My Lame Excuse For A Space Derby Rocket

I was never in Cub or Boy Scouts growing up, which explains why I can't build a fire or tie knots or sew patches onto shirts or walk old ladies across the street. But I really wanted The Boy (and myself) to learn these skills and so when the annual Cub Scout Recruitment Letter was delivered to last year's kindergartners, I agreed wholeheartedly.

Which just goes to show you how important this was, because I also knew that Cub Scouting would likely involve camping in the winter, and the Pinewood Derby, both of which I dreaded.

At this point, some of you southerners are completely freaked out about the possibility of winter camping. I know this because when I lived in the south, any southerner who heard my tales of frigidity would always react in stunned disbelief. "You mean you go OUTSIDE when it's below zero??!!? WHAT???!!" So let me say, again, that winter camping is a real thing. Some people willingly camp when it's cold. These people are called weirdos. As a Minnesotan, I have enough experience with cold winter temperatures to know that they are not only uncomfortable, but that they can kill you if you're not careful. This is enough information for me to avoid sleeping in a tent in January.

(Actually, we won't really be sleeping in a tent in the winter, only spending a full day outside doing camp-like activities; still, I prefer my mid-winter outdoor activities to be in short bursts, usually from the car to the house and vice versa.)

But winter camping doesn't scare me nearly as much as the Pinewood Derby. Don't get me wrong, it's probably the most fun thing about Scouting in the first place. But participating in the Pinewood Derby means that I'll have to "help my son" build a fast car out of a block of wood. And then the car that I "helped my son build" will be forced compete against other cars that fathers "helped their sons build." Inevitably, these fathers will be more skilled at "helping" than yours truly.

Sure, I built a deck over the summer, but I didn't exactly do a professional job on it and nor did I have to race my deck against other decks in front of crowds of people. Nor would I have to face my son afterward when my deck performed miserably at said event.

I'll have to do this with the Derby.

My biggest fear: Working hard with The Boy on the car, only to watch it crash three seconds into the race so I'll have to comfort a crying boy afterward.

We actually got our first taste of what the derby will be like last week, when our Cub Scouts "Pack" held a "Space Derby" at its monthly meeting. Like the Pinewood Derby, the Space Derby involves a block of wood, only it's carved into a rocket that is raced along some fishing line and is propelled by a couple of rubber bands and a propeller.

We had received these blocks, made of balsa wood, a month earlier. And, quite unlike my usual modus operandi, we got an early start. We had to glue two halves together -- the resulting block had a hold in the middle, lengthwise, for the rubber band. We then had to sand and carve that block into a rocket shape.

Each block came with a set of instructions that looked, both in terms of writing style, completeness and layout, like they were put together by first-year scouts themselves. They were terrible. Some pieces of information were left out. Others were poorly worded. By the time I was done reading the instructions I had more questions than when I began, essentially leaving me my own devices. And my otherwise trusty friend "The Internet" wasn't much help, either.

So I took what I knew about rockets -- long, roundish, smooth, full of astronauts or a nuclear bomb, etc. -- and tried copying that. So I -- uh, I mean, "my boy, with some assistance from me" -- started carving and sanding the block. And I kept carving and sanding. And when I was done I had a nice, narrow rocket-shaped thing -- OK, it was mostly rocket-shaped; it certainly looked more like an 'I' than an 'S,' anyway.

Then The Boy painted. And he did paint. That way, it looked like he actually made the rocket.

After we painted, I had to glue parts to the rocket, including flaps at the bottom and a piece of plastic that holds the rocket to the fishing line. I stuck the plastic in the rocket. And it stuck all the way through the rocket wall, which would disturb the rubber bands, making it useless. I apparently got a little overeager with the carving, and carved it too thin.

Dangit.

So I started over. I found another rocket kit and carved the block with less vigor. Unfortunately, by the time I got started on Rocket 2.0 it was two days before the race. So I carved. The Boy painted. And on the morning of the race I finished putting it together. I stuck the plastic in the top, but didn't poke it all the way down out of fear that it would stick all the way through again.

When we got to the meeting, I realized that I was hardly the only person among the first-year scout parents who had problems with the instructions -- in fact, I seemed to be in better shape than most; at least I had my propeller on correctly. I was confident this thing would fly. Heck, I thought, maybe we could win! Sure, there would be no prizes, but at least we could say we won the race.

The Boy's rocket was in the second grouping to race. We wound up our propeller. The rocket was placed on the line. Others were placed there, too. Then they counted down--"Three! Two! One!"--and someone pulled the lever, releasing the rockets. The propellers began spinning. They were off!

And ours was down.

That's right: The rocket went about four feet -- the distance between the fishing line and the floor.

UUUUUUGH!.

Remember the plastic thing? I overreacted to our previous problem and didn't secure it properly to the rocket, so the rocket fell off, leaving the plastic thing attached to the fishing line. I messed up!

I could take some modest solace in the fact that ours was hardly the only poorly performing rocket. And at first The Boy seemed fine. He even joined his fellow Scouts in an impromptu game of hallway football during the other races. But, in the van on the way home, he indeed began crying.

But by the end of the evening I had convinced him that it was OK, and I vowed that we'd do better come Pinewood Derby time ... when I pay some other dude to build our car.

My Boy The Clown

My wife is an adult female. I'm an adult male. Not surprisingly, we have two different senses of humor.

The Wife enjoys irony and subtlety, incongruity and hyperbole. She also likes bad puns, and she revels in humor where there is no intent as such. (For instance, she can't get enough of Mark Trail.)

All of these things are OK. But what I really like are fart jokes.

A not-insignificant part of my humor cortex could only be described as Fourth Grade Male. I spend most of my waking moment suppressing that part of me, because it usually results in some sort of look. At best, I get a groan and a sigh, and my low expectations are such that I consider such groans to be a victory worthy of a hoot and a lap around our basement.

Still, my everyday life has been devoid of anyone with whom I could share my juvenile sense of humor. So years ago I decided to create that person.

But first, I had to have a child.

Indeed, while most people aspire to raise the class president or the captain of the football team or the valedictorian or the stoner with the criminal record, my goal from the moment The Boy first divided into two cells was to raise the class clown. I wanted the kid who eats paste or throws spitballs or tells fart jokes or, better yet, makes up his own.

(Note: I've been informed by family members peeking over my shoulder that paste has been expunged from today's classrooms. While this may have done away with the single messiest substance known to man, it has now deprived generations of schoolchildren from seeing one of the Great American Classroom Oddballs: the paste eater. Pity poor kids. Sure, kids could probably eat glue sticks, but it wasn't the same -- no face full of paste, no desk coated in paste, no papers glued to the desk. No nearby girl yelling "EEEW!" Sad sad sad.)

Early in The Wife's pregnancy I let her in on my little goal, declaring that I'd consider myself a successful parent if I raised the class clown. For a brief moment, a look of horror swept across my wife's face as she wondered, "My God, what have I done?" But the moment passed and she seemed OK with everything.

So, since The Boy could first utter the word, "chickenbutt" I've been teaching him jokes and the finer art of goofing off. Mostly, I just showed him stupid things like "pull my finger." (I usually do these things when The Wife isn't looking.)

So far, at home, The Boy's been a blast -- he's gradually getting all of the jokes, and he's starting to make up his own (though he has a long way to go on the joke-writer front, to wit: "Dad, why are peas so happy? Because they're hap-PEA!" OK, I got it kid. Go back to the drawing board on that one, but I give you points for trying ...)

And then I went to pick The Boy up from a birthday party where he knew few of the kids. When I got to the room, I saw him surrounded by kids, and he was guffawing and falling off his chair and they were laughing right along with him. The Boy, it seems, has turned into the class clown. At a gathering with friends, my boy kept deliberately running into the wall and falling down, to the absolute delight of a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old watching.

At The Boy's recent parent-teacher conference, while my wife was ensuring that he is doing well at reading and at math (he is, for the record) I was eager for an update on my kid's progress on the Clowniness front. "He does get silly, sometimes," she said, "but never when it's time for work. Only at breaks, when he should be silly."

SUCCESS!

And, in fact, The Boy pretty much confessed that he lives for making kids laugh, telling us the following: "I like it when people laugh at me when I tell a joke or fall off my chair or something, but I don't like it when they laugh at me because I make a mistake or they're making fun of me."

Indeed, boy. You're just like the rest of us.