Two scenes from an otherwise ordinary afternoon earlier this week:
On the 14th floor of a high-rise in Costa Mesa, attorney Sean Sherlock's office is awash in documents, construction drawings and assorted files as he prepares to take a deposition the next day.
A couple of miles away in a condominium complex in Santa Ana, Deryck Matallah's living room floor is cluttered with boxes full of clothes, toiletries, dishes, towels and other personal effects as he prepares to head off to college the next day.
Under normal circumstances, the events would be unrelated, the two men completely oblivious to the other. But the twain does meet between them, this 18-year-old on the cusp of manhood and the 44-year-old who is the embodiment of it.
You could say the fates brought them together, but actually it was Big Brothers Big Sisters of Orange County.
The two met in January 1997, not long after Deryck turned 7 and Sean, then 32, took seriously a bishop's call to get involved in the larger society.
They liked each other right away, linked at first by a love of fishing. Sherlock pledged to honor the Big Brothers commitment until Deryck turned 18, the age at which the kids leave the organization.
However, lots of men say that and most don't make it. Some move away, some lose interest, some drop off the face of the Earth. The average match lasts two years.
"You get into it with this mind-set that you're going to take this young kid who doesn't have a dad and mold him into the perfect adult," Sherlock says. "He's going to be a pro baseball player or a Rhodes scholar or the president of the United States. You get into it with these delusions of grandeur. You quickly learn it's a lot harder than that."
This summer, the two officially ended their Big Brother relationship. Their 11 1/2 -year-run is six months shy of the maximum tenure, falling short of tying the record only because they met when Deryck was 7 and not 6, the minimum age for entry into the program.
Did I suggest the relationship is ending? That this married man with two kids and the college kid 26 years his junior have said their goodbyes and thanks for everything?
"We're very close friends and he's really a family member at this point," Sherlock says. "He's totally integrated into my family. Aside from the fact he lives somewhere else and sometimes we don't see each other for a couple months, my kids love him. He is their big brother. That's the thing I never anticipated. I've now got two little kids myself and they absolutely look up to and idolize this kid."
