Burn and peel

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

My daughter is a senior at the Academies of West Memphis and last Friday was the last day for seniors ahead of next Friday’s graduation, so she’s at home during the day now.

So, when she headed outside yesterday in a bathing suit with her phone and a big towel, I assumed she was planning to wash her car — which definitely needs washing.

But no, she was going outside to “tan” — Prom is coming up — which is somehing I thought we were no longer doing now that we have all this information about the dangers of too much sun. I thought the way to add some “color” here in the 21st century was all about spray tans and bronzers and that sort of thing. Even tanning beds (at least in my limited knowledge on the subject) were no longer in vogue these days.

But no, she assured me, people still “lay out” as we called it in

See VIEWPOINT, page A5 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

the before times of days gone by when we didn’t know what an SPF was and you just went out in the sun and did your thing like there was no such thing as skin cancer (and yes, we drank from the hose).

There’s a few pictures in my Mom and Dad’s old leatherbound family photo album they keep on the chest by their bed. It’s full of me and my sisters out playing in the summer time, with an inflatible pool or a Slip N Slide or whatever. No sunscreen (did sunscreen even exist in the 1980s?) or even a shirt on.

There are photos from around 1974 of a family get-together in Sardis, Mississippi, where my Mom and her sisters are all laying out in their swimsuits and there I am, wearing only a pair of baby swimming trunks (I was one), right there with them. This was, of course, when you wore suntan oil or lotion, not sunscreen, because the leading opinion was that the sun was “good for you” — soak up all that Vitamin D, right? Remember the bottle of Coppertone with the dog pulling the little girl’s swimsuit down showing her pasty white booty compared to her tan back and legs?

But sadly, I don’t tan. I turn into a lobster. The ol’ burn and peel. My back and shoulders bear the scars (and by “scars” I mean freckles) of my childhood days. The rest of me is just an “all-over” pasty white booty. And just FYI, a little sun is good for you… a little.