Finally, in 1961, I graduated from high school--It should have been 1960, but I had taken a year out to have mononucleosis and feel sorry for myself.

My high school grade point average was a fairly dismal median of the many things I did poorly or not at all (PE and Math), and the few things that I did excellently well (History, English, French). The official record, of course, makes no mention of my reading in Art and Music History, which by the time I graduated was vast; nor of my intensive reading of Milton, Pope and the non-technical works of Bertrand Russell, Ayers, Wittgenstein and Carnap; nor of the fact that I finished my senior year in French by correspondence (getting A+'s); nor of the fact that from about my 14th year onward I was reading the Encyclopedia Britannica morning, noon and night every day of my life (just as, from years 10 to 13, I had continuously read The Book of Knowledge--and just as I now read for an hour or two every morning on the Internet, whatever strikes my fancy); nor of the fact that as a student of the piano I had begun seriously to practice Bach's French and English Suites and both books of the Well Tempered Clavier, as well as the more difficult Mozart sonatas, along with some fairly disciplined Debussy and Chopin.  Still, I had no idea how I would fare in college--and when I found myself rather over-whelming the little land-grant college that I chose to do my freshman year in, I was puzzled and anxious, and not relieved as maybe I should by rights have been.

The big plus about my freshman year in college was that nobody cared or wondered about my sex life--and basically, except for  masturbation, I didn't have one.  Girls at last I could and did ignore as coldly, stonily and indifferently as I wished; with no hovering maternal presence to ask me which girls I "liked," and when I thought I might be "dating" one of them, I barely noticed that girls existed, and I found their virtual total absence in my life as bracing and exhilarating as the smell of free oxygen in a spring wind.

The big minus was ROTC, which, though it occupied no more than a credit or two per quarter of my grades' transcript, was a constant festering, galling insult to me and everything I had come to believe in.  Moi un Soldat?  I should hope to Christ not!  The bastards even gave me a gun--a rifle, which, in the guise of "cleaning," I utterly fucking destroyed.  So I took my one or two credit hours of ROTC "F" per quarter, and by dint of getting "A's" in all my other classes I still made the Dean's List and the Honor Roll every quarter, even the last quarter, when, as officially and messily as I could, I dropped out.

In sum, three important things happened in my freshman year in college:  (1) I kept my honors' grades in French--making a 4.2 in my last quarter, even though I seldom went to class and missed most of my tests.  (2)  I made a friend.  (3) I fell in love.  The grades in French were still (though provisionally) good when I went back to school at the U(niversity) of O(regon) 37 years later.  My friend and I shared remarkable experiences and adventures for nearly five years.  Following my true love, I found the philosophy and the way of life that has sustained me ever since.