As long as I can remember, I have been able to glance at a patch of grass and spot a four-leafed clover. My dad was amazed that I could find the four-leafs so easily. He told me I was the luckiest girl in the world.

Dad died five years ago on April 29. He was a good and decent man who believed in God and lived his life accordingly. Dad worked hard and supported his family without complaint. Dad loved his wife, his children, the land he lived on, music and a good cup of coffee. He had a crazy sense of humor. His heroes were cowboys.

Dad could get on a horse by vaulting over the horses' rump and landing in the saddle. He could also hold on to the saddle horn and swing up into the seat without putting his foot in the stirrup.

Dad was a mechanic and at one time he owned a filling station. He was a stickler when it came to maintaining vehicles and he gave me frequent reminders to rotate my tires and check my oil. I could call Dad on the phone, imitate a "funny" sound my car was making and nine times out of ten, he correctly diagnosed the problem. He was strictly a rural driver, but he wasn't afraid to tackle "big city" traffic. He stopped at the end of merging lanes leading to interstate highways and waited for traffic to clear before he entered. Once on a family vacation, we went back and forth five times over a bridge across the Mississippi before Dad figured out which exit to take to get us through Memphis.

Dad used to entertain us by standing on a footstool in the livingroom and conducting orchestral music that Mom was playing on her stereo. When I was a beginning piano student, he dazzled me with his ability to play "Chopsticks", "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "I Dropped My Dolly In The Dirt" on the piano without using written music. Dad and Mom sang duets in church. My favorite was "Ivory Palaces". My parents never missed a single piano or voice recital that I performed in.

One summer day, Dad and I went fishing. I caught a catfish and as I was taking it off the hook, I ripped my thumb on the catfish barb. My thumb wouldn't stop bleeding so Dad made a poultice out of some mud and put it on my thumb. I was 32 years old. I hurt my knee in a basketball game when I was a freshman in high school. Dad took me to the emergency room, but there was a man having a heart attack and all the doctors were busy saving his life. After waiting several hours, we decided to leave and make an appointment with our family doctor the next day. It had been raining heavily the entire time we were at the hospital and we couldn't get home because bridges were either washed out or under water. Dad and I ended up spending the night in our church.

Today as I was crossing the lawn at the high school, I looked down and there it was. A four-leafed clover. I chuckled as I bent over to pluck it and Dad whispered in my ear, "You're the luckiest girl in the world." He is so right.