RIVER CITY JOURNAL: YOU HAVE NEW MAIL! MAYBE FROM AFRICA

E-mail is a new way to say "Wish you were here." It also lets worried parents know that their sons are OK anywhere in the world.

Maybe some of you can remember when the world wasn't wired for instant communication, which meant you could be pleasantly surprised by good news, when it finally arrived, and protectively shielded, at least for awhile, from bad news.

In the days before telephones, news mainly arrived one of two ways: by mail or in person. Sure, there was the radio, but in the Ozarks hills there was only one station you could get in those days. And unless you had a particular interest in hog prices, there wasn't much news.

From time to time the routine of the day would be jarred by the imminent arrival of unannounced guests. Oh, they were announced in a way. You could see the dust on the gravel road up the valley about two minutes before they pulled in by the front-yard gate. Those two minutes could get pretty hectic: rugs had to be straightened, dirty dishes had to be hidden, hair had to be combed, shirttails had to be tucked in. You never knew who might show up, and making a good impression was important, no matter if it was just a candidate for sheriff passing out matchbooks with the slogan "Vote for Bill" on one side and "Honest and Dependable" on the other.

Eventually, of course, television and telephones upgraded the lines of communication. Soon every farm boy knew which cigarettes to smoke and every farmer's daughter knew which soap product would shine even the filthiest linoleum.

Nowadays, letters are few and far between. Telephones go everywhere. Fax machines can deliver a photo of a new grandson instantly. And then there's the 'Net. The Internet.

When our sons went away to school they managed to keep in touch by telephone, usually at our expense. Which was fine, because paying for the call is better than no call at all, as parents of any college-age son or daughter can confirm.

During the Tiananmen Square uprising seven years ago, older son at college in Boston was in constant communication by way of fax with friends in the thick of the Chinese protest. He would call to tell us what was happening before the Associated Press managed to tell the world.

Younger son, at college in Kansas, now produces World Wide Web home pages for his university, although he still prefers the telephone for communicating with his parents.

Older son travels a good deal. He has been in Africa since last October. He has telephoned a few times. This week he sent e-mail from Mozambique. This was a relief to his parents, who had read reports of the ferry disaster on Lake Victoria that killed hundreds of Tanzanians. It turns out Tanzania has a home page on the web listing a phone number to call for information about the dead and the survivors. The woman who answered the phone, which was at the Tanzanian embassy in Washington, quickly said we shouldn't worry, because the passengers "were just students coming home from university."

"Just students" sounded callous and uncaring. Parents of all those dead students were certainly crying real tears, we imagined. And "just students" wasn't enough to convince us that a stray American here or there might not also have been on the boat that sank.

So you can see why the e-mail from Mozambique was a relief. And to think that not that many years ago there would have been no e-mail, not even a telephone, to communicate with a son who had been traveling for months. Of course, traveling on the Dark Continent wasn't all that common either.

E-mail. Sometimes the inter-office communications pile up into an aggravating heap. But the long e-mail from Africa was a wonderful sight to behold.

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