You'll Reap What You Sow

Attention! Everyone who is within eyeshot of this blog! I'm conducting a "Sunscreen Now or Cancer Later" drive. The target? My usually intelligent and reasonable son. From the look of things, he's ignoring my advice to use sunscreen on a regular basis and, as a result, his body matches his hair (except for two nickel-sized white spots where he dabs sunscreen once a day at the beginning of his eight-hour lifeguard shift and calls it good). I guess it's not enough that I, myself a former tanning bed addict, was diagnosed with malignant melanoma about five years ago and had a tiny, tiny skin cancer removed. (Which, I might add, Tyler was present for and offered the excited observation, "Dang, mom, that hole is REALLY big, which caused me to momentarily consider a full-on dead away faint.)

So, no, he doesn't seem to think that this could be a problem for him later on in life. Never mind that when he was little there was this older woman who came to the Marty pool for three hours every day and her skin looked like leather. Not new, soft, supple, rich Corinthian leather. She had more of a beef jerky leather look going. SO attractive.

So . . . I'm begging everyone who knows Tyler to bombard him with the dire statistics of what UV rays can do to one's skin. You can totally make up stuff. The more catastrophic the better. His email is whompthis12@hotmail.com or jmartin5@emporia.edu (or jmartin5@esu.edu, I can't remember which) or whompthis@tmail.com. I'm hoping that perhaps he'll listen to someone other than the woman who labored for sixty-five hours to give birth to him (it was really only about five hours and he knows it) and heed some good advice. I was yelling at him tonight, saying I hadn't spent hours and hours slathering sunscreen on him when he was little for him to end up with skin cancer. It reminded me of the scene in "Gone With the Wind" when mammy was telling Miss Scarlett that she couldn't wear her dress off her shoulders to the barbecue at Twelve Oaks . . . "I didn't spend hours and hours slathering you with buttermilk your whole life so you wouldn't freckle."

I don't know which is more disturbing . . . My instantaneous and complete recollection of that scene or the fact that I'm now thinking about going out to buy gallons and gallons of buttermilk.

Oh. One more thing. During our discussion tonight about this subject (we were sitting outside on the patio), a large grackle deposited a large splat of poo on Tyler's lifeguard shirt. Karma perhaps? Tyler, maybe you should ask Sharon Stone about that.