Welcome To The SCCA, John Baruth

"I like to play a game called 'people ball'," John told me. "It's when you pick up people and throw them. And they make a noise like 'waaaaaah! I'm telling!' I don't know why you would even need a regular ball when you can play people ball at recess." When I heard this on the drive home from school yesterday evening, I was a little conflicted. On one hand, if John likes initiating aggressive contact for no reason I think he'll make a great club racer. But on the other hand, the entire Spec Miata class, and much of the SCCA in general, is built on the idea of people snitching on each other, so if John finds that to be annoying, he's gonna hate having his Viper torn down after each regional.

Regardless of the above, he's now an SCCA member in good standing. But he's remarkably annoyed about the membership card.

The SCCA kid's program is called "SCCA Clubhouse". I'm not sure what benefits it offers; the reason John has his card now is so he can autocross with Mrs. Baruth this summer in his TopKart. Maybe they have a program to let ten-year-olds work the corners at Laguna Seca. It would be an improvement over the people who neglected to throw the yellow on me last year after I got PITted and T-boned.

Anyway, the kids' membership cards have SCCA Clubhouse logos all over them, along with crayon-drawing graphics. John saw this and he got extremely angry. "THIS IS STUPID! WHY DOESN'T IT LOOK LIKE YOURS?" Incidentally, Sam Smith said the same thing about his SCCA card last weekend, because his has a National race endorsement and mine doesn't. What can I say. I was too busy racing Grand-Am on my own dime to get my SCCA race license.

Eventually, John accepted the idea that other, far stupider, kids probably like having the crayon logos. But it reminded me, yet again, that what children want is not necessarily what adults want for them. As a parent, it's my constant desire to tie my apron strings to John, to keep him out of danger and trouble, to surround him with crayon drawings and stuffed animals. But he wants to do grownup, scary things. Children model themselves on adults. They don't like being pandered to or treated differently.

For that reason, therefore, the SCCA license should look the same for everybody who has one. Except for mine. You can put the Clubhouse logo on mine. Because as an autocrosser, I'm basically a complete joke.