Trophy Room

I'm working on a small project to honor my son's completion of his Cub Scout career. It's a plaque with an arrow attached, which is painted with stripes corresponding to his achievements. It's a little over the top, but more presentable than most of his commemorative stuff. I hesitate to go the "kids these days" route, but I think that I got one trophy when I was a kid, for being a benchwarmer on a youth league football team – truly a painful period in my socialization process – and I am just as happy that I don't have that reminder about today. In thinking of it now, I recall the indignity of being the only kid on the team without a jersey, my gray sweatshirt a sharp contrast to the heavy blue nylon jerseys with the white shoulder accents and position-appropriate numbers stitched elaborately onto the chests of every other kid on the team. As if that weren't enough, a kid named Starly (I'd spit on him now, even after all these years) would grab my facemask during practice and twist me mercilessly to the ground, where I would occasionally devolve to tears, and thus add indelible shame to my physical pain.

So I don't have much in the way of past-life memorabilia, though I don't imagine that I'd display it now, if I did. Certainly an Olympic Medal would not be hidden away (I've never even known a person who has one – not even a "lowly" Bronze Medal), nor a Nobel Prize. I might even deign to tack my Pulitzer on the wall when I get it.

My kids are wonderful, but I would say quite average middle-American suburban white kids. Fairly talented, but fairly uninspired, doing little more than it takes to get by, but loved and loving. It would be greedy to expect more. They have trophies, though. I can only imagine how many they would have if they were even a little better at sports or academics, for their shelves are fairly bursting as it is with their various awards, certificates, trophies, ribbons, and plaques.

My son won the Pinewood Derby one year (a father-son project), which was a complete fluke, though I get asked all of the time how we did it, and it got back to me later that I was suspected of cheating by using non-regulation wheels. I was wounded by the notion, and as I thought back, I realized that while we were building the car we lost one of the wheels under the workbench. Rather than tear everything apart to find it, we just took one of the wheels from the previous years' cars (a losing car, btw), and slapped it on to the new one, never giving it another thought. I have to say, it took a pretty discerning eye on the part of the suspicious dad to pick up on that wheel. The difference had to be quite subtle. I have long suspected that people who see nefarious intent in others reveal much about their own iniquity.

So the boy is done with Cub Scouts. He enjoyed it, and he is good pals with several of the boys in his Pack, so there was plenty of goofing around and fun during the meetings. I was Assistant Cub Master, which is the perfect parent's job in Cub Scouts, unless you are really looking to add to your workload. We had a skeleton in our closet, though, in that we are Unitarian-Universalists. You may recall that it was some UU's that took the Boy Scouts to task for their anti-gay positions years ago. I was a Boy Scout myself, and I loved it, but I still cringe whenever we are funneled down a religious chute during some scouting activities. Happily, my son experiences no cognitive dissonance over it, and I, like all good atheists, have learned when to keep my religious disbeliefs to myself.

So, on to Boy Scouts. Lots of camping and perhaps, even an Eagle Scout in our future. I would be glad for him, but I frankly wonder if he will stick with it when he feels like it is considered uncool in junior high and high school. He likes to be cool. It's not easy to convey to a kid that what seems supremely important today will lose its bling so quickly in later phases of life. There are plenty of cardboard boxes full of trophies to prove it.

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." Anais Nin