My children firmly believe in the concept of parallel universes. Kat says she�s always believed in them to some extent but her tentative belief became a certainty when I took the children to Detroit a while back. She became a true believer after she met the man on my road not taken.

We had gone to Ypsilanti for a diving meet, back when Day-Hay was still diving competitively. Mr. Philately had been unable to come because of something that was going on at work, back in the days before he was working for himself and before he gained a little more control over his schedule. After the meet, we drove from Ypsilanti to suburban Detroit where I spent much of my childhood and where I later returned to hold my first real adult job as a teacher.

Mr. Road-Not-Taken (actually to be exact, Dr. Road) had just moved back to town. He had a wife and kids but they had not moved back from the east coast yet so, with my kids to chaperone us, we met for dinner. The girls had a wonderful time, but ultimately declared the experience �spooky.�

As the kids noted, Dr. Road and Mr. Philately are very similar. They are both sweet, gentle men but the similarity dos not end there. To my children, Dr. Road looked like a slightly shorter version of Mr. Philately. He talked about the same sorts of things their dad talks about and, like Mr. Philately, he seemed like he would never be at a loss for a hobby. Then, to top it off, he drove the same car as Mr. Philately did then (although his old Toyota was blue and one year newer.) Although we did not meet his wife or kids, my two daughters learned that his two daughters were approximately the same age that they were and that one of his and one of mine share a name.

The similarities between Dr. Road and Mr. Philately were not news to me. At the point when I was dating both of them (and no, not in secret), they each got me exactly the same birthday present: The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. They got them at the same time for the same birthday. I still have both books although Dr. Road�s is in residence at my parents� house these days. I can�t even remember exactly how it ended up there.

One of the few differences is that Dr. Road was the boy next door and a friend long before he was a life partner possibility. I remember how he looked in first grade, even before I saw the picture Dr. Road has of our Sunday school class that year. He was one of the boys who chased me and the rest of the girls around the playground although he had better sense than to be the kid who followed me around yelling, �Going cuckoo!� I lost track of him when I moved away in junior high.

But Dr. Road has a habit of popping up in unexpected places after long periods of silence. He suddenly showed up at my place for a party when I returned to Detroit as a teacher and we began going out. After many years of no contact, he suddenly wrote a letter just before I happened to be going to Detroit for that diving meet of Day-Hay�s. And now, he�s popped up again unexpectedly in my virtual reality.

Like Mr. Philately, Dr. Road always did like good science fiction and fantasy. Both of them would tell me that, as a plot device, the existence of parallel universes alone won�t do it. Instead, every once in a while, a good plot requires that those parallel universes intersect. It�s so much fun when they do so unexpectedly.

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