June 13th is June Bug Day
In 1973, I invented June Bug Day. It was a family celebration for about six years and then faded into the background of my children’s growing-up, but I always thought it deserved wider appreciation.
At the time I was raising (or being raised by) three energetic kids, having been separated from my wife for about five months. Then, after a long late-night discussion, she and I reached a tentative reconciliation and she came back. The next morning, June 13th, I rushed into the children’s rooms rousing them to “Come see what the June Bug had brought” and herded them into my bedroom to find their mom, somewhat less enthusiastic than I at that hour, restored to her usual place. Sadly, the reconciliation didn’t last, but the June Bug idea did.
The following year, I prepared everyone for June Bug Day. It would be the day when The Great June Bug would come to our home to reward these special kids for being so wonderful at looking after Dad. Over the next few years, the mythology was developed and refined so that it turned into the time when TGJB rose out of the lawns of the nation and carried summer toys to all the good little boys and girls who had taken their single mom or dad breakfast in bed the previous year.
It became a time to provide small gifts of tennis balls or baseballs or swim suits or goggles, and to capitalize on the kids’ natural desire to do nice things for me. Besides, they could all put together a pretty fine breakfast and so I also stood to gain from the occasion.
In a couple of years, we were cutting up magazines to make cards and having a pretty good time of it. Once I provided series sets of envelopes which led each kid on a round-the-house search for the June Bug gift. Another time, I started each with a lure attached to fishing line which they had to follow to find the rod — not Susan. Handling fish and doing car maintenance were to her the reason God had created boys.
And they got into the spirit of the celebration too. One famous ditty penned by my youngest to the eldest (though much to his disgust) went: “Because you haven’t been naughty/Look by the camper’s porta-potty” It was a masterpiece of poetic scansion if not hygienic discretion.
There was some good-natured grumbling from neighbours, of course. You can’t have kids explaining the new badminton game they were setting up as a June Bug Day present without creating a bit of an upset in the immediate community. Fortunately, no one but us remembered the event from year to year.
I don’t know just when we stopped celebrating June 13th as June Bug Day. I think at some point after they were in high school and we weren’t spending summers together on the road or camping, it just stopped happening. I thought of reviving it when the grandchildren came along, but I didn’t want to impose something so personal on the next generation, or maybe I didn’t even think it through that far.
It had been first something to celebrate hope, and then a distraction from loss, and both the hope and the loss were ours, not their kids’. I think at some point we all matured into the knowledge that we didn’t need magic to determine our responses to the events of our lives, either good or bad. The Great June Bug hasn’t flown since.