Thursday, February 24, 2011

Welcome to the Fold

When my daughter Nick phoned up late last year and said, "hello daddy, erm, I'm engaged!", I thought she meant she had a long term gig with her band Liza23.

I said something like, "oh, good, where are you playing?"

She replied in that tone which daughters seem to reserve exclusively for their slow-witted dads, "No, daddy, enGAGed!!"
"Ah, enGAGed, ok, erm, that's great... isn't it?"

Well, it turned out that it was great - she was delighted - her boyfriend/fianc´e, let's call him Dave, had proposed to her all correct and proper as they had got off the tram on their way home.

He's a good lad; I knew him before he started going out with Nick which means that there is now a sort of two-level relationship between us, the one a kind of standard bloke-bloke relationship and the other a sort of relationship via Nick, he being her boyfriend and me being her father (for me a much more nebulous thing because I don't really know yet how it functions).

Anyway, Dave is from New Zealand and at the moment is over there visiting people - so when I awoke the other morning and heard there had been a pretty serious earthquake over there, I contacted Nick to find out if he was ok. Fortunately he was, but this led me on to thinking that he had obviously now crossed a strange psychological border whereby my subconscious had put him on my priority list of people-to-worry-about!

Had I been asked before I would have said that an individual becomes part of another family through some sort of official ritual, such as adoption, engagement or marriage or weird native American blood-sharing ceremonies or whatever (glad it's not the latter) but clearly there are other subtle, surreptitious and quite unconscious forces afoot.

So, Dave, welcome to being worried about!

2 comments:

Anji said...

It's good to see you back again. Congratulations to Nick and her Fiancé.

I'm the same about Dom's fiancé too. He's got important exams coming up in a month and my stomach is in knots already.

Love is elastic

bert.linder@web.de said...

Hi Phil, It's good to hear some good news from you. Congratulations, however, now it's you being worried about, e. g., how long does it take you getting used to become a serious grandpa! If you need some advice, don't hesitate to contact me! You may know that I'm quite experienced in it. I'm looking forward to hearing from you once. Good luck, Bert