Every year we gather at the home of my dearest friend for a huge Fourth of July celebration. Her house offers excellent seating for the parade and fireworks, and there is always an enormous amount of food.

Being that she is the “hostess with the mostest” everything is beautifully organized, right down to a well-stocked, readily available first aid kit. With more than 20 kids constantly running through the house there are more than a few bump and bruises.

A couple of years ago, as we were gathered on the front lawn, glassy-eyed from the third helping of some chocolate pudding, whipped cream, graham cracker concoction, and wondering when we should heat up the leftover brats for dinner, my 10-year-old daughter emerged from the house with a bloody knee and very sincerely, “Do you have any latex-free Band-Aids?”

This innocent question, asked by a girl who is indeed allergic to latex, brought about gales of laughter. Anyone older than 25 knows that latex free Band-Aids are relatively new on the market (as in debuted in the last decade) and are not yet considered a staple in first-aid kits.

The Band-Aid company has made considerable strides in the past 30 years. When I was a kid, there were no cartoon characters, nothing waterproof, no bright colors or heart-shapes, nothing pre-medicated with antibiotic ointments, and the word “ouchless” was not a part of our vocabulary. We had plain brown plastic that would stick to your leg for days. It didn’t “breathe” like they do today. And if you were lucky enough to have one wrapped around your finger, you could make it last so long that the edges began to roll down and get grimy. And when finally removed, your finger would be white and wrinkly.

The best thing about those bandages was the metal flip-top box perfect for storing treasures when you finally depleted the contents. Nowadays, they have boring, flimsy, cardboard boxes that are not worthy to package something so special. A Band-Aid is more than a plastic strip designed to keep dirt out of a cut. It is a symbol that tells the world you have endured pain, you are strong, and you have a story to tell.

We go through Band-Aids like water around our house. I have a stash of every type, size, and color and the kids help themselves, letting me know when I need to restock. But when I was a kid, things were quite different because my mother was so frugal.

“How frugal was she?” you ask.

She was so frugal that each year my sister and I received our own personal box of Band-Aids as Christmas gifts. It was up to us to make them last for the entire year because mom was not about to let us have one out of the bathroom cabinet unless we were seriously injured. And then we were rewarded with the coveted plastic strip only after the wound had been vigorously scrubbed, doused with alcohol, and painted with Methiolate. I would have preferred the mercury laden Mercurochrome that my grandma regularly dotted onto our boo-boos, followed with gentle blowing to cool the sting, but Mom’s motto was, “If it doesn’t sting, it isn’t clean!”

Many of the times I received a Band-Aid, I probably should have actually been in the emergency room. One of the few times I was granted the privilege of stitches I had cut the edge of my hand, just below my thumb, on a broken glass. After soaking through three precious Band-Aids, Mom decided that perhaps a trip to the ER was in order. But she didn’t want to make such an expensive decision herself, so we wrapped my hand in a towel and headed to the college where my dad was attending night class.

I walked to his second story classroom, dramatically threw open the door, and I waved with skin flapping off my hand and blood running down my arm. My trip to the hospital resulted in an odd C-shaped line of stitches and an ugly hump that still throbs if I hit it just right.

My kids are spoiled with readily available Band-Aids and frequent trips to the emergency room. But as my latex-allergic daughter often sings: “There’ll be no Band-Aids in Heaven/No emergency medical care/There’ll be no skinned knees, no stings from the bees,/There’ll be no Band-Aids up there/We might as well use them while we have them!