The Pinewood Derby

As my son and I walked into the middle school cafeteria where the Tiger Cub Pinewood Derby was about to be held, we noticed that the organizers of the the event had laid the wooden cars out on tables near the track.

On the table were amazing cars in the shapes of hot dogs, school buses, apples, surfboards and the odd car that actually looked like ours ... a car. Many of the cars seemed to have been professional painted with German engineered designs. One car (the father of the boy apparently worked at a toy factory) had a computer aided, machine carved carousal horse on the side panel. Or fluorescent orange pine sports machine seemed a little overwhelmed.

It was a mere five weeks earlier, that my six year old son had snuck up to the side of the bed, gently tapped the shoulder and whispered, "Can we build it now?" A small block of pine, four plastic wheels, a sheet of number stickers and four shiny nails were all that were given to us at the previous nights tiger Cub meeting.

Our goal of that morning was to turned those simple ingrediants into something cool that could propel itself down a plywood track faster than any of the other fifty Tiger Cub cars.

The race organizers finally placed a dinosaur looking vehicle and our fragile car atop the track and pulled a lever which raised a Plexiglas shield from the front of the cars. I watched my son's eyes open wide and the weight of his little body shift forward as the cars hurled down the track that took up the full length of the cafeteria.

I looked quickly back to finish line as the cars crossed and then back to my son who pumped his fist into the air and whispered a victorious "Yes!" My thoughts were ... We won! We won! ... I mean He won! He won! There were more heats to go.

As the races went on, one could visibly see the disappointment in the faces of the children who lost as they sighed, stamped their feet or looked with scrunched faces back towards their Moms and Dads. Conversely, the winners were light on their feet and full of joy.

The curious thing was the neither the joy of the winners nor the sorrow of the losers seemed to last long. While there were a few exceptions, most of the boys seemed to bounce back to the state of the middle rather quickly.

My son was no exception. He seemed very happy with his victory at first then he went quickly back to exchanging headlocks with his friends. While the other fathers and I were nervously awaiting the next race, the boys that been knocked out were staging crash up derbies with pinewood cars that seemed to have $20,000 European paint jobs.

When his friends cars were racing, my son would cheer as loudly as anyone for their cars to win. This did not seem like it would bring the years of glorious memories to victors that I imagined or the years of agonizing memories to the defeated.

Amazingly, I had to remind my son that his name and number had been called for his next heat, we ... he ... won easily. Each race we won moved us closer and closer to the finals. Glory would soon be mine ... er ... his. I was, infact, planning my son's victory speech in my head as heat number 4 began.

We were racing against a car that was painted to look like an ambulance. Yes, a cute, idea-- but hardly a thought was made to the air that would furiously pound into the front of its course and blocky exterior. The race started out close, but the ambulance started pulling away. Then our car slowly began to gain. I looked at my son's hands high in the air as the cars crossed the finish line. It ended up a victory -- for the ambulance. My son's hands dropped.

I looked back at our car resting solemnly against the bumper at the end of the track. I then found my son at the exact moment he was flying through the air about to do a full body slam onto a large pile of boys.

Yes, trophies are nice, but when it comes down to it, our small victory was just building the car, just trying and having hope. Winning was not the most important thing that day. We had to race the race -- we ... he ... had to try. Anyway pee wee baseball came soon after. We got a trophy for that.