My mother keeps mementos of our childhood in an old cedar chest—things we drew for her with crayons, the little school projects that we brought home to her, the baby teeth that she snuck out from under our pillows and replaced with quarters from the tooth fairy. This year I'm going to start saving the cards I get from my parents, because I realize someday my parents won't be around to tell me how much they love me on my christmas cards or birthday cards, and I'll wish I'd saved them all. ----- It's been good to be home.

I was walking through a forest at night when I crossed paths with a firefly. When it switched itself on I was right on top of it, and I saw with abrupt and blazing clarity the horseshoe of lightning around its lower abdomen, the veins along its wings, the dangling wires of its legs. On a whim, I turned my flashlight off. For a second everything was black except the treetops silhouetted against the smokey night sky. As my eyes adjusted, I saw the forest was teeming with fireflies, and each of their slow pulses revealed small sections of the world behind the world of darkness. A patch of gravel here. A bed of pine needles there. A semi-circle of tree trunk. The textured asphalt that had led me here from the camp site.

This is how we live. Not in sunlight but in a vast darkness lit by fireflies. When we stand in broad daylight, we believe that everything we see is everything that exists. But how often do we see the truths that lie beneath---only in brief flashes of inspiration, in patches of vision that quickly dim. Our reality... consciousness... knowledge... experience... is a constellation of fireflies glowing in a night of ignorance.

And the fireflies glow all the more beautiful for it.


-------,edited----

I was walking through a forest at night when I crossed paths with a firefly. When it switched itself on I was right on top of it, and I saw with abrupt and blazing clarity the horseshoe of lightning around its lower abdomen, the veins along its wings, the dangling wires of its legs. On a whim, I turned my flashlight off. For a second everything was black, but as my eyes adjusted I saw the forest was teeming with fireflies.  Each of their slow pulses revealed small sections of the world behind the world of darkness. A patch of gravel here. A bed of pine needles there. A semi-circle of tree trunk. The textured asphalt that had led me here from the camp site.

This is how we live. Not in sunlight but in a vast darkness lit by fireflies. In broad daylight, we believe too easily that everything we see is everything that exists. But how often do we glimpse the truths that lie beneath?  Only in brief flashes of inspiration, in patches of vision that quickly dim.  Our reality... consciousness... knowledge... experience... is a constellation of fireflies glowing in a night of ignorance.

And the fireflies glow all the more beautiful for it.

I saw an older couple I know on an outing with their eleven year old daughter in downtown Reston. She was dressed up in an old-fashioned way, with a ribbon in her hair, a white blouse with short ballooning sleeves, and a long blue skirt, and wherever they went, she would run ahead of her parents ten or twenty feet and wait for them to catch up, or run back to them as if to report like a breathless scout returning from far afield. I was about to go out to them from the cafe where I'd been trying to write, but something about the way her parents glided behind her, smiling patiently, contentedly, following their shining daughter with their lives in their eyes wherever she went, made me feel like I would be intruding.

I woke up this morning imagining the diverse yet fortunate parenting that went into making some of my favorite people on the planet the persons that they are. How this one's mother showed her daughter through silent example that when *she* doesn't always get what she wants, she tries instead to be more appreciative of what she has. How another's father sat him down and told him that everyone loves

what they're best at, which is a blessing, but he should never lord it over people, not necessarily because it would make him a bad person (that was in the subtext) but because if he did, other people's jealousy would always hold him back.

And I thought about how 'diverse yet fortunate parenting' isn't always 'good' parenting. How one of my friends learned to be responsible and solicitous because her father could never take care of himself after her mother died. How another one became goofy and overly gregarious because he inherited his mother's talent for connecting with people, but saw that she was manipulative and swore he'd never be the same. How this one's calmness and humility derive from her troubled childhood, her overbearing parents, and never quite feeling like she was in control of her own life.

It's strange how we become who we are. I know that you can zoom out, see bigger patterns and trends, and talk about what 'good parenting' comprises. But personally I'd rather zoom in and marvel at the improbability of individual lives. It makes me feel grateful for my friends, and to their parents, for making them who they are.

My grandfather is becoming senile. He forgets where he puts things. He forgets where he's going. He forgets why his foot has been bandaged up after they removed cancerous cells from his toes. But he can remember, like it was yesterday, being a kid in Canton and watching the giant forms of Han Chinese walking through the sky on the strutworks of the first bridge to span the Pearl River. He remembers discovering what a battery is, and trying to bring electricity to his parents' tiny third story apartment by rigging together an old battery, a light bulb, and some wires (it didn't work). He remembers going to missionary school in Shanghai, and skipping ahead two grades so that by the time World War II came to China he had just obtained the highest educational degree he would ever receive—his sixth grade certificate. He remembers fleeing before the Japanese invasion a second time as a young man, running and running until his shoes fell off and his feet began to bleed and running still some more with the sounds of tanks and machine guns behind him. He remembers the man who shared half a ball of rice with him on the evening he might have starved to death. And he remembers the day he ran into his sister, my aunty Pearl, months later at a church social in an inland city hundreds of miles away from home after they had lost touch with everyone else in their family.

I find it strange sometimes how incognizant we are of time, how mostly it slips out from under us quietly and unnoticed. Every day we wake up, we go about our business, we go to sleep. Someday we will wake up, blink our eyes, and find old age upon us. I told my grandmother that time seems to move faster as you get older. “Ha ha ha, try it when you're 84 years old!” she said. “The decades go by like they're nothing!”

And then there are the babies. In just a few short weeks they learn to smile, to use their eyes. They start to laugh, and crawl, and talk. It seems everyday they're noticeably changed. And their parents know that each moment they have with their child is something to be cherished, because in the binge of their unstoppable growth, the present moment is constantly being swept away by the next, and the next, and the next...

The men in my family have done amazing things. My grandfather become a successful engineer after he mostly taught himself electrical engineering. My father is a physician, a professor of medicine, a hospital administrator.

But the conspicuousness of their successes have also at times made the accomplishments of their wives seem muted and dim. When my grandfather tells stories from his life, he

sometimes cuts my grandmother off if she interjects or starts to tell us bits and pieces of her own story where they intersect with his. When my mother finds herself drowning in housework, she has to steel herself against the dark feeling that her work is somehow less important, is somehow taken for granted by us all.

And what have the women in my family done exactly? They have all of them worked jobs while they also raised children, cooked meals, cleaned homes, balanced check books, entertained guests, and otherwise forborne and compensated for the flaws of their husbands and their sons—sometimes thanklessly and in the background, but almost always with patience and a wry yet loving sense of resignation.

Really, I have always had the feeling that if my mother died today, God forbid, my father would go spinning off into some void of uselessness—eating toast for breakfast, lunch and dinner, getting lost on his way to an out of town meeting, mismatching his coat and his pants, or putting laundry detergent in the dishwashing machine. Whereas if my mother lost my father, she would roll up her sleeves and figure out how to make ends meet. Because that's what she's always done. She, like her mother and mother in-law before her, shaped her husband's success with her own two hands, and then she got down to doing her own.

All of which makes my mother and grandmothers awe inspiring. And which frequently makes me feel that I am not deserving of any of them.