I am a fortunate man in many ways, but not least among them is that even as I approach my 50th year I am still able to pick up a telephone and speak to my father. As certainly should be expected, I did that very thing on the Sunday in June we Americans set aside as special recognition for fathers, and as I did the sense of my good fortune did not go unnoticed.

Some of the more controversial musings of Freud notwithstanding, I have long felt that of all traditional human relationships, the one between father and son is and always has been the least understood. This is particularly true, I suspect, when it comes to the players - the fathers and sons themselves.

My sister went through the needlepoint stage a few years ago and one of her productions, combining new thread and an old aphorism hangs above a favored couch in my father’s home: "Any man can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a Daddy." Like most aphorisms, there’s a spot of truth in that one. Everyone, of course, has a father - at least in a strict biological sense. Thank God, I have a Daddy.

My Dad (one of the father-son rules is that at some point "Daddy" turn in to "Dad") is a little banty rooster of a fellow who passed along to me his trait of coming to believe he gets a great deal bigger anytime he gets real mad. In that neither of us has ever seen 150 pounds, that one’s made for some interesting times for both of us over the years.

As a young man, I can recall frequently thinking and once or twice saying that there could be no two people on earth any more different than Dad and I. After all, he was dogmatic, narrow-minded, more than a little authoritative, quick to make judgments and highly resistant to changing his opinions once he’d formed them.

My Dad, I was convinced, could be consistently (and infuriatingly) right about the little things but the man just failed to grasp the big picture.

Ray Mosby, on the other hand, may have made a few mistakes when it came to money or women or career or business decisions, but was without peer when it came to the big picture.

Then one day - I’m not sure what day or even year; I couldn’t point it out on a calendar - something happened. It was a day after I had married, of course, a day in which I was wrestling with one of those confounded little things related to raising my own children that it occurred to me: how in the hell did Dad pull this thing off?

How in the world had Dad managed to make a living, be a good husband, raise and educate three kids, and somehow retain his honor, his sanity and his sense of humor through it all? How had he managed to do that without killing somebody kin to him?

While I had always respected my father, it was at that historically unrecorded moment that I came to infinitely respect my Dad. It’s a father/son thing - if you are neither you might not understand.

I called my Dad on Father’s Day and I told him that I loved him, just as for 47 years in ways large and small, he has told me the same. Just to be able to is my good fortune; that I might have learned to enjoy doing so is more than anything else a product of an example long ago set for me.

Not too long ago my sister paid me quite a compliment when she said, "You know, you really do get more like Daddy every day."

I’m so glad he finally got the big picture. DBJ

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