Remembering “How Long Am I Gonna Live?” and the Lightning Bug

Once upon a time, hot, humid, and lightning bugs were the stuff of summer evenings in the place I called home as a boy—Kingsbridge in the Bronx. I remember swatting them with a wiffle ball bat, which I know wasn’t very nice. They were, nevertheless, remarkably resilient insects.

As the years passed and empty space became hard to come by—and mostly a relic of the neighborhood’s past—the lightning bugs’ numbers dwindled along with their natural habitats. Still, a fair share of them endured, reminding one and all that the lightning bug—the firefly—was once a key player in past summers. If one landed on you, it invariably left an unpleasant odor as its calling card. And while they were a marvel to observe while clumsily flying through the night and illuminating, they were a pretty creepy visual up-close.

There are nonetheless plenty of private homes in the old neighborhood with grassy backyards, and nearby parkland as well. So, there must be something else at play here that has cast the lightning bug asunder. More artificial light sources than ever, which interfere with their inky mating rituals, doesn't help. This, though, is not a scientific field study on my part. They may, in fact, still be around in some diminished capacity—and probably are in the parks and such. But no matter how you slice it, the lightning bug has seen better days in the big city. And from the looks of things, so has the bee population—a very worrisome trend. I remember countless species of bees and wasps while growing up and getting stung by a few. Their numbers were legion—everything from honeybees to yellow jackets to mud wasps. My peers and I called mud wasps “mud whoppers” for some reason, and I never liked the looks of them. I don’t see them around, either.

And now for something completely different: There was an elderly Italian lady who lived up the street from me. I nicknamed her “How Long Am I Gonna Live?” because she frequently posed that question to young and old alike. She was a “sweet old lady,” not a “mean old lady.” The neighborhood was chock-full of both. Anyway, she often asked neighbors, including me once, to “Guess how old I am?” And I guessed. “Eighty-six?” I answered. “No, eighty-nine!” she gleefully replied, knowing she had outsmarted yet another patsy. A week or so later, I had another encounter with her and another chance to guess. But this time I knew the answer to her question—or so I thought. “Eighty-nine,” I said very confidently. “No, eighty-seven!” she responded and went on her merry way. “How Long Am I Gonna Live?” was an old eighty-seven- or eighty-nine-year-old woman. Back then, people that age often looked their age and then some. They led rougher lives and typically came from hardscrabble places in an age before modern medicine and the many meds that not only make us live longer but look a little less ancient as we near the finish line.

I don’t exactly know why the lightning bug and this sweet old Italian lady merited a blog coupling. But maybe it’s that if the lightning bug could talk, it too might pose the question, “How long am I gonna live?” Not forever, it would seem.