When Worlds Collide

I've recently had the wonderful experience of reconnecting with some friends from college. It has been years (decades, really) since some of us have been together. Before the fateful day of that rendezvous on Tybee Island, I wondered how it would be and whether we would still feel as close as we did "back in the day."

I needn't have worried. It was a day and evening of laughter, tears, hugs and some kind of magical confluence of spirits that allowed us to seemingly pick up where we had left off so long ago. I hadn't realized how thirsty I'd been for this kind of connection until I tasted it once again after so long. It's good to love people.

And now, suddenly a new reality has reared its head. It happened unexpectedly, when I was feeling all nice and mellow over re-establishing connections and lines of communication. You see, I live a lot of my life in a compartmentalized fashion. It keeps me sane (or as close to it as I'll ever get). I have my World of Work (WOW for short). WOW is the place in which I function as an administrator, counselor, minister, public speaker and cleaner of toilets ( my WOW is nothing if not diverse). I also have my Home Base or HB (you get the pattern I'm establishing here?). My HB is where I can try to relax, to connect with my wife, release some of the tensions of the day and, hopefully, be less defined by a job description. My HB also has a dog, which creates a whole new sub-world that we won't go into here.

My reconnection with the friends I loved in college is another sub-world of HB - they were (and are again) a blessing of living a life without specific job requirements. All they ask of me is that I be who I am and if that person is going through changes or a time of rediscovery, that's fine with them. That's part of the beauty of the relationships. We take care of each other. We take care of each other because we're friends - and because we have some really good dirt on each other. There are things that are uniquely OURS. To understand them, you had to be there.

Here is where the check-engine light of my aforementioned reality starts blinking. One day, my college-age daughter became "Facebook Friends" with two of my own college friends from the Tybee experience. Who knew that Facebook was so cross-generational? It was then that I realized that she was a step closer to hearing stories and finding out things that she never knew about her father that she really doesn't need to know.

You see, when you're a dad (which is better than being a just a father), the last and maybe best chance you have of being a hero is in the eyes and heart of your daughter. Years ago, when she was a Little Princess, Bekah and one of her friends came to me with a toy that had broken. It wasn't really broken; it just needed to be re-assembled a bit. I performed said re-assembly and they went happily on their way, but not before I heard her confide to her companion, "My daddy can fix anything!" Anyone who knows me knows that this is profoundly untrue. I have great problems fixing any number of things. But for one brief, glorious moment I was the hero who saved the day.

Now my worlds are about to collide. Friends I've had for decades and the child I raised are about to become more than stories to one another - they will become real, living persons with relationships. Worse yet, they might start telling one another stories about me! I don't know if my highly compartmentalized, emotionally precarious state of mind can take it. For all my trying, there's nothing I can do to stop relationships from being complete organic messes. Who knows where it will all end?!

There's nothing that can be done about it now. All I can do is hope that my friends don't corrupt my daughter for life and that my daughter won't tell my friends about my many faux pas of dadhood. Well, maybe there is a little more that can be done. I can hope that all these folks see in one another what I see in them - love, hope and friendship. That's what makes it great to have friends and to have family.

To have them all in one place might be a good thing after all.