I know it’s called bioluminescence but I have forgotten its purpose
I saw the first of the season but my oldest kid says it doesn’t count because it wasn’t lit up on account of the daytime, and the one she saw lit up that night is the first. I suddenly can’t remember as I type this if she calls them fireflies or, as I do, lightning bugs. I worry in these moments of drawing a blank that I am not living my life attentive to what actually matters, too caught up in work and bills and Trump tweets and unlistenable music. I worry as well that I will end up with my mind mostly gone - was it dementia? Alzheimer’s? I can’t remember - like my grandmother.
She did a lot of my raising. My mom was quite young, 20. My grandma was 26 years older than that. My own advancing age scrambles the distances I remember, makes my memories inaccurate, makes them read differently now. Here, try this. Plot the following points: my mother on the day of my birth; my grandmother on the day of my birth; an average of my grandmother in most of my memories of her; me today. Four points. Six possible pairs. Take a ruler and draw a line between each pair. The line between me today and my mother is longer than the line between me and either of grandmother points. The line between me and my mother is nearly as long as the line between her and my grandmother. Add three points, one for each of my children. Draw a line from the youngest to my mother at the age of my birth: shorter than the line between me and my mother. This is all to say I have aged into beginning to identify with my grandparents and to seeing my own parents as they were when I was young as more like my children than like me.
I would rather think of those hypothetical lines on imaginary paper and similar abstractions than of my grandmother at the end. I didn’t go see her. Would it be insulting to compare her memories to the lightning bug’s ass, blinking out? Is the callback worth that? In my own blinking out, like with firefly vs lightning bug (did you catch my trick? I focused on the bug, when in truth what I have forgotten is the exact phrase used by my beloved children for an experience which is for them a thing of genuine beauty and wonder; I was not primarily tricking you, reader, and it was not a trick I fully planned; surely that’s for the worse), I recall my grandmother dimming, and my own choice to not see her fully shut off. Last I saw her she was still funny and stubborn; she knew everyone’s names, knew she had children. I wanted to stop there, keep that, prevent the corrosion by laying more memories on top. I don’t regret this choice yet I do feel it displays some cowardice and selfishness.
My grandfather blinked out too, much younger, at 54. He was a bit younger than grandma. I’m not that age yet, but the difference, age-wise, between him in my most formative memories of him and me today feels minuscule. I have always had a skewed sense of old age as a result. My wife’s parents, only ten to twelve years younger than my grandparents, have always seemed positively dinosaurs to me.
Toward the end of his life grandpa was small, skeletal from cancer. We used to play chess on a commemorative civil war chess set. We played before he got sick, and after. I don’t know where that chess set ended up. I remember later my younger brothers got at it and bent the soldiers’ rifles and I lacked the words for what that meant in relation to my memories of my grandfather, who they never knew, but the feelings were big and I was rude about it. I regret that now.
We played on that set and in the last game I can recall, I don’t know if it was the pain or the medicine - marijuana, mostly, as far as I know, bought from one of my uncles’ friends who my grandparents’ disapproved of; it must have been a blow to their pride - he slowly forgot how to play. I began to win easily. He took it in stride, was a good sport, but didn’t like it. My oldest beats me in Clue now, I have more sense of what this is like. It’s fine, but there’s a degree of sense of my own eventual superannuation. His was accelerated.
In the last game I remember playing with him he began to move a pawn diagonally like in checkers, me chasing with a piece from the back row. I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or if he thought it was a legit move, and he kept making that same move each turn and after while I’m not sure if he knew if it was a joke anymore. I may have eventually said to my mother that I didn’t want to see him anymore once I realized he wasn’t going to get better. I’m not sure, that’s dimming now.
My cousins and I used to catch lightning bugs in our grandparents’ back yard - there must have been thousands of them, like living constellations - and we’d kill them (the trick was to kill them while still lit) and smear the jelly from their still-glowing asses onto our fingers and we’d run around that way as the jelly slowly dimmed. (I feel I must say I am not proud of that and would not let my own kids do that.)
Eventually he blinked all the way out, forgetting people, getting mean. I was there when my grandmother called the hospital saying she needed paramedics to come get him because he’d become belligerent. That’s when I first recall hearing that word. She said it three times. Once in discussion about whether to take the plunge and call, once while practicing what to say, and once by phone. Was it the old rotary phone that she used? I’m sure I knew once but that’s blinked out now. I remember the paramedics taking him out on a… gurney? Is that the word? Another blink. (Blinking in just now, remembering my mom getting the call that he died; “my dad died,” and my dad hugging her, one of the few clear memories I have of them being affectionate. Do other people remember their childhoods more clearly? I sometimes think mine blinks off more often as a response some of the bad parts. It is so strange to be so in one’s own head and yet to have parts of it darkened, and equally strange that we get so rarely to be in anyone else’s head in order to have a basis of comparison.)
Why was I allowed to be there for that phone call to the hospital and the arrival of the paramedics and his final departure? I assume because of the shortness of the lines between my daughters and my mother — i.e. her young age. I wouldn’t say I was damaged by it, and I am not shy to say when I think I was, but I don’t want those memories either, and I remember not liking going back to their house anymore once it wasn’t their house, only her house, still full of her in all her loveliness but empty of him. (It must have been so much worse for her; it is so selfish but I find it comforting to know that wives tend to outlive their husbands rather than the other way around; I can not - refuse to! - imagine living… after…) There’s nothing good that comes of my having been there. I wouldn’t parent the same way in those circumstances, not that it matters.
I’m told that old people forget in reverse order, losing the more recent past and keeping the distant. Maybe to the very last I’ll remember our firefly atrocity and that gurney, and him yelling something to my grandmother and my mom - I don’t remember what, another bit blinked out.
My middle daughter joined me and my oldest when we went out tonight to feed my friend’s cat. It was dark by the time we left, too late to be taking them out really - I got a weird look from people in the parking lot of my friend’s building as I took my young daughters into and a few minutes later out of the building. On our way to the car we saw… lightning bugs. The girls both ran down the sidewalk after the lightning bug, shouting their excitement to see… whatever it is they called them. When we got home they saw a few more and ran around in the yard holding their hands up high hoping to be landed on. They would never dream of killing them; this is progress across generations.
“Daddy! One landed on the bird statue! The one we got at the hardware store!”
“Cool girls, now go inside, we gotta get you to bed.” I had to repeat and in my not nicest voice, getting the “ohhhh” of disappointment.
The younger one said “those are the first fireflies” I think it was fireflies, I feel pretty sure of that now, it’s blinked back on, “the first fireflies I’ve seen this summer!”
My oldest didn’t tell her she saw some the night before. Or maybe she did. I’ve blinked out again.