Perhaps it was the burning rubber and Budweiser talking, but Charlie put the national drag-racing championship right up there with going to Disney World.
A huge thank you to funny car driver Bob Tasca III and his sponsor, Ford Racing, for inviting Charlie and a handful of other children from the local JDRF chapter to be their guest for the day.
This was a brand new experience not just for Charlie, but for me too. When the sonic blast of the engines revved and the cars shook our insides with a wave of sound at 310 miles per hour, we turned to each other with big smiles, shouting over the noise.
"This is so cool!!!!"
"When do the silly cars race?" Charlie asked.
"Funny cars," I corrected him. "Soon."
Charlie really got into it, cheering on our host, Bob Tasca, who did very well, but eventually lost to Ashley Force (what a racecar driver name) in the semifinals.
In between races, we hung in the Bob Tasca pit, mingling with other kids with diabetes and their parents. Next to us, a crew hovered around the car, surgically taking it apart and putting it back together.
Charlie formed an immediate bond with a boy his age who had the same pump in the same color. After just a minute of meeting each other, they were playing baseball with an imaginary ball and bat.
The boy's mother told me a story about a parent at school who thought her son shouldn't have a cookie because it wasn't sugar-free.
"He can have the cookie!" we both said in unison, rolling our eyes and then smiling at the fact that we so intimately know what the other is going through.
She had a look of measured frustration. I could so much relate to it. If diabetes was a person, it was a person who had wronged her time after time after time. "Oh, I know diabetes." That was the look on her face.
"He's 350 right now and not happy that I won't give him a bagel," she told me.
"He'll crash later though," she added.
And crash he did.
While lightning-fast cars roared in a blur down a damp track at impossible speeds, it was her son who was crashing in the stands.
And it was mine that would have a night from hell later that day.
Just another day at the races for the parent of a child with diabetes.
