JOY ALONG THE WAY: TALKS WITH FATHER

If my father were alive today, he would probably be living with me, all the rest of the family having gone on too. He would be 109.

I have no doubt he would still be mentally alert, nimble-witted, and dreaming big dreams. It was always the Big Picture of life he held up before us, made up of all the little pieces that we say and think and do. "But we don't want our place in the Big Picture to be smudgy, do we?" he'd ask of us from time to time.

What would we talk about? Ritually, he would dissect and discuss the latest Cardinal baseball game and tell how it could have been won if they had lost.

Together we'd reminisce about the old Gas House Gang. In those days, still in abject awe of the radio, we spent many hours before the Atwater-Kent listening to the games, static and all. Before any baseball discussion would be over, he would most assuredly bring up something about Rogers Hornsby. I never quite understood what the deal was, but whatever it was, he didn't like it.

I'm not so sure that at his being 109 we would still enjoy sitting in a summer rain like we used to do. I can't recall how this sitting in the rain got started. I'm sure it was when we lived on the farm when being in the rain didn't mean much to us. We walked the long walk to school in the rain, went to the faraway mail box in the rain, fetched the cows from the hills in the rain. If Dad and I were sitting on the river bank fishing and it started to rain, we just kept on fishing, stealing glances at each other once in a while, trying to suppress our smiles as rain dripped from our noses and chins.

I'd thank Dad again for all the little remembered things he did for my sisters and me. Whenever he went to town, we could expect, later that day, to find a little sack of candy somewhere in our favorite haunts. For me it might be in the folds of the laid-back buggy top or the seed container of the corn planter. I loved the machine shed -- sitting in all the iron seats, pretending to be the operator. Lou, who loved tools, would find her sack somewhere in the blacksmith shop and Lillian's would be somewhere in the little private area she'd fixed for herself in the smoke house "where she could go read without distractions." Some hands-on dad to know all those little personal foibles!

We'd talk politics. He'd be sure to remember something about President Woodrow Wilson. It was always an enigma to me that Dad, a staunch life-long Republican, thought that Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was the best president we'd ever had. Could it be they shared the same name, Wilson being the President's last name and Wilson being my dad's first name? Naw. Too shallow. It would have been the concept of the League of Nations. Whether he would have switched his allegiance to the United Nations, I don't know.

And we would talk about Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Ripkin. On a full moon night, with a twinkle in his eyes, he'd urge me to look at a certain dark spot on the moon. I doubt if either of us could see a dark spot but we know they are there. "Know what that is?" he might say. "It's that buggy we left up there." And I'd probably reply, "I wonder if anyone left any candy in it." Dad would know what I meant.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.