From my Gazette column of August 1996

I miss the fireflies of July. A secret galaxy born from the still, overflowed waters of the Connecticut, they dance up the hillsides that surround the Meadows of Northampton into the night sky. For years we have visited the fireflies on our daughter Leah’s birthday, but not this year. On July 8, she turned 10 – old enough for sleep-away camp, old enough to be away on her birthday, she said.

Fifty years ago, cows grazed on these hills that now are blanketed with sensitive and maidenhair ferns, jackweed and jewelweed, honeysuckle, morning glories, thistle, and asters. The shrubs and ferns live under a canopy of black and yellow birch, gray ash, and silver maples. Farmers still work the acres below, planting corn and potatoes, but long ago they gave up the cows.

This year when my wife, Dale, and I strolled down to the Meadows with friends and neighbors to visit the fireflies, we pooled our knowledge: The bioluminescence is a chemical reaction; they’re classified as beetles, not flies; they live about two months; and they flash to find a mate. We were surrounded by thousands of them. Those peridot points seemed to connect the earth to the Milky Way.

When Leah was younger, she’d delay bedtime by asking me to “tell a story about when you were a kid.” That request was tough to turn down. I found that I liked telling her my stories that included many about summers.

I told her happy stories, funny tales, goofy things that her father and other relatives had done when we were kids – playing Wiffle Ball with my older brother, her Uncle Jeffrey, who batted lefty to make our games closer; another time, my sneaking peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to him after he ran away from home — he was hiding behind the big rock across the street, having once again broken a pane of glass while we were playing stickball.

When I told Leah these stories, I omitted the unhappy parts. As Amherst poet Patricia Schneider writes, “We make collages of the way/it might have been/had it been as we remembered,/as we think perhaps it was ...”

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Summer makes parents take stock of their kids, forces us to acknowledge how much they’ve changed since the summer before, focuses the fact that they are too quickly, even if in other ways maddeningly slowly, growing up. Even for the Peter Pan-enthralled 1960s generation, the eyes of summer see that we are getting older, that nothing lasts forever. These hot and slow days offer adults respite from routinized, yet often uncalm, lives and grant parents the luxury of being together with our kids, in Schneider’s words, “taking the long way home.”

We all want our kids to have great summers filled with adventures and friends. We hope they’ll have a reservoir of stories so that they, too, can easily acquiesce to postponing bedtime when their child says, “Tell me a story about when you were a kid.”

If Leah is lucky enough to have a child who graces life and loves stories as much as she does, I hope she will tell about visiting the fireflies every year on her birthday. She will leave out the part that we only did that for a while.

Leah was back home – Yay! – here with her husband, Kenny, their not quite 3-year-old Estelle, and 13-month Omari. They live in the island nation of Mauritius.

One night we kept Estelle up past her bedtime so that she could see the fireflies. She was enthralled by those flying, blinking points of lights. One landed on her shirt. She spoke to it like a friend. Another Dale handed to her, and her hand glowed. Mauritius is a beautiful island, but there are no fireflies there.

After our walk, sitting in our family room, Leah found the firefly column from 1996 and asked me to read it to her, which I did. I put out of my mind that night that it had been almost two years to the day that one of my favorite people, one of the kindest and most joyous people in my world, my Uncle Bill, had died. He was elderly but vital and smart and funny, and his death was unexpected. I thought he would live many more years.

Thinking of Bill always sparks the memory that just a few months later, my brother Jeffrey also died. His death, too, was completely unexpected, a shock. Recently, I was speaking with Jeffrey’s lifelong friend who put it succinctly, “We’re at an age when everything is fine until it isn’t.”

Before they left, Kenny and I played catch in the backyard. I lent Kenny my old Rawlings mitt, and I used the last present that Jeffrey had given me — an exquisite, still not fully broken-in Wilson baseball glove.

Dale and I said goodbye sadly with the hope that Estelle and Omari will have many more years of firefly walks so that later in life they’ll remember those magical times with their grandpa and grandma. Of course, you never know.

Bill Newman is a Northampton-based lawyer and co-host of Talk the Talk on WHMP.