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girl all the time and spend a whole day at the beach with her and somebody says, "Hey man, so what happened?" and I say: "She gave me a black rock and I gave her an agate." Hey, yeah? Wow!
    See, I began thinking what the others would think, not what I, myself, thought.
    Its hard to explain, because there was more to it than that. Of course there was. Being with a girl, a woman, and Natalie was a woman, was exciting. That sounds dumb, and you can make jokes about it if you want, but its the right word. Physically, and mentally, and spiritually exciting.
    But what I thought, because of what everybody, even Freud, says, was that it must be Love. They all say that sex is the real thing, and Love is what you call it when you are slightly more civilized than a gorilla. Sex isn't something you do when you're in love, love is what you call it when you want sex. Just ask the toothpaste commercials and the cigarette ads and the porno movies and the art movies and the pop songs, or Mr. Field. Man, there is one important thing. Just one.

    And so the next time we met, it was entirely different, I had decided that I was in love with Natalie. I hadn't fallen in love with her, please notice that I didn't say that; I had
decided
that I was in love with her.
    According to some of the people who write about the brain and the mind, and who are interested in the front-back differences rather than the left-right differences, this would be an example of the frontal lobes trying to run the whole show, and fouling up the poor old hind-brain. This is a foul-up intellectuals are liable to. At least, stupid mixed-up intellectuals like me.

    It was all right at first, because I was actually very cowardly. I spent the time when I wasn't with Natalie working on being in love with her. But when I was actually with her, I forgot about all that, and we talked like crazy, just like before.
    One thing we talked about was our plans, a fairly natural subject for high school seniors in the last semester. Hers were quite definite. She was going to Tanglewood this summer, mainly to meet people in the East, other musicians, professionals who might help her, and the other kids, the competition as she put it—she craved to meet the competition, to measure herself against them. Then she'd come back home in the fall, and for one year she'd work full time at the music school and giving lessons to save money, and practicing and composing, and taking a class at State in advanced theory and harmony; she said there was one man there who could teach her some things she needed to know; she'd already worked with him some, in summer school last year. Then she'd go to the Eastman School of Music in New York, with her savings and whatever scholarship they'd give her, and study with a couple of composers there "for as long as it's worthwhile," she said This was the same kind of reason why I wanted to go to MIT: there was a man there doing a kind of physiological psychology that was exactly what I was most interested in. We had some really strange conversations, with her explaining what these composers were trying to do and me trying to explain what consciousness was; but it was surprising how often the two completely different things came together and turned out to be related. The neat thing about ideas is the way they keep doing that.

    In April the Civic Orchestra was giving a concert at one of the big churches, and three of Natalies songs were to be on the program. It was no big deal, she said; it was because she knew the conductor, and when he needed an experienced player to hold his amateur violists together she did it for him; but still, it was a first public performance of her compositions. Composing, she said, is about the worst art of all, because its about nine-tenths string-pulling. You have to know people, or you never get played. She was realistic about that, and said she wasn't going in for the "Charles Ives game." Ives heard hardly any of his music played at the