NOSTALGIA-LIGHTNING BUGS!

*Recently, while I was enjoying a Saturday evening cookout at a neighbor's house and watching the hostess try unsuccessfully to entice her preteen children away from their video games and out into the backyard where they could at least get some fresh air and maybe even a little of the healthy exercise that so many of our young people seem to be missing these days, I could not help but recall how, way back in the middle of the last century, when I was a boy growing up in Dallas, Texas, my buddies and I would spend many an enjoyable evening outside and running around our neighborhood, like a bunch of crazy little people, in pursuit of the more than plentiful little flying insects that we called "lightning bugs," which we would then catch and "detain" in our mothers' clear glass fruit jars so that we could watch them while they sent us secret coded messages by using their bioluminescent abdomens to flash red, yellow and green signals in what were seemingly random combinations that only we could understand, which always entertained us until late in the evening when our moms would eventually come out and call us in for the night...after telling us to set all of our captives free of course.