Lightning Bugs & Whiffleball Bats

Baseball was what we did all summer in the Upper Heights. Mr. Mingle’s backyard was the perfect baseball diamond for boys our age and he didn’t seem to mind much. He owned the local five and dime and I suspect that he expected it’d only help business if he let us play there. After all, he was the only store in Havre de Grace that carried those skinny yellow whiffleball bats and the white whiffleballs that, well, whiffled when you threw them.

Marylanders were all caught up in the Orioles in those heydays of Boog Powell, Brooks Robinson, and Frank Robinson. The 1966 Orioles were the best baseball team ever in the history of the world. At least to us. And, of course, we all played just as well as they did.

I remember one, stuffy, midsummer’s evening playing whiffleball with boys across the street. The lush trees that ringed the yards rose for a hundred feet around us…it was like playing at Memorial Park in Baltimore only with the lights off. The darker it got the darker the trees became, as it grew darker, the lightening bugs would slowly appear. At first, only a few, then there seemed to be thousands. The trees were full of them, like so many fans with slow flashing Instamatics; they winked as we played into the night.

When I was nine, me and the Carcirieri boys ventured into Mingle's yard for our usual evening game of whiffleball. Maryland summer nights are hot and muggy most of the time and whether you were Boog Powell or Brooks Robinson or just some kids in rural Harford county, you sweat profusely. That was as true in 1966 as it is today. Maybe more so. There was a lot more water back then.

Anyway, it was my turn at bat and night was closing in on our ballpark. The lightning bugs were out and hovering low to the ground. They seem to cluster along the first base line like fans with slow-flashing instamatic cameras.

We played until it was so dark, I couldn't see the ball until it was nearly across the plate. I watched Vinnie wind up and pitch. I couldn’t actually see the ball, so as I listened to the whistle homing in on me, I counted silently: 'one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two' and then I swung as hard as I could.

Naturally, I missed the ball.

But in the instant I whiffed it, three rogue lightning bugs – either inadvertently or by God’s keen design, depending on your world view – flew into the flight path of my bat. When I hit them, they lit up and tumbled through the thick night air like Molotov insects….one toward first, one down the third base line and one right at Vinnie. Beautiful. We were awestruck for a moment.

In that one frozen moment, the ballgame was over but a new one was born. I think we slaughtered a thousand fireflies that night in a fireworks display that had Old Man Mingle calling the local fire department to complain about “those dang kids trying to burn my house down.”

Kamikaze lightning bugs, glow-in-the-dark whiffle ball bats and the sweaty boys of summer...images that linger a lifetime.

Baltimore beat the Dodgers in four straight games in the World Series that year. I only know that because I looked it up on the Internet. The rest of it? Ok, maybe it didn’t happened exactly like that, but that’s how I remember it.