For many reasons, I love summer.  I love the lush countryside. I love the warm, even hot, temperatures.  I love the smell of water on hot pavement.  But mostly I love lying in the sun in the pool.

The pool is my sanctuary.  No one else gets to enjoy it as often or as much as I do.  My vag. daughter is in beauty school and is gone 5 days a week from 8:00 until 5:00.  And Boppy would rather eat glass than swim in the daytime.  Many long years ago, Boppy received a bad sunburn…one of the blistering kind.  He was at a water park with his cousin, and in typical little boys fashion they outlasted their sunscreen.  He has never forgotten.  And he extends his phobia unto others.  I am constantly reminded to use sunscreen.  Even-though, my moisturizer has sunscreen in it I rarely take a topless trip in my convertible without being asked, “do you have sunscreen on?’ It doesn’t help that we have no shade around our pool.  Around 5:00 in the evening the sun goes behind some neighboring trees and casts the deep end into shade.  For this reason, I always make sure to keep sunscreen for everyone who might swim.   I keep everything from a SPF4 to and SPF50.  When I was placing last years sunscreen in the cabinet I learned that we were out of several strengths.  So  Boppy and I headed off to Wal-Mart to buy sunscreen. 

We didn’t have to search to find it.  Luckily every store in Arkansas has a big kiosk of sunscreen available.   Finding wasn’t the problem…agreeing on what to buy was the problem.  I don’t like sunscreen that smells like coconut.  Love coconut, hate artificial coconut scent.  Boppy can’t smell the coconut, or he just doesn’t care.  I tend to buy Coppertone products because they don’t have “that” smell.  It is slightly more expensive so Boppy wants to buy Banana Boat products….they reek!  The intensely sweet smell gives me a migraine. I had to tell Diamond Jim to suck it up and pay the extra .50 because it was lots cheaper than my migraine prescription which our insurance doesn’t cover.  Reminding him of the cost of Treximet did the trick.  We picked Coppertone.

I am dark skinned.  Not Native-American dark, but olive toned enough to tan easily.  Boppy is opalescent.  He burns easily…he does tan, but you have to see his covered skin to prove it.  Trust me when I say that will not happen.  So I pick out a SPF8 for myself.  As soon as he saw the number on the bottle, Boppy told me that I would be just as well off putting on water (he tends to over exaggerate).  I reminded him that I am darker skinned than he is (so was our albino bunny, by the way.) He keeps it up. “I don’t know why you even bother…you’re going to look stupid when you get skin cancer…you’re not setting a very good example….” and so on.  Again, I reminded him that if I did indeed get skin cancer it would probably be from tanning when I was young and using butter on my body…or baby oil and iodine…or the fact that I nearly lived in tanning beds until 1990.  I also reminded him that my dermatologist checks my body yearly for skin cancer and that he told me that the sun protection factor number was less important than how often it was applied.  Now dear ones, I know you don’t know Boppy, but he gets a look that is hard to describe when he is faced with logical information that flies in the face of his beliefs.  It causes his brow to knot up and his eyes to narrow.  The irises change from a azure blue to a gray.   He becomes….his mother!   Ignoring all of his arguments, I purchase the sunscreen that I wanted.  Of course he insists that he must have a different one.  I agree because putting an 8 on him is likes putting oil on a chicken breast on an open flame.  I pick up a 50….it’s for babies.  It comes in a pink bottle with teddy bears.  The look returns.  I find a 70.  Now it has become a treasure hunt and the goal is to see who can find the highest SPF.  He finds an 85.  OMG!  I don’t see how in the hell I can beat that.  I look on the back side of the display.  Eighty-five after 85 appear on the shelves.  Then I hear a triumphant yell from the other side.  In typical Boppy fashion, he doesn’t speak but holds the bottle in front of my eyes so I can see for myself (it’s kind of a passive aggressive neener neener).  100!  Keeping in mind that the number reflects how much longer you can stay in the sun than you could without sun block…the one minute he has, has now turned to 100.  That’s almost 2 hours!  I ask him why he can’t just roll in mud like other pigs.  The look returns.  I’m laughing my ass off now, partly because of the pig comment and partly because of the look.  He turns to me and seethes, “skin cancer” and turns to go to the checkout.

Yesterday I got to lie in the pool.  I sunburned.  Life sucks sometimes! 

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