Fireflies and The Dogs

This week, Pam and I intend to correct a major parenting mistake. It embarrasses me to even write about it. For some inexcusable reason we haven’t visited Kaitlin and Jon in Columbia in over two years! When we realized this fact, we could hardly believe it. How on earth could this be? Over that same period of time, we have visited Patrick and Sarah three times...and although nobody is keeping score...what am I saying, of course they’re keeping score! My children are famous for their competitiveness. Nevertheless, this week we will begin to correct this imbalance. We leave tomorrow and will come back Friday. The excuse for this particular visit is to see, in person, the annual...Synchronized Fireflies at Congeree National Park where Jon is a Ranger. We will gather at the park one night along with a couple thousand others around nightfall and watch an amazing spectacle that happens in only two places in the United States...thousands of fireflies all pulsing light together at the same time.

I’ve been told that it is an amazing sight to see, magical and hypnotic. No one really knows why fireflies synchronize in so few places, or why they bother to synchronize at all. The best scientific explanation is that the whole lighting up thing is how fireflies go about selecting a mate...call it flash-flirting. If this is true, then the occasion of a display of thousands of them lighting up at the exact same moment would be the human equivalent of karaoke night at a singles bar. So what we have here is one of nature’s most glorious displays turning out to be all about sex!! Isn’t that always the way? Be that as it may, I can’t wait to see it in person.

The rest of the time, we will just be hanging out with the kids...and the dogs. Yes, we are finally taking Lucy along on one of our trips...and she is stoked about it. She truly loves going bye-bye in the car, and for the most part enjoys hanging out with Jackson...

...right up to the moment where she has had enough of Jackson’s smothering affections, whereupon she jumps up on our bed and guards her safe place from all intruders, foreign and domestic. The Alfa Dog and the Queen Bee.