Adlai Stevenson at the Pinewood Derby

Oh how we all worked and engineered away on Mikey's Pinewood Derby car! First the internet search, for the Secrets of Pinewood Derby Life n Such. This involved a necessary download of the Car Guys proffering their theories about the Pinewood Derby (they're either in favor of it or in favor of laughing at it, one). Then Dad whacked away at the regulation block o pine with the Skilsaw to establish the basic profile of the vehicle; Mikey paging through hundreds of Batmobile designs, picking out the parts he liked (and doing a pretty good job of combining them into one integrated vehicle), and dragooned Our Andrew into assisting in the sanding, weighting and painting consultation. The Mama and The Dad machined the regulation nails and wheels into the preferred mirrorlike finish; we ignored the Internet recommendations for calipering the diameter to insure perfection, perhaps this was our downfall. The Pinewood dry run actually got Mikey's hopes up; the consensus of his brother Scouts seems to have been "You've got a fast car there, dude."

Mikey is the most competitive of the guyses. He s losing. He despises losing. He abominates losing. He's not happy losing. Problem is, every year he loses. That happens when one is competing one's Pinewood Derby car against, well, real rocket scientists. But this year, it looked like Mikey might just have a shot at a Fabulous Prize.

We did a bunch of managing expectations. We had many family conferences with Mikey, reminding him that it isn't if you Win or Lose, the Cub Scout Motto is "Do Your Best" and not "Winning is the Only Thing", that it's an exercise in Grace Under Pressure, all that kinda motivational stuff; and on the way to the track, Mikey allowed that he was satisfied with his work, as he should have been. A couple of tweaks at the Official Weigh-In, and we were ready for racing.

Six heats for each car. Mikey won five out of his six, as well as a run-off. Not good enough for a Fabulous Prize. Sigh.

It's hard for a competitive little guy to accept that sometimes one's best isn't as good as someone else's best; and that just missing is, in technical racing terms, well not to put too fine a point on it, losing. He's taken it harder, but still ... he took it hard.

It amazes me how much we need the validation of a Fabulous Prize to reaffirm our basic worthiness. Another manifestation of our fallen nature, I reckon. Still: it hurts to see a little guyse hurting so; and even though he managed better than he ever has, it hurt too much to laugh, and he was almost too big to cry, coming so close and missing by so little.