JOY ALONG THE WAY: WATCH OUT FOR DICHOTOMIES

Dichotomy. When did you first come in contact with that word? Not yet? Well, you haven't listened to many speeches or commentaries. I must say the word didn't come into my working vocabulary until the age of the Talking Heads. When I began to hear it consistently, without going to the dictionary, I tried to figure out its meaning by its position in a sentence or speech.

Most speakers or columnists who use the word usually also use other words that are not in everyday use as does George Will, unless in his scholarly columns he is talking about baseball. Even then he manages to strike a spark on one's brain when he speaks of the foul lines reaching into infinity. Foul lines and infinity? Would anyone else have put the three words together? Of course Will is right, foul lines don't just end inside the ball park but implicitly just go on forever, like a sentence ending with three dots.

But, back to dichotomy. Before I ever got around to the dictionary, which says it is a division of two parts or opinions, usually contradictory, I began to think back over my life to recall situations that could rightly be called dichotomies. The one that seemed to stick out above all others was the coiled rattlesnake in the blooming bluebell patch. Here were two forces of nature, the bluebells blooming so beautifully, their lavender, pink and blue blossoms swaying in the breeze, spreading their perfume, inviting the wayfarer to, "Come. Stop. Gather the big fragrant clumps into your arms and smell." And as one did, there was the coiled rattlesnake, glistening in the sun, rattler hoisted making those dry menacing sounds. Two opposing forces of nature. Danger among the siren songs of the bluebells.

I was that wayfarer. Barefooted. Ten years old. Half a mile from home. Country reared, I was apprehensive of ominous sounds enough to draw back in the nick of time and start speedily for home just knowing that snake was slithering at my heels. That was a dichotomy of nature.

However, there are more subtle distinctions of dichotomies. Consider the baseball foul lines for instance. Since Will suggests they just go on into infinity, somewhere along the curve of the glove they must leave the earth and be ghost-marked in the air like jet trails. On and on they go, past Ursa Minor, past Cepheus, past Pegasus, into the mind-boggling immensity of outer space.

On the other hand, if the foul lines are marked with chalk on the earth's surface, each line, ever leaning to right and left, they would become circuitous and come back around far right and left of their straight line beginning. Is this dichotomous?

I like my less questionable definition of dichotomy. Beautiful bluebells and shiny, dry rattling, forked-tongue rattlesnake -- two things of nature, divided.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.