This piece is another adult angst/midlife crisis memory-meandering woolgathering that was constructed from a number of 'scratch-pad' fragments, and which serves as a follow-up to an older one I did a few years back with the title of: "Since I've Seen the Fireflies".

That particular piece was a great deal more straightforward, and was namely about just how long it had been since I'd actually *seen* one in the area, where I live (namely Southern and Central Ontario).

In October of last year, I moved out of the city, where I had lived since 1999, when I'd moved there to attend University, but in the last few months I was still living there, I was given what turned out to be one of the last pieces of inspiration the city had to offer me before I left.

On the Sixth of July of 2021, whilst out walking the dog, I saw a single firefly slowly hovering across someone's lawn two streets over from where I was living at the time. Being still on the last, lingering effects of a medical cannabis edible I'd taken much earlier that day, I suddenly found myself inspired by that single firefly, and when I got home, I sat down with the scratch-pad, and started jotting down some old memories from an evening much like the one that I was currently in, but which dated back enough years in the past that my late Maternal Grandfather (who died in 2000), was still alive.

Specifically, when as he was occasionally wont to do, Grandpa made a rather pithy observation, when he said (my memory is not perfect, so this is my best attempt to reconstruct his words): "Everybody makes mistakes and bad decisions. The important thing is that you learn from them. If you learn from them and become a better person, only ignorant and petty people will try and use your past mistakes to humiliate or shame you. But... if you *don't* learn from them, or you refuse to — well, that's when you deserve whatever you get!"

Of course, there are always certain folks that we run across from time to time, whether past acquaintances or certain family members,(especially if they have never much liked us, for whatever reason), who can never resist the opportunity to, like that infamous scene from "Goodfellas", make themselves feel better at our expense by telling us to: "Go home and get your f**kin' shine-box!"