Fireflies and Father's Day

The next newsletter date falls on Father's Day, and I will be doing some as-yet-undisclosed activities at some distant location, so I'm writing this in advance. Little robots will take care of sending you your copies on Sunday morning, giving me time to enjoy the day.

We've been sitting outside on the long summer evenings, watching the fireflies come out at dusk. They're plentiful this year, lighting up the trees with their advertisements. This is Tinder for fireflies: "Look at me! Swipe right!" Bioluminescent speed dating.

We get to talking about fireflies. My wife remembers the ones in Japan, which come out in the thousands for just a week in mid-June. They're larger than New York fireflies, and they hover in the creekbeds, gradually rising higher as the night gets darker. In contrast, ours hang out in the trees and grasses, and are active for four to five weeks from mid-June to mid-July, far longer than the short-lived Japanese hotaru (ホタル).

There was a story that her father always told her, of the time he was selected from his class for a special task. He caught some hotaru and put them in a bamboo cage. Then, dressed in the best clothes, he went by train with the school principal to present them to the Japanese Emperor. These were the days before the bullet trains, before the war, so the trip took all day. He made his presentation, but never saw the Emperor, because it was forbidden to look up. Then he took the train back to the village in the mountains.

So there's a story of a father and some fireflies, for this Father's Day newsletter.