lightning bugs and free gold

When I was a child, we tried to stay out after dark in the summer time so we could catch lightning bugs. Lightning bugs are also called fireflies.  They are flying bugs (insects?) that are only seen in the warmest months of midsummer in Chicago.  They only came out when it was really dark and it doesn't get very dark in midsummer Chicago (at least back in the early-to-mid sixties) until late. Or what seemed very late to a six year old, or a seven year old.  We had to fight to get permission to leave our front porches once it got dark. Going 'out' after dark was only for big kids.  Gradually, 'we' got permission to go on the lawn in front of our house, and the houses on either side of us.

On my block growing up, there was a child my age in each of five houses in a row. Tammy, then me, then, when we were in the 7th grade, Nancy, then Patrick Snooks, then Bucky Cywinski. Bucky's real name was Richard but everyone called him Bucky. He had the most bucked teeth I have, to this day, ever seen.  I asked him once if it bothered him to be called Bucky and he said he was okay with it, that even in his family, before he was old enough for school, he had always been Bucky, it was the only name he knew. And I took him at his word but, upon reflection, all these years later, I still wonder, what else could have have said?  Was he supposed to organize a campaign to stop being called Bucky and draw even more attention to his negative trait?  I always felt sorry for Bucky.  I sensed that his parents didn't really love him. My parents were unevenly focussed on their parenting but even my semi-negligent folks would have campaigned against a nickname like Bucky.  Maybe Bucky's parents felt helpless.  Us kids formed the impression they were immigrants. There were lots of immigrants in our neighborhood, poles and slavs and other denizens of eastern europe fleeing post war starvation. The freshest immigrants did not go to Catholic school but they tended to be Catholic and went to CCD classes on Wednesday. Do public schools still send kids for a half day of CCD?  In my southside Chicago, Catholic kids got let out of their public schools at noon on Wednesdays and came to Catholic school for religious instruction. And us Catholic school kids had only half a day of school on Wednesday. We ran until 12:45, to give the publics time to wolf down lunch and run over to our school. So, in general, we thought well of the publics because they gave us that half day on Wednesdays. But, also in general, we pitied the publics. We believed public school teachers didn't love their students, and didn't really care if the kids learned. We believed the Catholic school teachers cared more about us. Kids.

Although I was forbidden going past the house next door once it was dark on a summer night, it was hard to catch lightning bugs in front of my house because the street light was in front of my house and we didn't have any trees in front of our house. Two houses down, at Patrick Snooks' and then Bucky's, there were dense shade trees and no streetlight. Good for lightning bugs.

One of my earliest acts of disobedience was inching down the sidewalk to catch lightning bugs under the cover of Patrick and Bucky's tree canopies.

One night, I became determined to catch enough lightning bugs to form a gold ring. If you caught a lightning bug and pulled off their 'light' and rubbed it on your finger, and if you caught enough of them to go all the way around your finger, and make a thick ring of the gunky stuff, the next morning you would have a gold ring. As soon as I heard that fairy story, I knew it was a fairy story but I still wanted a free gold ring. Anything of real gold seemed very impressive to me.  So, sending myself a lot of negative, shaming self talk, for killing lightning bugs and for being gullible, I caught several dozen lightning bugs, slimed their light all around my left wedding ring finger and slept with my hand carefully outside the sheet that night so as not to disturb my ring.

But I didn't tell anyone what I was doing so no one would laugh at me later.

And my parents never caught me down in front of Bucky's.  I learned a few things that night.  Instinctive knowledge. If you are going to break the rules, don't tell anyone. Certainly not my brothers who would have ratted me out. And certainly no boys, who would have ratted me out to my brothers. Maybe I could have told Tammy.  Her mother did not let her off the front porch after dark, not when I was so young that I believed lightning bug lights could turn into gold rings. Maybe later.