Teeth Marks at the Derby

Newsletter 2024-01-28

Another year of the pinewood derby is in the books. I’m not sure what books those are, but they’re certainly not ones fit for children. There were tears. There was biting. There was a trophy. Depending on how you feel about numbers, it was either our best or worst year ever. Victory is subjective. So is justice. This year’s pinewood derby had it all.

The chaos kicked off bright and early Saturday morning. Actually, just early. It’s still winter. Nothing will be bright in the morning until the end of April. Check-in time for the race was 8 a.m. Saturday. The kids woke up an hour before. A few of them did, anyway. My eleven-year-old, Mae, had her final pinewood derby last year. She’s now in BSA Scouts, where they have fun by playing with knives and building fires instead of racing little wooden cars down a track. It didn’t have to be an either/or situation. BSA Scouts would be way more popular if they let kids race flaming knife cars. If any of their marketing people are reading this email, you can have that idea for free as long as you don’t sue me when you implement it. Many first aid merit badges will be earned that day. Neither of my older two girls could be bothered to get out of bed to support their younger sisters for a regular, non-flaming knife car race, even with the added incentive of pancakes. There was a full breakfast at the race this year, but Mae and my thirteen-year-old, Betsy, still chose sleep. They’re both truly teenagers. That meant I only had to get two girls out the door Saturday morning. It was still two children too many.

With minutes to go until we had to leave the house, I heard a kid on the second floor scream, “Ow!” I instantly knew someone had attacked someone else. We only have two rules in this house: 1) Pick up your stuff; 2) Don’t touch anybody. Both statutes are constantly disregarded. My nine-year-old, Lucy, and eight-year-old, Waffle, had attempted to brush their teeth at the same time. Obviously this was an impossible task. It would be easier to negotiate world peace than to get them to share a single sink. Instead of working out their differences or taking turns, Waffle bit Lucy. It was the logical move. If in doubt, let your teeth do the talking. Unfortunately for Waffle and her brilliant plan, Lucy cried out in pain, alerting me and the rest of the neighborhood. The usual punishment followed. Waffle hadn’t even been awake for a full sixty minutes and she was already grounded. The day was off to a great start.

I made the two of them brush their teeth in different bathrooms, a solution they had failed to come up with on their own. Waffle was fuming. The fact that she bit Lucy was everyone’s fault but her own. She finally convinced me that Lucy shoved her first, so I grounded both kids. I’m sure Lucy had a similar story about how Waffle had started things with an even earlier act of violence, but I wasn’t interested in hearing any more. Everyone awake had been uniformly punished, including me. Kicking them off their devices always leads to a drastic increase in their fights and my migraines. There’s a reason I usually default to giving them unlimited screen time. It’s the only thing preserving the peace. With everyone’s weekend completely ruined, we piled into the van. I was about to unleash two very unhappy children on the world.

My wife Lola cradled both kids’ pinewood derby cars protectively on the drive to the race. The last thing we needed was for a wheel to fall off on the way there. Each car had to make it down the track for me to not have completely failed my children. Not that I have a whole lot to do with that marginal level of success. I lack the tools, skills, or desire to craft a quality racer. Every year, the Cub Scouts offer a workshop a few weeks before the race where better dads whose kids have aged out of the event use their fancy saws and drills to help hapless parents like me. For designs, Waffle picked an hourglass shape she found in a book about fast cars. Lucy chose a wedge of cheese. There are two kinds of people in the world. The better dads cut out the designs, and the girls painted them. Lucy’s car came out looking like a cheetah door stop, which is still pretty cool in my book. She was thrilled with the design and pretended to eat it every chance she got. Waffle painted her car black, except for the top, which didn’t appear to have any color at all. She assured me that she covered it with what was left of the orange. Apparently the cheese car used up more of it than she thought. It wasn’t my place to argue. We were going for participation, not domination. We’re masters of showing up.

We took care of our final pinewood derby preparations at the regular Cub Scout pack meeting Thursday night. Both cars were severely underweight. In general, you want to get as close as you can to the five-ounce limit for maximum speed. I asked Lucy if I could glue a pile of weights to the top of her wedge, but she flatly refused. It would totally mess up her cheddar style. Instead, the scoutmaster let us use some flat weights that were sticky on one side. I didn’t even have to add glue. Waffle was less particular, which was good because I had to basically double her car’s mass to give it a chance. The heaviest weights I had were long metal cylinders I had no way to cut. I could get her up to just under the limit by supergluing exactly three of them to the top. I showed Waffle what it would look like, and she approved. It gave her car a retro industrial vibe, or maybe a lazy dad vibe depending on how much you know about pinewood derby racing. All I had to do after that was attach the wheels. That simple task was still beyond me. The grooves for the axles are never quite as straight or wide as I want them to be. I struggled mightily until the assistant scoutmaster stepped in. He not only attached the wheels to both cars but also ran them down the test track again and again, listening to the racers to make final adjustments and get them just right. By the end of the meeting, I was confident of two things: The cars would make it down the track on the big day, and I had nothing to do with it. I was content with both facts. My contribution was taking the kids to the pinewood derby workshop and the tune-up pack meeting. My status as this family’s taxi driver remains unchallenged.

Saturday morning, we arrived at the race site with both cars intact. They passed the weigh-in, which was to be expected. I would have been alarmed if they’d managed to gain weight since Thursday. I kept them away from the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for that very reason. Lucy and Waffle had settled into an uneasy truce with each other. Soon, they were stuffing their faces with pancakes and all past animosities were forgotten. Perhaps diplomats should try that approach with the various wars around the world. We had a lot of pancake time as the other scouts trickled in. Finally, around 9:30, we said the Pledge of Allegiance to weed out any communist sympathizers hiding in our ranks. The big show was about to begin.

Cub Scouts is much fairer now than back in the day. A thousand years ago when I was Waffle’s age, the pinewood derby was a merciless head-to-head double-elimination tournament. I showed up to my first race with a car I was so proud of. My dad cut it into a sleek wedge with a hand saw and painted it gray. It was identical to Lucy’s car in all but color. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. In a matter of seconds, my car lost its first two matchups and was relegated to the dustbin of history. I wish it was the recycling can of history, but we were less environmentally conscious back then. In modern times, each car gets at least four races. There are four lanes on each track, each with minor, imperceptible differences. Every car gets to run once in each lane. The times, which are measured beyond a thousandth of a second with a laser at the finish line, are averaged together for a final, perfectly fair score. There are no questionable calls here. If you lose, it’s because your car sucks. I hate that level of precision because it puts the blame squarely where it belongs: on me. I prefer nebulous outcomes with many possible scapegoats.

The kids raced by den. Waffle is a wolf, and Lucy is a Webelo. There was only one other kid in Waffle’s group. When she first joined scouts, her den had five. Waffle is the sole survivor from that group, with the second kid in there now joining years later. I’d like to think she didn’t scare the other kids off, but I also can’t explicitly rule it out. She’s always been about the long game. Saturday, she beat her sole opponent four times in a row, even if their final averaged times were only a hundredth of a second apart. Seriously, Waffle’s mean speed was 2.6802 seconds, while the other kid’s was 2.6940. That’s the difference between eternal glory and crushing defeat. To my slow human eyes, it looked like a much bigger gap on the track, but maybe that’s my dad bias showing. Next, it was Lucy’s turn. There were six kids in her group, making it one of the largest. Her block of cheese fought valiantly, but it wasn’t swift enough to carry the day. Her final average time was 2.7180, making her slightly slower than Waffle, but not by much. Waffle was the first of two. Lucy was the fifth of six. Now I know how parents feel when their two kids play against each other in the Super Bowl. Not really. We got all of the tears and none of the money. The Super Bowl parents did it better.

Lucy kept it together relatively well. No scenes were caused, and any trauma was kept discreet. Waffle, meanwhile, continued on, just like she did in both of her prior years due to her limited competition pool. The top three kids from each den advanced to the finals, so the only kid Waffle beat moved on, too. She picked the right age group. Good on her for deciding when to be born. In the finals, each of the cars once again got four races, one in each lane. Waffle finished seventh of sixteen. Two brothers took first and second with designs that were virtually identical. The younger sibling joined scouts the week before the race, which was a little suspicious. I assume the dad, who is likely a NASA engineer and tested their cars in a wind tunnel, wanted to hedge his bets. He might have won, but I don’t envy him. Now his kids will forever wonder why he loves one of them a hundredth of a second more. My kids know I love them equally. That’s why Lucy and Waffle were both still grounded.

Waffle came away with a trophy, just like every other year. She’s not a big fish in a small pond. She’s a regular-sized fish in a pond with virtually no other fish. That’s one way to interpret things, anyway. I shared the results in my family’s Facebook Messenger thread. My dad replied that both kids actually finished the same. Waffle was the one of two, and Lucy was six of seven. They were both second to last. Numbers can tell whatever story you want them to. So can newsletters.

When we got home, I caved in, just like I always do. I told the younger girls they could be ungrounded if they did chores. I got a slightly cleaner house, and they got their screens back. They didn’t need them. Instead of streaming shows, we played a game called Stuffed Fables, which is like Dungeons and Dragons for kids. It was some of the better parenting I’ve done. I might be a terrible race dad, but I’m an okay regular dad. There’s always room to improve on the former. Just 364 days until next year’s pinewood derby.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James