The Bringer of Light (First published 6/21/1994)

In the winter, I forget about fireflies.

I don’t know how this hap­ pens. How can I be so jaded to take them for granted? I guess it’s because there are so many of them we think of them as common, simply so much background glitter.

Late one evening I stood in the driveway taking in the night. The fields stuttered with a galaxy of fireflies, blinking the lusty Morse code of their brief mating season.

The black expanse under the clouded sky swarmed with them, as though the Milky Way had come down after all this time to see what all the commotion was about.

Taking fireflies for granted makes sense, I guess. As we grow up, we like to act cool, like we know it all. Miraculous old world. Ho-hum.

The firefly is doubly misnamed, in fact.

The light has nothing to do with fire. Its scientific name, Lampyridae, means “torch­ bearers.”

Also, it’s not a fly, but a beetle.

America has about 100 species of firefly – out of 2,000 across the globe – each with its own flash pattern.

The members of a Southeast Asia species flicker their tail-lights in unison. Must be quite a sight.

The light show you see in the open on summer evenings are the males of the species, looking a little girlie action.

The females remain on the ground, mostly out of sight, flashing back.

One naturalist wrote that the males can be attracted by squatting near the ground and flashing a penlight at two-second intervals. I’ve never tried it, so I don’t know if it works.

The firefly’s light, called “bioluminescence,” is caused by the internal mixing of two substances in the bug’s body called, wonderfully, “luciferin” and “luciferase.”

Don’t be alarmed. The materials were not named after the devilish Lucifer, but after the one in Greek myth, the light-bearer who brings in the dawn.

Almost all of the chemical energy expended by the firefly results in light.

Compare that to the light of a 100 watt bulb; 94 percent of the energy it takes to run it is wasted producing heat.

However interesting all that is, it has little to do with what is so magical about fireflies.

Science can tell us, to paraphrase poet Dylan Thomas, everything about fireflies except “why?”

A famous Dutch philosopher was once a summertime houseguest of a friend of mine.

During a dinner party held on his first evening in the country, the old man walked out onto the deck that over­ looked the woods behind the house.

After a long while, my friend went looking for her guest.

He stood transfixed, staring at the fireflies, which he had never seen, awed that such things could be.

Everybody else at the party was inside, talking shop, and playing office politics. Only the philosopher thought to look around. Only he was open to wonder.

Sometimes I think that only children, philosophers and poets retain wisdom in this world. The rest of us are too busy with email, meetings, cell phones and lawnmowers.

And that’s a shame.