Oatmeal Cookies of the Night...

Booga loves to swim.
He would spend the entire day in the water if I let him. And if I could get a covered pool to let him spend the entire day swimming, I would let him spend the entire day swimming. Because he loves to swim…He’s a fish.
It doesn’t matter if it’s cold or if it’s raining….Fish don’t care if the water cold. Booga’s gonna swim.
That’s my Booga.
However, I sometimes forget that we have English/Irish skin and we burn like vampires in the sun…

So Sunday I took Booga to his Aunt’s and let him swim to his Turkish delight.
I watched him from their dining room and since it was the first time he’d gotten to go swimming this year, I of course, forgot to bring sunscreen.

Because I am stupid that way sometimes and forget that the sun hates me.

I am white to the point of glowing in the dark. The road commission doesn’t need to have flashing lights on the highway, they just call me to stand there and wave my arms. Santa would probably make me his lead reindeer and drop kick Rudolph simply because I gripe less and use less voltage.

That is how very white I am….Deal with it.
Red hair and white skin.
The only time I’ve tanned is when I’ve used self-tanning lotion and I have to be careful with that or I look like an Ooompa Loompa.
I’ve had spray tans and so forth and the bottom line is…I can’t tan. *Sob*
It’s like a woman that can’t eat chocolate…It’s a crying shame, and somewhat unfair.

However, I digress.
Booga was swimming and I was visiting with my sister-in-law and he got a burn on his back.
Now, I’ve had burns, bad, bad, painful burns that kept me up at night. However this burn didn’t look all that bad.
I put some Aloe on it, and called it good.
Next morning, it still didn’t look all that bad; in fact it looked pretty good. It looked like the red was already fading. Wow. It’s probably his dad’s alligator skin….Right?
So, he went pretty much all day without a shirt because it was really hot and muggy and I didn’t think much of it.
So about 10:30 that night I looked at his back and lo there were little blisters on the top of his shoulders. Now, Booga is nineteen so it’s hard to tell if those blisters are blisters or if that is acne or his hairy back being hairy. So I touched one of the spots in question and it broke and the burn fluid dripped down his back….
Needless to say I was instantly sick, I felt horribly guilty for being a hideous mother and rotten caretaker and immediately called my Aunt Sharon who is a nurse and asked her what to do….I mean it’s 10:30 PM, what do I do now? Well she told me it needed ointment (Aloe, burn ointment, etc.) and it needed to be covered with gauze or some kind of bandage….
“Covered? How do I cover this large an area? I mean Booga has a broad back and these little blisters are going all across the top of it. I’m not going to be able to cover that whole thing.”
“Well, if you don’t cover it, it could get infected now that one of the blisters has popped…”
“Oh holy cats!”
So I told her, “Hey, I’m taking him to emergency.”
So I told Booga that we were going into the emergency room for his back, and oddly enough, he didn’t care.
He got his hat and shoes and got in the car with me and the night was warm and Dave Matthews was playing on my CD player in my car. And it was actually a pleasant drive in, and when I got there the doctor talked to me about the burn like he was discussing the quality of the oatmeal raisin cookies he just had on break. It wasn’t that bad, according to them.
Not that bad? Not that bad?
Have you met me?
Not that bad….
Listen, I am the queen of getting burnt. One time I sat on my parent’s porch, when I was a teenager and deliberately burned my legs while reading a romance novel simply to get some color on them. I ended up sicker than a dog that night, about puking my guts out with heat stroke, but I had some color on those pearly puppies, and I have never, that I can remember, never, blistered….
Perhaps this is God’s will, perhaps he is smiling on me because the ozone layer is so thin…Who knows….But I was unaccustomed to the whole concept of blistering. This was rocking my world.
However, I believe Booga was just relishing the whole idea and the novelty of being in the car, driving twenty minutes into town, at what he considered the middle of the night. And after we had picked up his medicated cream and his steroids that they put him on to stop the inflammation, we drove home in the dark at about 1:00 AM.

And it was nice.
It was a warm summer night, and I had Dave on the CD player and I was driving my car with the moon roof open and the windows rolled down and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed driving at that time of night when no one else is on the road in the country. It was quiet and calm and I didn’t even mind the deer trying to cross the road, standing there staring at my car like a chance not taken. It was nice. And Booga was intrigued at the idea of driving after midnight. He’d never done this before.
I had also forgotten how some of my most favorite memories were of my father coming home from work and mother packing us up in the car and driving with us, all the way from central Michigan to Dresden Ohio where my mother’s extended family lived.
It wasn’t the actual stay at my great Uncles farm that captivated me as much as it was the drive at night. The whole looking out the window into the deep, dark, night and seeing the firefly’s roaming around. And we would stop at rest areas and have a late night lunch. It was so cool.
I didn’t enjoy visiting with my mother’s family in Dresden as much as I did traveling at night.
I also remembered that when I was a young person, in my early twenties and I would go out and dance with my friends and come home in the wee hours of the morning. I enjoyed the night; (and sometimes the very early mornings) and the peace and serenity of driving at a time when everyone else was asleep.
And for a moment I really remembered something that I’d forgotten about my youth; and I was sharing it with Booga and he seemed to be enjoying it too.
Somehow that seemed sad. That he couldn’t enjoy something like driving at night because of his disability.
But perhaps, while dad is out on the road, Booga and I can do some late night driving-just to do it and enjoy the peace and quiet of the warm summer’s night.

Funny how life works out sometimes.
Something frightening and hideous happens, however, out of it comes the remnants of a memory and something that is warm and comforting as my mom’s oatmeal raisin cookies. Isn’t that odd? What started out as being scary- ended up being memorable?
But isn’t that the way it goes sometimes?