March 29, 2024

I get burned — once a year

The first baseball and softball games of the season bring the usual excitement. The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the fans cheering or cursing plays that affect their teams.

Nearly always, I am too caught up in this excitement to remember to bring one major thing with me.

Whether covering an event for the paper or simply spectating, there’s an outdoor-sports checklist: water, a hat, weather-appropriate clothing and maybe tickets or a media pass — yet I always overlook the same item.

It only takes one outdoor experience each season to remind me what was forgotten.

The sun is a helpful ball of fire, warming our planet, giving us beautiful Iowa days and helping plants and animals thrive. But it also bakes and dries the skin of fair-skinned mammals, making them regret their forays into the tempting light.

My one forgotten item always seems to be sunscreen.

For me, this summer’s experience has yet to come, and at the risk of jinxing it, I’m hoping this can be one of the first summers in recent memory when I can make it through without the same painful lesson.

When I covered high school sports for a living, it would often be during an evening or the next day it became clear how red and burned my neck and face were, prompting some predictable “true redneck” jokes.

Upon returning home, I would immediately locate my leftover supply of sunscreen from last fall and purchase a new bottle soon thereafter.

You’d think eight years of living in Huntington Beach, Calif., and under the hot New Mexico sun for more than 12 years would forge some type of hot-stove reflex, but it doesn’t. The lesson has to be repeated every spring or summer, despite repeated resolutions to remember this time.

In fact, anyone who’s ever lived at the 5,300-foot elevation of Albuquerque or higher knows how much easier it is to get sunburned there than at sea level, but low elevation, along with cloudy skies, are deceptive. Like a video-game sniper waiting for a clean shot, the sun sneaks an attack, waiting above he ceiling throughout the morning before firing its vicious, dermatologically catastrophic rays toward us fair-skinned folk.

Before the days of sunscreen and modern knowledge about skin cancer, painful punishment was simply the cost of working or playing outdoors. Now, apparently, it is usually needed for one or two days each year to help provide sufficient recall of sunscreen and its helpful properties.

My need for sunscreen might or might not be tied to my Western European lineage, but it is tied to an apparent need to repeat painful lessons. While there seems to be no issue with remembering rain gear, winter clothing or bug spray, sun protection eludes my memory banks.

Like a thief who squeezes through the vents of a building, the recall of the last sunburn escapes my thoughts. It scurries out of my brain with the same sense of desperation and determination that the sun’s rays show in blazing toward my forehead.

When I hear the crack of the bat or the splash of a pool this summer, I’ll be focused on that moment. Hours later, however, I might be focused on what I had forgotten to throw in my backpack that morning.

Contact Jason W. Brooks at

jbrooks@newtondailynews.com