Paulette Revisited

I'm going to break from the story for a moment because I've dredged up a couple of more memories related to the incident described in my second blog entry. That's the one in which I compared Paulette Devine (the 'girl next door') to a cheeseburger:

http://pdx70rt.blogspot.com/2009/10/apologies-to-paulette.html

First off - a bit of background: There was a 30 ft tall evergreen (shaped like a giant Christmas tree) in our back yard. The branches went all the way to the ground but there was a small opening in back that led to a little hollow inside. It was my "Fortress of Solitude" :-)

So, around the same time as the 'cheeseburger incident' Georgette (the girl across the street) wandered over. As I recall, we were both deeply concerned about the state of our parents' marriages so we started commiserating and (eventually) ended up under the tree.
It was all totally innocent - we just sat there and talked. I remember the 'd-word' coming up. It was the first time it had crossed my mind that my parents might split - it was a very frightening thought...
But I think Paulette saw us go under there and assumed we were k-i-s-s-i-n-g... Now, I'm not going to claim that the thought hadn't crossed my mind, but at that age I was still too worried about cooties to seriously consider it :-) Regardless - it may have been a contributing factor in the cheeseburger debacle...

Here's the other memory that popped up recently:
Many months earlier Paulette and I stopped by the hoagie shop (it's a Philadelphia thing) that used to be near the intersection of Darby and Brookline in Haverford. I had enough money for a soda but Paulette was broke and asked if she could share mine. I didn't really see any harm in taking turns drinking, but just to be safe I asked for two straws - cootie avoidance, you know... Unfortunately, I totally failed to anticipate what happened next:

We put the two straws in the glass... I started drinking... And Paulette did too... At the same time...

So there we were - sitting there side by side - our lips almost touching - my 'cootie alarm' is going off big time - and I can't think of a way out of it without hurting her feelings.
And it gets worse: I look around the hoagie shop and I realize that everybody is grinning at us! I can't blame them - a 10 year old boy and girl sharing a soda is just too cute - it's right out of a Norman Rockwell painting :-) I was seriously embarrassed - I wanted to yell "It's not like that!!!" but I thought better of it.

So I just turned off the 'cootie alarm' and never let Paulette know just how freaked out I was by the whole situation...
It's like Adlai E. Stevenson once said: “To act coolly, intelligently and prudently in perilous circumstances is the test of a man ..." :-)