It is summertime and time to start spitting watermelon seeds. If you have not performed this feat in awhile you will find today’s seeds mere shadows of the seeds of your youth. Today’s seeds are white, rather thin, and blah … not those bulbous seeds with glossy black bodies you use to roll on your tongue – just waiting to be spit out in a contest with your sister or cousin on the Fourth of July.

Today’s seeds lack the density to move through the air with deliberation. Today’s white thingees just fly off in any direction as I can attest to after a recent contest with my granddaughter. So what’s going on here?

I have a feeling that watermelons have been engineered (dare I say genetically?) to produce these midget seeds. What seems to have been also lost and forgotten in this newly created watermelon is that old, really sweet taste as well as the extreme stickiness of the juice. I sort of recall I needed a towel to clean my face in the past and now I can do the job with a paper towel. Today’s watermelon is OK but lacks a certain excitement.

The best watermelons I have ever eaten were in Saudi Arabia where I worked in the ’80s. Juicy, sweet, meaty, delicious, and filled with old time big black seeds. They came from the mountains in southern Saudi Arabia where planting methods had not changed for ages; no pesticides or anything else were used to fool around with those watermelons. In “One Thousand Roads to Mecca,” Michael Wolfe mentions a pilgrim in the 14th century who wrote a letter home describing these choice, delicious watermelons of the region. The best he had ever tasted. So I gather some things never changed in the Kingdom.

Bill Clinton has written watermelon stories in his “My Life”; his Uncle Fred grew giant watermelons; as a Yale Law student Bill was bragging about the size of Hope watermelons the first time Hilary ever saw him, and once his friends from Hope, Ark., produced a watermelon feed on the South Lawn of the White House and as he puts it, “I got to tell my watermelon stories to a new generation.” You can bet Bill spit seeds in his youth.

Now the Fourth of July will soon be upon us. For the complete enjoyment of a watermelon you need to search for the melons of your youth, and then line up your daughter or grandson for a seed-spitting contest.

William Gallagher, M.D., is a Bangor dermatologist. He is a member of the American Academy of Dermatology.