BUZZon - Glimmer, Glimmer

The boy is ten years old, and he has recently moved from a big city to an old-fashioned small town, from a small house with a tiny backyard, to a house built early in the nineteenth century, with a huge barn behind it, and behind that a garden with plantings of red and black currants, raspberries, a peach tree. It is a summer night and he is in that wide, tranquil, far garden, where he sees tiny fragments of light floating through the air. Fireflies, and he tries to catch them in a jar provided by his mother. He doesn’t yet know the word bioluminescence, but he is fascinated by the little creatures that flash their signals across the darkling summer air, a new vision of natural magic.

I was that boy, of course, and earlier this summer I was reminded of him and the intoxicating moment when he first saw a firefly. Each night I have the habit of taking our dog, Star, for a walk up the road on a leash, a last outing before bed. In the vanishing twilight she sees and hears more than I do and for a few nights we were surrounded by hatching June beetles, which she wanted to catch and gobble down. It was a relief when the hatch ended. I am no longer in danger of being hauled into the ditch by a muscular canine bug hunter.

One later night she grew fascinated by something in the long grass. Looking to see what it was I had the sudden impression of a gleam of light, then another, a blue-white flash a few feet above. At first I took all this for a delusion, some momentary explosion in the brain, but then I realized that I was observing fireflies. I hadn’t seen them for fifty or sixty years, and without the dog to lead me into the mosquito-haunted night, I might have missed them.

Bioluminescence their pale fire is called and the cold sparks in the blackness provide species recognition and mating signals, male and female signalling back and forth their readiness to mate and their appropriateness as a partner. They produce light without heat, a rare phenomenon in nature.

I got all this information on bioluminescence from an encyclopedia. “Many luminous shrimps are known, but no luminous crabs,” says the Brittanica. And also reminded me of the luminescent fungus called foxfire. When I was young, some adult promised to show it to me, though now don’t recall ever seeing it.

Then I found myself listening to Stuart MacLean on the CBC, and he was talking about an artist named Michael Flomen, who makes photograms by exposing photographic paper to the movement of fireflies. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the details of how he gets the firefly to dance for him; you’ll have to work it out for yourself if you want to try the trick.

Suddenly, it seemed, fireflies were everywhere.

Glowworms, they have been called. I thought back a year or so ago, to the times when a group of my friends decided to memorize a poem a week. The project didn’t go on long, but while we were at it I chose a poem by Andrew Marvell called “The Mower to the Glowworms.” It is one of a series of poems in which The Mower is a central figure. The Mower refers to the illuminated insects as ‘living lights’ and ‘country comets’, and presents them as offering light to lead the mowers home in the absolute blackness of the pre-modern night.

But not this mower.

Your courteous lights in vain you waste
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home.

And then of course there’s the pop song ‘Shine Little Glow-worm’ recorded by the Mills Brothers in 1952. Twenty one weeks on the charts. Three weeks at number 1!

Ghost Story ←		A Real Letter →

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The Other Notebookby David Helwig

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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig