Flannery O'Connor came to mind, Eudora Welty, Willie Morris. Pat Conroy, if I could catch up with him. Any one of them would make for a compelling visit, if not incredible columns.

In reality, the person I would choose to talk with was never famous. He never wrote a book, didn't find a cure for a scary disease, nor did he do much of anything to distinguish himself outside of the small town in which he was born. But when I knew him, there never seemed to be enough time for me to ask him all the things I wondered about.

I would want to sit down with my own father on my screened porch, a man whose life ended much too soon.

"There are two basic things you need to remember," he told me right after I got married. "Number one," he held up his index finger, "don't ever buy plain hamburger meat."

"What on earth does that mean," I asked.

He sighed and gave me the kid of look normally reserved for particularly slow people. "Plain hamburger meat is made up of a cow's unmentionables. Trust me. Don't buy it."

Before Daddy became a policeman, he worked as a salesman for a local meat packing plant. It was shortly after the Great Depression but long before the FDA began cracking the federal whip. The sight of cows being prepared for human consumption was a vision etched on the walls of his brain. I never saw my daddy eat a hamburger.

"Now, this is the second thing I want you to remember," he continued that day. "Coffee will always taste better if you drink it from a thin cup. Throw those mugs away."

I was a brand new bride at that time hoping for some fatherly wisdom, hints on budgeting or keeping romance alive. What I got instead was a list of stomach-turning hamburger ingredients and advice on how to drink coffee. Big deal. I continued to drink Maxwell House Instant in the thickest mug I could find, the kind that wouldn't break if I threw it at my husband because Daddy hadn’t told me how to keep romance alive.

Years went by before I discovered coffee that was slowly brewed with freshly ground, imported beans. Only then did I realize how much better it tasted in a thin cup.

Conversation tidbits with Daddy are easy to remember. But what of the ones we never had? What might we talk about today if the two of us were sitting, as my friend suggested, on my screen porch? What would we say to each other while egrets flew over the pond or dogs barked at a mailman two blocks away?

I would want to get out my best china cups and pour us some freshly brewed Starbucks French Roast. I’d add a splash of cream to mine while Daddy, the quintessential coffee purist, would look at me aghast. "If you had a lick of sense, you wouldn’t ruin a good cup of java with milk."

I would take Daddy's hand in mine and try to memorize the shape of his long fingers while running my own over his knuckles, nails, and the FBI Academy ring he always wore. Examining both of his hands, I would try to discover a resemblance perhaps passed down to my sons.

After a while, I might ask, "Daddy, what do you regret NOT doing when you were alive?" Secretly, I would hope to hear him say, "Not showing more affection to you kids." Most likely he would say, "I regret not catching that SOB who robbed the First National Bank!"

What words might I use to tell him that I thought he was a good man and that his family was proud of the difference he made. I would say to him that in spite of the missed opportunities that lingered between us, I always respected him for what he was able to accomplish with so little formal education. I would tell him that his willingness to take responsibility for our town's safety was admirable, even though our family was often short-changed in the process.

On second thought, maybe I would leave out the last half of that sentence.

I would like to tell him all of the things I never said, like, "You were important to me, Daddy, and if you were here now, we’d have special times and lots of hugs."

I would put my arms around him for a few precious moments and pretend that our time together had not passed and that I was still his little girl. After that, I would say something funny hope he would laugh. And then I would etch the vision of his smiling face on the walls of my brain until it was time for me to join him in that artery-clogging Hamburger Joint in the sky.