A Procrastination Lesson Not Learned

I'm a lifelong procrastinator. As a teenager a friend gave me a "procrastinator's license," and my mom called me a procrastinator so much I think she forgot my actual name. And I have continued that procrastination habit well into my adulthood.

So it was no surprise, then, when earlier this week I sat at my desk at work and realized that I had to take The Boy to Cub Scouts that evening, and that this was Rocket Derby Night, and that we hadn't done even the tiniest bit of work on his rocket in the month we'd had it. Dangit.

For those who don't know, the rocket derby is much like the soapbox derby, only using rockets that are propelled along strings with a propeller and two or three big rubber bands. I say "propelled" loosely, because the most likely result is that a rocket goes a couple of feet, assuming it doesn't plunge to the earth altogether. That's what happened to The Boy and I last year. We had worked on the rocket for days. Yet yours truly failed to do something rather important last year: effectively glue the piece the connects the rocket to the string. The device plummeted to the ground and broke upon start, breaking The Boy's heart with it.

So when I sat at my desk and realized that I hadn't built his rocket and I had precisely 9 hours to get it done, 7 of which would be spent in the rocket-construction-unfriendly environment that is my workplace, I was a wee bit disappointed in myself.

I thus embarked on a daylong mental rocket-planning expedition. I went home briefly for lunch and I glued the two pieces together that formed the block from which we could carve the rocket. That evening, The Wife and I met with The Boy's teacher for his parent-teacher conference, and then The Boy and I rushed home to begin carving. We then began turning that block of wood into a projectile.

Incidentally, the wood is made of balsa, which is wood so soft you could carve it with a spoon. I used a potato peeler, because as a household cook who specializes in mashed potatoes, I am one with the peeler. Yet I got a tad aggressive with the peeler and took a chunk of the nose off the rocket off and, along with it, all of its aerodynamics. But we pressed on. The Boy helped some, but as we were rushing I decided to do the carving and sanding for, you know, expediency.

This was the moment that my phone rang. It was my wife. She was at day care.

"My car won't start," she said.

DANGIT!

So we set aside the rocket and headed out the door. The Boy looked at me with big, blue eyes. "But Dad," he said, "are we going to do the rocket?"

I melted. Yes, Boy, I said. I'll do anything within my power to get that rocket done. But first, we must rescue your mother.

We drove to day care, tried to jump her car once, failed, went to a mechanic, got some car-jumping advice, returned, and got the car started. The Wife followed me successfully home, and then we restarted the rocket-building process. Only we had less than an hour.

We glued the pieces correctly, especially the part that connects the rocket to the string, and then I had The Boy get the paints so he could paint the rocket and make it look like he did the whole thing himself. And then I heard this, "Dad, this paint don't work."

The paints we had bought last year for the rocket were bone dry.

Alas, I added a little water, and The Boy began painting the rocket to look like a red crayon. Actually, it was a pink crayon, given that he had time for only one coat. It looked remarkably nice, given how rushed we were. And sure, I would spend the evening getting pink on my hands as I installed the propeller, but it was done and I was relieved.

That was when The Wife went to her car to go get a new battery, only to get the same clicking sound she got earlier in the evening. So a jumping I went.

Suffice it to say, by the time we got there, 10 minutes late, our expectations were low. Frankly, I just wanted the rocket to go a few feet. I just wanted to do better than last year.

The younger kids went first, and then The Boy and I began winding up our propeller. We wound it 100 times, just like they told us, and then The Boy calmly held his projectile and waited his turn. When they grabbed his rocket and put it on the string, he looked at me with both his fingers crossed and his eyes crossed. The scout leader running the derby yelled "Three! Two! One!" and then pulled down the device holding all of the propellers.

And The Boy's rocket fell straight to the ground.

I was devastated. The Boy speechless. Two years in a row!

But just as we thought it was a lost cause, just as I was frantically thinking of a way to explain my failure to my young son and just as I began thinking of ways to make it up to him, the scout leader picked up our rocket, and the one piece that fell off in the crash, one of the fins. Surprisingly, our haphazard rocket survived the fall. "Glue this back on," he said, "and try it again. It was wound up too tight and just flew off."

Another chance! We went looking for glue, and then a savior offered some of the "super" variety. We glued the fin on, I held it for a few seconds, and then we went back to the starting area to get our second shot.

We wound it up, this time stopping well short of that 100 mark. The leader grabbed our pink projectile and placed it in the blocks. "Three! Two! One!"

Boom.

Our rocket went a few feet. And then some. It flew off the blocks much faster than the other rockets in our heat, and went much further. When it finally came to a rest it was just a few feet short of the end, a very rare feat for even the best rockets, let alone our last-minute bottle of Pepto Bismol. Success!

The moral of this story is, of course, that procrastination pays. Just wait and wait and at the last minute a combination of adrenaline and willpower will get the job done. My Mom is probably reading this and is crying quietly in her hands.

I patted The Boy on the back after our race. We had given our high-fives, and I handed him his rocket. His first question was this, "What prize do we get?" Alas, Boy, no prize—the rocket derby is far less competitive than is the soapbox event. All we get is our pride in a job well done under extreme circumstances.

He didn't seem satisfied with his reward.