Remembering Paul P., my college boyfriend. How my parents hated him!!!  Mostly, I think, because of his ethnicity.

It would have made more sense to hate him because he introduced me to alcohol and sex when I was about 17 or 18. This was in my junior year, which would have been about 1964.

Paul was white, but he was Eastern European.

For reasons (if any) that escape me, my parents disapproved of Eastern Europeans. If you weren’t white and British or Western European – or a white American — you did not make the cut, in their world.

I was madly in love with Paul, who was handsome, fairly smart, and reasonably ambitious. His morals left something to be desired: fuc!ing an underage girl was questionable, as was his enthusiastic approval of his best buddy’s laying a barmaid because the buddy’s wife was so advanced in pregnancy that she couldn’t accommodate his dong.

If that latter episode hadn’t happened, I probably would have married Paul. It was just a little(!!) too revolting for my taste, though… Talk about your narrow escapes!!

But he seems to have turned out OK. He became a university administrator. And online there are pictures of him surrounded by his loving family (absent any barmaids). So I assume his life went reasonably well.

Hope he’s living happily ever after…