"What did you tell your father?"

I got an e-mail from Debbie yesterday.  Debbie?  Why yes -- she wrote me as follows:

I just received a very friendly email from your father, quite out of the blue. Surprised me. He briefly caught me up on family happenings, including Son 1's plans to go off to college at the end of August (Yay! Congratulations!) and then ended with an invitation for me to drop by for a visit and swimming some time this summer.

Very nice, but seems odd, given our separation.  I'd just like to ask what you have told your parents about our going separate ways so that I can respond appropriately to your Dad's email.

Wait ... he what??  Oh, wonderful.  Just bloody wonderful.  Figures, though ...  I replied:

Oh heavens, I didn't expect him to do something like that.  Maybe I should have.

I haven't said anything about it.  I don't remember ever saying explicitly that we were together as more than friends (though it probably wan't a hard inference to make), so I didn't really figure it was any *more* of his business now that we weren't any more.  This means I haven't talked about you at all.  Once or twice he has asked questions that alluded to you and I've just said I haven't seen you in quite some time and left it at that.

Fortunately Debbie is very sensible, and concluded the short discussion like this:

Okay.  Thanks for this.  I think I will put together a brief reply that confirms that we haven't seen each other since the beginning of the year and just say that our paths are taking us in different directions.

So there's not a lot of news in all this -- certainly no high drama -- but I thought I'd pass it along.