The Dance of the Fireflies OR Implications of Making Assumptions

Where to start.  Our seven year old daughter, Cressy, has been running amok lately.

Doesn't that look amok to you?  Looks amok to me.
Wait.  I need to go look up the word, 'amok.'  It means in a
murderously frenzied manner or a violently raging
fashion.  Guess that really isn't Cressy, unless
she was on crack or maybe on pixy stix.  By the way, amok
is in between the word, 'amoebula,' and 'amoldering,' both
of which I have no idea what they mean.  Maybe
I should read the dictionary.  What I should certainly do is
stop writing on this caption, which is getting
ridiculous.  (BTW, she's not really unhappy to
be standing on some poor bastard's grave, she was
just saying that she really wanted ice cream instead.)

There was the firefly incident.  We came home after dark and there were fireflies in the yard.  So Cressy said, "I want to catch them!"  Mommy and Daddy said, "We're tired."  Cressy said, "But I want to catch them!"  So I folded like a cheap suit in a cheaper dry cleaning joint and said, "Okay, for five minutes.  Cressy said, "I need a glass jar for them."  When she said that what she really meant was, "Mother, you shall procure an item for me that I shall incarcerate said insects within so that I may gloat over their little imprisoned bodies for the next several days until they perish."

The exact moment of firefly realization.  (If you ask Cressy
the fireflies were 'asking' to be captured and imprisoned.  Maybe
it was the way they were dressed, the hussies.)

Well, I didn't have a glass jar.  I already knew that I didn't have a glass jar.  But I had disposable bowls with lids.  No problem.  I didn't think the kid would catch one anyway.  After all, she runs like a transvestite in his first set of stiletto heels.  (She does.  I was going to get out the camcorder to show people but then I decided it might be crossing the line.  I don't want to offend any transvestites, after all.)  I really, seriously thought, 'Kid doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of catching a firefly.'  Anyway, it took me 30 seconds to get the disposable plastic bowl with the lid and as I was going back outside, Cressy comes trotting up and said, "I got one."  She's got her hands clasped together and a smug look of triumph on her little face.  (She has kicked firefly butt and she knows it.)

I was like, "Naw, you didn't get one this quick."  (Unthinkable.  She can't catch a caterpillar, how was she going to catch a firefly with wings and a disposition for escape.)

Actual firefly security detail.
They're kind of like the Secret Service,
except without Obama.

It was THIRTY seconds, tops.  No exaggeration at all.  I was inside for a half a minute to get the container that I didn't really think I was going to use.  I had been thinking as I carried it back outside if I should put holes in the top and rapidly decided that since Cressy wasn't going to catch a firefly then I didn't need to put holes in the lid.  So I open the container up, thinking she got a mosquito or something equally icky in between her hands, and sure enough, it was a freaking FIREFLY.  She put it into the container.  (Actually it kind of fell into the container because when she had slapped her hands together, she hadn't left any space for the firefly.)

We both looked at it as it lay on the bottom of the container and I said, "Maybe we should let it go."  So the poor little smooshed thing could die in peace.  Poor little luminescent bastard.

Oh, it's time to steal lines from the classics.

Cressy looked at the sad, pitiful dying insect and I suspected that she knew that she had smooshed its little, green, glow-in-the-dark guts out.  She said, "Okay, Mommy," in a subdued sort of voice.  So we somberly let it out in the grass where it sat on a piece of grass and glowed for awhile.

Then Cressy went back into the yard to catch more.  She even called to the little fireflies like they were dogs.  "Here, firefly.  Here, firefly.  Come here, firefly."  She was getting annoyed that they wouldn't listen to her.  But I suspected that the word had gotten around.

You know what they say about gossip.

She came back a few minutes later, disgruntled because the fireflies weren't acting like friendly little puppies, and took a look in the grass for the one she'd smooshed.  "Oh, I can't see him anymore," she said blithely.  (The principle of 'Out of sight, out of mind' works well with her, except with Chuck E. Cheese, toy promises, and play dates with her BFF, Addie.)  "He must have flown away.  Bye!  Bye!  I'll see you tomorrow!"

Then we went inside because all of the fireflies had mysteriously vanished.

The moral of the story is: Don't make assumptions AND Don't squish fireflies.