Let's settle this once and for all . . .

The issue at hand is Paula Bunker.

It's getting so I can't walk out the door, can't open my email, can't answer the phone, can't hail a friend on the golf course, can't take a shower, without being confronted about Paula Bunker! Everyone wants to know, when are you leaving Liz for Paula Bunker? Short answer: Never.

Long answer: See, it's not about Paula Bunker, per se. Yes, I knew, intimately, a girl named Paula Bunker. The image of her Senior Year photo is the easiest recollection to call up from the dusty archives of my memory. But there are definitely other images.

Mostly what "Paula Bunker" is, is a touch stone, a focal point for the essence of what I care to consider about my youth. Youth being a time when one is unformed, as well as liberally uninformed. Many people remain "youths" all their lives.

One of the characteristics of Youthness (only the grossly ignorant call it Youthity) is to desire more control over one's surroundings and activities. Becoming a mature adult does allow us to contrast the degree of control we exercise with the almost total lack of control available during Youthness. (This contrast allows us to put up with still almost total lack of control of our lives, but we're able to content ourselves because it's a lot more than we had as youths.)

Paula Bunker was my attempt, during my Youthness, to exercise control and dominion. I failed miserably. But she kept me spinning in her orbit because she was also trying to adultate. (Whaddayamean adultate is not a word! To adultate: to behave as an adult when you aren't actually one. Your kids, as well as the Spears girls, do this all the time.)

You know how kids go out 'tagging' because it allows them to think they're adultating? Well, Paula Bunker and I would go out petting (we were good Mormons, so that was the limit) and this allowed us to think that we were grown up. At least that was partly what I was thinking. I was also partly thinking what a great rack she had! But I also wanted to be 'in love' because literature and the movies told me that this was part of being grown up. Naturally, being the male, it meant I got to be on top. So I can see why Paula resisted this additional step, not to mention that she didn't want to have to tell her parents about me.

We orbited around each other for Junior and Senior year in high school and freshman year in college, she in Seattle and me in Salt Lake City. In high school, she 'broke up' with me before the Junior Prom, so I took Rayetta Kay Kanel. We got back together during the summer, between Junior & Senior year, but she broke up with me before the Sadie Hawkins dance (Linda Sharp asked me), before the Christmas Ball, (I asked Judy Clyde) and before the Senior Prom (I took Chris Gang). I was 'going steady' with Chris Gang and my senior year book had all this tripe about what a cute couple we were. But then a couple of days before graduation, Paula called me and applied some gravity and pulled me back into a tighter orbit. We spent graduation night together, petting. I was intimately acquainted with every color of blue you can imagine. Then we went off to college. Contact was sporadic. After Freshman year we met a couple of times during that summer and the petting was as good as ever, but she finally let me know that it was over. She broke my little heart.

Just before I left on my mission, 18 months later, we had a couple of conversations and I felt a form of vindication at the time, because she was no longer 'firm in the faith.' Meaning that she anticipated my same life style apostasy by a few years.

The very last word I heard about her was at my high school 20 year reunion. She married, very successfully (meaning a rich guy) and had had a number of children and was fat. I took what pleasure I could from this knowledge and never gave her a second thought, except that I can't think about my youth without seeing her face.

So no, I don't want to see Paula Bunker ever again. I don't dream about her, I don't live in the past with her. She's actually an embarrassment to me because if truth be told, everything that happened involving her was wrong, done for the wrong reasons, and with the wrong results. Rayetta Kay Kanel, Linda Sharp, Judy Clyde and Chris Gang were wonderful, warm human beans who didn't care that I was only a first generation Mormon. Had I explored relationships with them, my youth would have been properly served. But I wanted Paula Bunker, who was ashamed of me, as the break up pattern tends to indicate. She didn't mind being with me, but didn't want it publicly known. I couldn't see that then...

I can't speak for her problems, but for me it was all because I was trying to grow up too fast. I spent too much time adultating instead of youthinating.

But I did learn my lesson and when the time was right, in 1979, I began youthinating in earnest and with a true purpose. So then when I met my wife, in June of 1984 (the first Wednesday of that month) I was ready to put aside my youthness and become mature with her. And now 24 years later, we are still very mature youths.