Sunscreen

Moments after pulling in to the far parking lot at Great Falls by the platform tennis courts and seeing the minivans and SUVs with stickers in the rear windows from Loomis Chaffee, Woodberry Forest, Georgetown, and UVa, and also stickers supporting both presidential candidates, and seeing the tents set up and the bleachers full of young tennis fans, it takes Anne no time at all to remark, “We’ve forgotten the sunscreen.”

Anne is paranoid about the sun and not without good reason: three years ago she had a basal cell carcinoma removed from just beneath the left side of her jaw. She and Kate are fair and seemingly more vulnerable than Thomas and I who, with our mystically-received Moorish genes from my mother’s Norwegian ancestors, have curly dark hair and skin that tans well without burning or freckling. (The original Ericksons apparently enjoyed sailing the warmer climes.) Anne and I remember both being in college in Chapel Hill stretching out on beach towels on the tiny strip of grass at Connor Beach, our bodies soaked in baby oil and surrounded by cardboard wrapped in tin foil, listening to the Talking Heads and Superchunk and R.E.M. coming from a handheld stereo broadcast from WXYC right across the street. That was probably when most of the damage was done, outside of her childhood on the cape, but the scare was real enough and we take it seriously now, carrying around spare bottles of sunscreen in the glove compartments or travel kits of both our cars (60+ SPF) and never letting the children out of our sight without a quick spritz.

“I’ll take a look,” I say. “I may have some in the back.”

My golf clubs (second-hand) and shoes (well-worn, first generation Foot-Joys) are sandwiched in the cargo area of the wagon along with a stack of wool blankets (in case of a snowbound crisis), a size 7 Winston fly rod in its protective olive green case (more than worth the money I paid for it, I’d say—based on its current appearance, the rod would have been beat to hell and back by now), an old Wilson football in need of air, my running shoes, a copy of an engineering journal with an article on solar-powered tree houses, an emergency road repair kit, a chewed-up, fluorescent green Frisbee (Pepper’s) that pulls to the left when you throw it, and the cooler we took to the farmer’s market. The ice in the cooler has started to melt and the chicory and the asparagus is floating on top alongside six recycled plastic bottles of kefir and two gallons of organic, hormone-free skim milk in glass containers. The jar of unprocessed raw clover honey has sunk to the bottom of the cooler under its own weight.

“No dice,” I say.

“Well,” Anne says. “We’ll have to cut it short. And we’ll have to wear the hats.”

Kate and Thomas take their time getting out of the wagon: Thomas is still reading his folded-up paperback, the earpieces of his iPod still wedged into his ears (I can never tell if the thing is actually on; he wears them around the clock solely to avoid conversation) and Kate is fixing her sunglasses and massaging her hair into place (she has Anne’s hair; it’s uncanny how the two of them could be fair-skinned, freckled twins). I study them emerging from the backseat and stretching—Thomas in his baggy skater shorts and tee-shirt covered with graffiti (he has a growing collection of band tee-shirts in black though this one is white with a picture of two stylized guitars crossed at his sternum); Kate in a beige skirt and pink polo—as though they are someone else’s children, someone else’s beautiful children, more beautiful than anything I could ever begin to take credit for, standing with someone else’s stunning, ageless wife, (in her white tennis skirt and her knit shirt from Roland Garros that shows off her shoulder caps and a pair of pristine Stan Smiths) who on any other planet would not be caught dead with the likes of me.