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| Who of you kids can match the power of this dad? |
The Cub Scouts has a yearly tradition of having fathers build cars to compete against boys whose fathers don't help them make cars. It is called the pinewood derby.
The 30-year-old fathers who build the car for their sons beat the crap out of the kids who built the cars themselves. Then the 30-year-olds are proud of all the hard work they did to bring glory to their kids. My brother and I would build a pinewood derby cars every year and try our best to carve it out on the power tools we had at our disposal. Our poor efforts were much less good both aesthetically and mechanically compared to the cars produced by a neighbor of ours who worked in an auto body shop. For some bizarre reason, his son's cars always end up looking like they came from and auto body shop. which was just a whole lot better than what we could manage, but I digress.
The point is not how great they looked, their cars also performed orders of magnitude better than ours. On the track, there was a clear distinction between the father built wonders and the kid built monstrosities in lap time. By lap time I mean they go straight down a hill better. Some of the cars built by kids were so bad they couldn't even cross the finish line while cars built by a 35-year-old would zip past bringing honor and glory their undeserving and spoiled kids.
Bitter? Yes, I guess I am. In all the years I entered and all the years I help my brother we won nothing. The whole time I thought I was competing against other kids. I didn't realize until I was a little older that there was some cheating going on. Maybe we were just building up mental toughness so when we failed as adults we could take it like 9-year-olds.
