I recently paid a visit to my dermatologist, not a social visit, rather my annual visit to pay the piper for years of joyous exposure to life under the sun. Many of such years when “sunblock” was not slathered but sought. Sought by the shade of a tree, or anything or anyone, casting a shadow wide enough for a brief respite.

As a kid, during all the time I spent at the Bowbells pool, playing baseball, hanging out at Mouse River or Van Hook, I can vividly remember one kid being slathered with sunblock by his mom.

It was probably somewhere around 1980? I was lying on the hot cement at the Bowbells pool, a blazing North Dakota July sun high in the sky, my scrawny 8-year-old body quivering uncontrollably. As I lay there, hoping a cloud didn’t drift between myself and salvation from hypothermia, I saw him. I don’t know who he was, but he looked miserable.

He was probably the same age as me, same scrawny body, same thick, yet quite short, polyester swim trunks. The ones with a draw string that was impossible to get undone when wet. I can remember frantically pawing at the drawstring with numbed and wrinkly fingers in the changing room at the pool so I could use the bathroom…sometimes. Other times? Well…“P” is the first letter in pool.

The one major difference between myself and this kid, was that his skin, that wasn’t covered by his little thick polyester swim trunks, was as white as my skin, that was covered by my little thick polyester swim trunks (with the knot in the drawstring). Throughout the pool break, his mom liberally applied a thick white paste, from his wispy strawberry-blonde hair down to his little blanched feet. He looked like a waxed candy bottle.

When he entered the pool, I curiously watched him, adrift in the middle of an ever-widening opaque film of surface water, and I pondered what that thick white paste might be? Maybe it provided a barrier of warmth between himself and the frigid water? No…he’s quivering too.

Now, as I sit in the waiting room of the dermatologist’s office, I know what it was, and I know that maybe I wouldn’t be sitting in the waiting room of the dermatologist’s office if I had applied a fistful now and then. So it goes.

Nowadays, I’m a bit more mindful about sunscreen. A bit. My dermatologist, whose skin is reminiscent of the slathered lad at the pool, doesn’t seem to agree with my position that gradual tanning of the skin from sun exposure is a natural, healthy form of sunblock.

She just frowns. She frowns at me a lot. I need to start scheduling my dermatology appointments for February to give my application of “natural sunblock” a chance to fade a few more shades before she lays her disapproving eyes upon my aging flesh.

I question the sanity of anyone that would willingly spend 12-years in college and medical school to examine people’s nasty skin conditions for a living? I don’t like to look at my own, but those little polyester swim trunks, only cover so much.

On the television, in the waiting room of the dermatologist’s, there was an infomercial, on repeat, for some new Botox injection to treat “mild to severe frown and laugh lines” complete with the obligatory before and after photos. I didn’t find it to be a very compelling sales pitch, as I preferred the “before” pictures. The “after” pictures looked like mannequins attempting human expressions.

A simple injection to blot out the evidence of a lifetime of mild to severe frowning and laughing? No thanks. There’s a lot of living I’d prefer not to forget stored in those lines, folds, and furrows.