one who'd introduced me to Beau and Ella’s humans— told me that her 8 year old son had informed her “I will never sleep at ‘Johnny’s’ house again. This boy was friends with the kid who lived in my ghost house. He told his mom “I hear a woman and man talking all night up in the crawl space and they keep me up.”
     Years later I saw the couple who live in that house. I said to her “there’s something I want to tell you but I have been afraid to since I thought you'd think I was crazy.” “Oh,” she said. “You saw the ghosts. I’ve never seen them but they show themselves to visitors.”

Sea birds, QAnon and the quicksand of conspiracy

Stormy Sea, by Eduard Hildebrandt (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     The common murre is a big seabird, a type of auk found, among other places, on an island in the Baltic Sea, off the coast of Sweden. The New York Times science section ran an article about those murres on Tuesday and I read it, even though I have no particular interest in seabirds, the Baltic Sea, or Sweden. It was lunchtime and the Science Times was right there.
     I’m glad I did. The article explains how biologists are eagerly exploiting the pandemic shutdown of global travel to see what effect the departure of humans has on ecosystems such as the murre colony at the Stora Karlsö nature preserve. The general perception when it comes to the natural world is humans = bad. But here “the sudden absence of tourists at Stora Karlsö during the pandemic set off a surprising chain reaction that wreaked havoc on the island’s colony of common murres, diminishing its population of newborn birds.”
     Oh no! What happened?
     The murres aren’t the only birds in the area. There are also white-tailed eagles. Researchers discovered that the eagles don’t like people — and who can blame them?— so they stay away when tourists tramp about. But with people gone, the eagles are emboldened, and their presence, swooping around, throws the ungainly seabirds off their egg rearing.
     I love that. Because it supports my belief that the world is complicated, interconnected and counterintuitive. Though if scientists found the opposite — with people gone, the murres are having a jubilee — I’d accept that, too. Because I’m an adjust-my-outlook-to-the-facts kind of guy.
     The world doesn’t always tickle your biases. That seems, to me, a given. Not everyone got the memo, though. Many swap this enormous, beautiful clockwork of endless complexity for a little ball and cup contrivance of their own dry imagining. Because its plop-plop makes them feel better about themselves.
     On Wednesday, a video surfaced of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon) harassing Parkland massacre survivor David Hogg.
     “Why do you use kids?” she yells. “Why kids?”

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Flashback 1996: It's Pointless to Shift Gears on State Street

401 N. Wabash, 2004

     As a rule, I look back with satisfaction on past columns. That might be a bad thing. But this one is an exception that makes me wince, a little. Not just that it was wrong. Or terribly bad. But clunky. Definitely a little clunky. 

     Then again, it was my very first regular column, published 25 years ago today, and I thought I would celebrate by putting my feet up  and posting it without allowing myself too much embarrassment. I got better, over time.

     I probably should try to say something about 25 years of  writing a news column in the Chicago Sun-Times. Hmmm... God it was fun. Yes, I think that about covers it.

     Nothing is sadder than a business that time has passed by. The typewriter repair shop, clinging to life. The 1950s era Chinese restaurant, with one customer at noon. The faded tea room in the basement of a once grand hotel, boldly announcing that ladies will no longer be required to wear gloves at the second seating.
     And State Street. The ailing address, turned into an odd hybrid pedestrian mall 17 years ago in a desperate bid to boost business, is now being changed back into a normal street.
     Not that it matters. Those with a financial or political stake will argue the problem with State Street can be fixed with narrower sidewalks and thornless honey locust trees. But who else thinks so? Who thinks that once traffic is allowed back, all those shoppers with money jammed in every pocket will suddenly skip Old Orchard and Woodfield and Oakbrook to make the journey to State Street, to shop at Wanda's Wig World or Cut-Rate Electronics? Who believes that?
     Mayor Daley, for one, apparently. He was at State Street Tuesday, speaking the right words —"dynamic," "rebirth," "boost," "economy" and "tourism"—and his pronunciation was beyond reproach.
     That's his job. Maybe he got back to City Hall and laughed his peculiar Poppin' Fresh tee-hee-hee giggle and said: "Well . . . it's neva gonna work . . . nope nope nope. Neva neva neva."
    Probably not. This is the same guy who is constantly dreaming up giant construction projects —casino mini-cities and transportation hubs and celebratory gateways—vast edifices that would make Ramses II blush.
     State Street is small potatoes, on the pharaonic scale. Perhaps that is why it is actually coming to fruition. There is nothing grand to what is being called the "de-malling" of State Street. Nor original. Nearly a decade has passed since Oak Park and many other communities across the country got rid of their pedestrian malls, attempting to cure the selfsame economic slumps that inspired construction of the malls in the first place.
     These things run in cycles. We can fully expect the city to take an even more frayed State Street, albeit one with Kentucky coffee trees, and re-mall the remaining wreckage, perhaps by order of Mayor Pippen, sometime around the year 2015.
     Don't get me wrong. I'm not mourning the loss of the State Street mall. It was nowhere near as historic as that Mies van der Rohe staircase in the Arts Club and twice as ugly. OK, three times.
     Unlike the Lake Street mall in Oak Park, which was beautiful, with oaks and fountains and benches. Merchants complained that residents were enjoying the parklike setting instead of going into their stores. So the street was put back in. Sixty percent of Oak Park residents opposed the change, but the merchants were delighted.
     "Tremendous," says Bob Proce, owner of the Razzle Dazzle costume shop on Lake Street. "Fabulous. It worked really well. Access is easy. If a guy wants to park his car, he can."
     This would seem to bode well for State Street. But, in a perverse twist, cars will not be allowed to park there.

   "No parking on the street, no standing—that same red city sign," said Sonya Griffin of the city Transportation Department. "That will be enforced."
     Lack of on-street parking may not be so bad, in itself. There's no parking on Michigan Avenue, either, and it still works, except for Stuart Brent. But Michigan Avenue has glamor— Tiffany's and Neiman Marcus and all that. Even if the various North Loop theater renovations actually succeed, how will that help stores during the day? How much glamor will 1920s streetlights create if they are in front of the same two-suits-for-$99 discount outlets lining the street today, with their flashing strobe lights and blaring loudspeakers? That'll pull 'em in from Wheaton.
     The mayor should know this. But Daley has usually been off base when pushing to build his pyramids. He fought for casino gambling even as evidence mounted in New Orleans and Atlantic City that casinos are a civic disaster. Daley similarly got whupped on the Third Airport by a bunch of Southeast Siders who outmaneuvered him, inspired only by the prospect of their homes being turned into Runway Seven.
     Perhaps the problem is genetic. Early last week PBS aired its two-hour special on Daley's father, Richard J., who was very good at commanding underlings but not so good at reacting to social change. He not only constructed the high-rise hells that plague the city to this day, but pushed through the expressways that encouraged downtown workers to flee to suburbia in the first place.
     Daley, the younger, claimed he didn't watch the program, an astounding act of resistance on his part. Were PBS dissecting my dad in prime time, I'd probably find a moment to tune in.
     Maybe he didn't want to see all those clips of his father in a hard hat looking over the construction of famous skyscrapers. Maybe that explains State Street. Daley is just so sick of being thwarted in his grandiose projects that he wants to build something, even if it is just a bunch of planters and subway kiosks. Not quite the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. But then we live in less heroic times, and a mayor has to grab for glory where he can.
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 28, 1996

Dilemma at heart of sex abuse claims

 

“No one ever had a bad word to say about him.”

In late May, 2015, it was revealed that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert had sexually molested boys he coached in high school wrestling. The media descended on his hometown of Yorkville, Illinois. Those who knew him were shocked and supportive.

“He was a fantastic mentor.”

Hastert was charged, not with the abuse itself, but for structuring payments to silence the abused. Which isn’t quite a signed confession. But close.

“I would have known for sure. Something like that we would have jumped on right away.”

Only the good people of Yorkville didn’t know. Or knew and didn’t jump on it right away. Hastert admitted to molesting children and went to prison for 13 months.

“I hope it’s not true.”

Which sums up the view of those who know and respect Father Michael Pfleger, including myself, as the longtime firebrand priest of St. Sabina’s faces a pair of brothers who accuse him of abuse 45 years ago. 

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A short history of occasional poetry

     My treatise Sunday on another columnist got out of hand—every time I read it, the thing got even longer—and this is perhaps worse. I grow prolix in confinement. Today's effort started as a few sentences trimmed out of my column on the inauguration and the Star Spangled Banner. The problem, I think, is a stab at thoroughness. I tried to include ALL the inaugural poets. And more. Plus the subject. If you are arguing something is mundane, you need illustration, but then you end up with a catalogue of mundanity. 

     So apologies in advance for beating you into submission with this. And if you want to skip it, I not only understand, but approve and encourage.

      Though maybe you are housebound and need to kill some time. Or maybe this isn't as bad as I think it is. Anyway, too late now. Grabbing a machete and cutting it back would take a stamina that I just don't have at the moment. Running on fumes. Or maybe Inauguration Day was six days ago and the hard, cold slog ahead is starting to sink in.

     The composition of a poem to mark a great occasion is an ancient tradition, probably what got poetry going in the first place. Stretching back to pre-literate times when verse really was the only way to carry on the particulars of an event into the future. "The Iliad" could be considered such a poem, assuming the Trojan War actually occurred, which it may have.
     The genre slides quickly downhill from there. In later centuries, what has been known as "occasional poetry" tends to be a fairly dubious catalogue, reeking of the overwrought, like Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," published six weeks after the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

      The most jarring example of a poet knocked off the rails while trying to capture history is "O Captain, My Captain," which intellectually I know was written by Walt Whitman, but really feels like Longfellow. Inspired by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman was proud to nod at as they rode past each other in wartime Washington, D.C., the rebel is kneecapped by emotion, at his overwrought Victorian worst:

But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

     It would take 50 years for  decent war poetry to appear, such as Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est." 

     Even more fraught is when a poem is not just inspired by a contemporary event, but paid for, as a commission, to mark an occasion, giving the fatal stamp of official approval to what is supposed to be a spontaneous and heartfelt expression of honest emotion, nudging it toward work-for-hire PR. 

     The first poet to read at a presidential inauguration was Robert Frost, a fact often mentioned by journalists last week, every last one oblivious to the fact that the poem he composed for Kennedy was singsong shit. It clatters like a tray of dropped stainless steel flatware, and the first three lines will serve:

Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state
Seems something for us all to celebrate

     Read it out loud for the full effect.

     In his defense, Frost was 86, and thankfully God Almighty Himself interceded at that point, blinding Frost with sunlight so he couldn't read his freshly-minted opus, and after an agonizing muttering eternity when the whole thing teetered on disaster, Frost recovered by switching to "The Gift Outright," a far better poem he knew by heart.

     Not that occasional poems can't rise to the occasion, occasionally. Gwendolyn Brooks' poem written for the dedication of Chicago's Picasso sculpture in 1968 stands up well, particularly considering she thought the statue looked stupid.

    It begins:

Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms. 
Art hurts. Art urges voyages-- 
and it is easier to stay at home, 
the nice beer ready. 
In commonrooms 
we belch, or sniff, or scratch. 
Are raw.

     "Art hurts." That should be a book title. One has to wonder what Mayor Richard J. Daley, on the dais, made of that. There are also more than a few treatises to be written on the tendency over the past half century for Black female poets—never male—to be called upon to solemnize a public occasion by white politicians who wouldn't dream of inviting them to dinner. Maybe some deeper, unrecognized yearning toward truth sparks the assignment, but the truth can only be considered when rendered into poetry and delivered by a woman. We'll know our country has made actual progress when somebody like Terrence Hayes delivers the inaugural poem. I hope observing this isn't interpreted as diminishing female poets—careers have been scuttled for less. I'm not. I'm just pointing out a tendency. 

     The near fiasco of Frost's reading might have been why nobody tried it again for 32 years, until Bill Clinton tapped Maya Angelou, whose "On the Pulse of the Morning" is more honored than recalled. To listen to it today, with its talking rock, tree, river, and long lists of ethnicities is catch a glimpse of where liberalism goes astray. Maybe the stanzas where all those types come together as one mighty nation got cut, for brevity, and its wisdom is of the shallowed sort:

     History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived

     but if faced with courage need not be lived again.

    I'd say it isn't lived again however it's faced, but that's just me. Then again, the poem was acclaimed at the time, so maybe the message here is the short shelf life of such works. Composed to mark the moment, they lose their footing when the moment passes, as all moments must.

    But Maya Angelou, grim, regal, rebuking, is Grace Jones snarling in a cage at Studio 54 compared to Miller Williams—you ever hear of him? Me neither—the poet whose reading at Clinton's second inauguration was so inconsequential it simply evaporates from history, the words deracinated and drained.

   We mean to be the people

   We meant to be 

   To keep on going 

   Where we meant to go

   But how do we fashion the future?

   Who can say how?    

     Do this for six minutes and you have an inaugural poem.
     Barack Obama's first inaugural in 2009 featured "Praise Song for the Day," written and read by Elizabeth Alexander. It is, in essence, a paean to the normal, and all the possibilities contained within. The poem has its moments.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp

    Not a bad poem. But it ends up manifesting rather than celebrating ordinariness, further undercut by her halting, choppy delivery. No matter the poem, you gotta sell it. Alexander's ... one ... word ... after ... another delivery is a reminder why many people don't like poetry. Watch her reading, and Amanda Gorman's accomplishment last Wednesday will be driven home.    

    Richard Blanco was even more somnambulant reading "One Today" in 2013, if such a thing were possible. He was identified as the first gay poet to read at an inauguration, and the son of Cuban immigrants. Those groups no doubt cherish their participation trophy. His poem wouldn't seem extraordinary read by any high school senior at any talent show anywhere.

   "Thank the work of our hands ... weaving steel into bridges ... finishing one more report for the boss."

     Donald Trump, needless to say, did not have a poet read at his inauguration. He may never have heard a poem in his life that didn't begin, "There was a young woman from Sussex..." Still, the Scotsman published a poem written in honor of his inauguration by Joseph Charles McEnzie:

He welcomes the worthy, but guards our frontier,
Lest a murderous horde, for whom hell is the norm,
Should threaten our lives and our nation deform.

     That hasn't aged well, has it?

     Blanco was the youngest, at 44, which makes Gorman, exactly half his age. I probably shouldn't say anything about her; the nation has already rocked with praise for her delivery of "The Hill We Climb" for days. She began:

     When day comes 

     We ask ourselves

     Where can we find light in this everlasting shade?

     In you, young lady, for starters. Gorman soon slips into the lightest rap cadence, "The dawn was ours before we knew it, somehow we do it" with more memorable, powerful phrases in her six minutes than in all the previous inaugural poems put together. "A nation that isn't broken, simply unfinished," and "To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man" sailing boldly over the gender shoals that wreck so many. "Victorious, not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division" (okay, the truth is, we'll never stop sowing. But as another poet, Robert Browning, noted, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?")
     The heart:

The hill we climb if only we dare it
Being American is more than a pride we inherit
It's the past we step into
and how we repair it
We've seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it
would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.

     I don't want to quote the whole poem. Maybe it feels right because it was written three weeks ago. Or maybe it'll last the test of time.

     My wife said two things afterward, the first undeniable.

     "She's beautiful," she said, and I gratefully nodded. I hadn't wanted to say. It's creepy when the guy says it.

      Second:

      "Maybe she'll do for poetry what 'The Queen's Gambit' did for chess."

      That's an intriguing thought, though poetry is already a big deal, if you ask me, especially in cities. Gorman is the America's Young Poet Laureate, and I'd say she has a future as bright as her canary yellow Prada jacket, although it'll be hard to top the international flash of last week. Then again T.S. Eliot, another Harvard poet, was 27 when "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" appeared in Poetry Magazine, and he still had "The Waste Land" and "Four Quartets" ahead of him. Life is very long, as Eliot said, if you do it right.

     

Season’s skate through youth hockey hell

Micah Cohen

     I know how valuable youth hockey can be because I went to Andy Stein’s funeral. The Steins live across the street from us. Andy coached hockey.
     He died in 2016 of brain cancer, and there were hundreds of mourners at his funeral. The Glenbrook North hockey team came in uniform. I listened to his twin sons, Ben and Jared, eulogize him and thought, grimly, “I’ve wasted my entire life by not coaching hockey ...”
     So thank you Rich Cohen, whose new book “Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent” body checks that sort of thinking, hard. It’s a Dantean journey through all nine rings of frozen youth hockey hell.
     If it seems an odd choice of reading material for me, remember Cohen is author of a string of captivating books from “Tough Jews” to “The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse.” I’ve read nine and read this book because reading Rich Cohen’s books is what a person who likes reading books does, whatever the subject. It’s almost a duty.
     Spoiler alert: Nobody comes out well. Coaches, parents, kids with the signal exception of his own son, Micah, and his teammates. But most of all, himself.
     Cohen, who played hockey during his golden North Shore youth, is every angry, stymied hockey parent who ever pounded the glass, albeit with a self-analytic gear most lack. An adult who cares far, far, far more about any given hockey situation than his kid, who just shrugs and plays, as kids tend to do.

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