Lightning Bugs

This is a piece I wrote in my journal about a month ago. It doesn't have anything to do with the class (I hope that's okay), but I just felt like sharing it.


One night in late June, I was sitting in my sun room, just relaxing and looking out over the back yard. The fireflies were out in force. The scores of little flashing dots showed up crisply against the near-black backdrop of trees in the rearmost portion of the yard. It was quite a light show.

Seeing the fireflies took me back to any number of summer evenings from my childhood. I was never one to go chasing fireflies in order to catch them in a jar, but they were still always a part of the scenery on those summer nights when I would be outside well after dark.

I was reminded of my father. He worked long hours during the summer, twelve or thirteen hour days, usually. He was a manager at the Birdseye frozen vegetable processing plant in town, and summer was their busy season. By the time he got home from work, it was usually approaching dusk. That was his time to tend to his garden, or to redo the yard work that my mother or I had not done to his satisfaction earlier in the day - which was pretty much all of it. He would keep working until it was too dark to see. Then he'd take his usual seat on the picnic table.

My father never sat at our picnic table unless there was a meal being served at the time or he was using it as an outdoor workbench. He preferred to sit on top of it with his feet resting on the bench and his elbows resting on his knees. With his bald head and aquiline nose, he looked like a majestic bird surveying his territory from a perch. On those long summer nights, he would sit on the table and sip beer and smoke a few cigarettes. I would often sit out there with him, partially because it seemed like something of a treat to be outside after dark, but mostly because I was a boy and wherever my dad was seemed like the right place for me to be too.

Dad didn't say a lot. Sometimes he'd comment about the state of his vegetable garden, more to himself than to me. Mostly he sat quietly, looking down with his head resting on his fingertips, moving only to take another sip from the beer or another drag from his Benson & Hedges. When he did the latter, the end of the cigarette would glow a little brighter for a few seconds. That would be followed by the sight of fireflies closing in on his position. Occasionally, he'd take a drag, and one of them would find the glowing butt so irresistible, they would fly directly into his face. The peace and calm of the night would suddenly be interrupted by Dad flailing his arms around, saying, "Shoo! Scat!! Goddamn lightning bugs!" To a seven-year-old, the scene of ones father getting dive-bombed by insects with all the resulting fidgeting and profanity is pure comedy gold. To me, the memory of it still is.

When I look back on those nights, I don't really remember much about what was going on inside the head of the young boy at that picnic table. But the old man who, at the time, was such a mystery, now seems like an open book. He worked like a dog all day to feed his family and pay the mortgage. The house he came home to was no palace, but it was his. With the few remaining hours of the day, he wanted to lose himself in a hobby and some chores around the yard - which, to him, were one in the same. Then finally, he had a chance to unwind and clear his mind enjoying some peace and quiet on a beautiful summer night, with his kid being seen but not heard.

I thought about those things as I sat alone in the sun room looking out on the back yard on a Friday night after a challenging week at work. I sat in the darkness and remembered the old man. And every now and then, my attention would be torn away from thoughts of what happened decades ago by a particularly intense display of insect fireworks in some corner of the back forty.

Goddamn lightning bugs.