Uphills Both Ways

On a car ride tonight, my father and I talked about fire flies and how we don't really see any in Massachusetts.  When I asked him whether he, as a child, caught any in glass jars, the way I'd heard of my friends doing as little kids, he looked at me as if that was a bizarre suggestion.  "Glass jars?  We didn't have glass jars.  I didn't even have a plastic bag to catch them with." 

Silly me and my hegemonic worldview, making wild assumptions like the availability of spare glass jars in a household (seriously, what?).  Every once in a while, talking to my father catches me completely off guard like that.  The man loves his Red Sox, has an iPad, and drives an SUV.  We've lived in the same house in the Massachusetts suburbs for years, yet that was my childhood, not his.  His was spent shooting rubber bands and running around barefoot on the edge of town in Chong Li.