RIVER CITY JOURNAL: LEON AND NEWT -- CAN THE QUEEN BE FAR BEHIND?

Youthful fantasies allow for rubbing shoulders with monarchs. But sometimes imagination smacks into reality.

It was a perplexing question and a cogent statement on the times in which we live all wrapped up together.

And the fact that the words were coming from across the breakfast table made it even more significant.

I don't know about your house, but at our house my wife and I barely speak in the early-morning hours. We do well enough to be deferential to each other and the cat, who parlays the situation into being the center of attention until everyone leaves. Goodness knows what the cat does when we're gone. It's one of those don't-ask-don't-tell situations that are all the rage right now.

Anyway, my wife's question/statement went something like this: "Did you ever dream when you were growing up that the Secret Service and the Air Force and the Army would be using anti-terrorist dogs to check out a church across the street before a funeral?"

Bill Emerson warranted a state funeral, and he got it, complete with all the security measures and attendant media hoopla surrounding the mourners, at least one of whom could be a future president of the United States.

But there we were, my wife and I, munching Grape Nuts and contemplating that for a short while this week the eyes of the free world would be on the Presbyterians across the street as they laid to rest one of their own.

If it had been customary for a conversation to occur at the breakfast table, I probably would have responded -- instead of just saying "Mhmmm" -- something like this:

Growing up on a farm without brothers or sisters leaves plenty of time for daydreaming and contemplating the future through the eyes of imagination. Hauling wood from the woodshed included building forts out of the chunks of oak and pine. Stacking bales of hay in the barn included the construction of elaborate castles with secret underground tunnels. Going for Lulu, the milk cow, in the early-morning fog included fantastic encounters with knaves and bandits and thugs, all of whom were quickly dispatched right there in the narrow path that Lulu and the other cows had made but which magically turned into the road to Nottingham or Gettysburg or Iwo Jima.

But nary a time did I ever imagine that I would be eating breakfast just a few feet from the scene of something so important that it would involve the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the White House chief of staff and some bomb-sniffing dogs. No siree. I never dreamed that even once.

Nor did I, as a daydreaming youth, imagine that I would be sitting in a choice seat in a fabulous theater listening to a little-known but wonderful opera, which is where I was last Saturday. During the second act I thought to myself, "When I was down on the farm, I never dreamed this would ever happen."

All in the same week: National security and the opera. Who knows. The next thing you know I may go to Athens. You know, the one over there in Greece. I never dreamed I would do that either, although I did fantasize once about seeing the queen of England in her coronation coach. In that fantasy, though, she came to see me, right there at the house on Kelo Valley.

That's the way it is with imagination. You can get all the big shots -- Newt and Leon -- to come to you instead of having to go there.

And sometimes it's for real.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.