Living life without his spots

Irecently bumped into an old friend that I hadn’t seen in 40 years.

Her first words to me were: “Jim, what happened to your freckles? I used to love them!”

What? She caught me off-guard. I hadn’t considered the issue in ages.

“Sandblasted away by life’s trials, I suppose,” I replied.

Once upon a time, tens of thousands of despicable little reddish/brownish spots covered my face, arms, hands and shoulders. Curiously, I had almost none on my chest or legs. My legs — in shorts — compensated for zero freckles by glowing brightly like an LED streetlamp.

I loathed freckles. They made me feel like an outsider in my native Southern California. I wasn’t worthy of the expression “Sunny California, where everyone boasts a year-round tan.”

Not this surfer boy.

I grew up a ginger kid: brownish/reddish hair, freckled face and light complexion. My skin was so sensitive I couldn’t stand before an open refrigerator door for fear of getting sunburned.

My mom’s nickname for me was Freck. She used it affectionately, but I hated it. You’d think she would have been more circumspect. She had freckles, too — a gift from several redheaded Kansas aunties.

In California, my freckles had no redeeming value. They only contributed to my grade-school miseries. I faced taunts like “Freckle face, freckle face!” “Potty spots!” “White butt!”

I was the Doris Day of my high school class, requesting that my senior photo be shot through wax paper.

I recently heard a physician on television say that if you’ve had five sunburns in your life you stand a significantly greater chance of developing skin cancer.

Umm, five? Really? How about five a week?

I recall vinegar baths for particularly severe burns.

I usually forgot to apply sunscreen at the beach, but I managed to slather zinc oxide on my nose. Still, my proboscis was a slab of Farmer John bacon.

I never achieved a summer tan before Sept. 1. And, what I had then, really, was a reddish/brownish scorching of the flesh. It wasn’t a tan per se, more like a burn on top of a sear covered by a char. And loads of pealing chaff.

Many guys I was stationed with in the Army ribbed me about my condition: “Carnett, you can’t be from California! You must be from somewhere above Hudson Bay.”

I grew a beard when I became an adult, no doubt to hide my tortured face. Though the hair on my head was brown, my beard came in red, exacerbating the situation.

I suppose all this can be attributed to my Scots-Irish heritage, bestowed upon me by my paternal grandparents. While a pale countenance might work in Killarney or Dundee, it doesn’t cut it for a teen in Newport or Huntington.

Adding insult to injury, my two younger siblings, Bill and Judi, inherited my maternal grandfather’s Mediterranean complexion and to-die-for summer tans. No such luck pour moi.

I visited Dublin in the summer of my 27th year and noticed that a substantial segment of the population was pasty. Like me.

The Celtic summer sun dances tantalizingly above the western horizon well into the night, but rarely scorches.

Then, improbably, sometime during my fourth decade my freckles slipped away on little cat feet. It was as if it were a belated answer to prayer.

But I scarcely noticed. I was focused on bigger things, like providing for my family.

It was sometime after that, on a particular day that I can’t even recall now, when I looked into a mirror and realized the cursed spots were gone. But where did they go?

I have no idea.

Today I see my dermatologist regularly — last week, in fact. He goes over me with a magnifying glass. I’ve had more patches of skin probed, burned scraped and cut from my body than I care to recall.

But it’s all good.

After seeing my old friend the other day, I realize that freckles aren’t so bad after all.

Was I cool in high school without even knowing it?

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JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.