The very next day, following Thomas Berry’s advice, I began the task of remembering the memories of falling in love.I was filled with a sense of expectation.After listening to Thomas Berry for eleven months, I felt ready to train my knowledge of the universe on myself to see what it revealed about the experience of love.New insights might tumble out.It would be like the moment half a billion years ago when the trilobites invented the first eyes.That radically new visual experience must have blown their little minds.That’s what it felt like.Using it, perhaps I would see things never seen before.After a breakfast of cornflakes and toast, Thomas Ian and I walked through the forest of maples, black walnuts, and mahogany trees down to the creek that flowed into the Atlantic Ocean thirty miles away.I imagined the retreating glaciers that had left this rock behind fifteen thousand years ago, a faint reminder of what once had been.The same with the memories that came back to me from fifteen years before.They too were stubborn and insistent as I leaned back against the rock and wrote.As I lived in Lakewood, an hour south, I knew no one at the evening event other than Julie Gamwell who had invited me.The ballroom of the Rainier Club was packed with dancing tuxedoes and formal gowns.At one point in the evening, Julie insisted I meet Denise since the two of us would be classmates at Santa Clara University in the fall.Julie pointed a finger across the sea of beautiful girls.The one with the big smile, she said.See her?Yes, I said, keeping the excitement out of my voice.What does it really mean to say that I saw her?Did I see that she and I might have children someday?Did I see that the rest of my life, my destiny, would be shaped by her more than anyone else on the planet?Though such potentialities were there in the photons that arrived in my eyes, none of them surfaced in my consciousness.That is the way it always is with the universe.Five billion years before this dance, at a time when there was no Rainier Club, no Forest Ridge Convent, no Seattle, no Earth, and no Sun, there was a cloud of hydrogen and helium atoms.The atoms were attracted to each other, and in that attraction, and because of it, the Sun and Earth and Forest Ridge Convent came forth.Those potentialities were there in the initial attractions between the atoms, but the atoms had no awareness of these, just as I had no awareness of the ocean of potentialities longing to become actual.Though I am pointing to an analogy between the attraction linking atoms together and the attraction connecting humans, I do not want to suggest the two are identical.The difference is at the level of consciousness.When Julie pointed out Denise, even though I was ignorant of the vast array of potentialities dangling in the moment, I certainly had more awareness than those atoms had back in the presolar cloud.I would have admitted to my desire to impress Julie.But there was a dominant emotion that pushed all other contents to the side.Which is a fine emotion to feel but one that lacks any sense of the depths of time involved.I was composed of attractions.If the elementary particles had not been attracted to one another to construct the light atoms, I would not exist.If the atoms had not been attracted to one another to construct the stars and galaxies, I would not exist.If the minerals of the rocky planets had not been attracted to one another to construct living cells, I would not exist.We live inside that nested sequence.At the base of our existence, we are an attraction inside an attraction inside an attraction.As we pushed through the crowd, we kept bumping into her girlfriends who shouted to be heard over the harsh driving beat of the Sonics.Like a cloud of imploding atoms, I was growing hotter and hotter.My undershirt was soaked, drops of perspiration streaking my cheeks, but even before we were halfway through the crowd, Denise and her date had moved elsewhere.Attraction is the fundamental dynamic of the universe, but randomness is at work too.No one can predict the pathway of any particular atom.I was mesmerized by something Sherb, my physics lab partner, had said.He and I and Jolly Spight had planned a trip to the ocean beach at Santa Cruz in order to get away from parents weekend.With Jolly still half asleep in bed, Sherb tells me that on his walk over to my room, he met three sets of parents, including the mother and father of Denise Santi.Where?He gave me a quizzical look.Graham 100.What were they like?Who?Denise’s parents.I don’t know, Sherb said.Average looking, I guess.What do you mean, what were they like?Would they still be there?Sherb looked over at Jolly, who was smiling.He looked back at me.Denise and her parents were walking through the arched gateway of the Graham dorms.Denise made the introductions.Santi was tall and thin, his hair still black, a handsome fiftysomething with an Italian look.Her mother had to be 100 percent Irish, wearing a pink blouse and a pink skirt, with a dark pink jacket.They both smiled warmly as we shook hands.Then there was nothing to say.Santi said, breaking the silence.Are you two dating?No, Denise said.. She looked at her husband and stopped.The awkwardness deepened.Brian is on the basketball team, Denise said.Santi said, nodding his head slowly as if thinking about something entirely different.He went to Bellarmine Prep.In Tacoma, she said.More awkward silence.You can use my dog, uh, I mean my dodge, he said, making it a thousand times we’d heard that dumb joke.I’m not asking her out, I said.Then what was that all about? he asked.What do you mean what was that all about?You running over there to meet her parents, he said.This is because love arises out of our bodily existence, and each body is connected through gravitation with every other body in the universe.I was irritated with Sherb because he could see I was fascinated, while I was still in the dark.But it’s always been that way.The universe does not ask for permission when it decides to invade you and use you for its own creative purposes.Did it ask the hydrogen atoms if it could draw them into constructing a star?Did it ask the unicellular beings if it could knit them into giraffes and cockatoos?Just so, the universe had bonded me to Denise without getting anything like my consent.This was ridiculous.Ask her out, for goodness’ sake.I made up my mind to do it even though I didn’t think my chances were great.The Italian Club had nominated her as their candidate for homecoming queen and plastered her face all over campus.She became known as the Seattle Smile. Guys with Porsches dated her.And that had a dead battery.How was I going to fight through the crowd to ask my question?I needed a friend to shore up my courage.After I talked Jolly into joining me, we marched across campus to her Graham 100 dorm.She was out celebrating her birthday at Farrell’s ice cream parlor.The only person I knew was Phil Grosse who had been on the freshman basketball team.Their conversations died out as we approached.They stared in silence as if Jolly and I were mafia hitmen.I wished Denise a happy birthday and asked if they’d sung to her yet.I took hold of her elbows and lifted her to a standing position on her plastic chair.We sang the song and she smiled through the awkwardness of it all.At the end, I took her hand to help her down, but before I released her, I asked my question.The band Chicago was coming to town, would she like to go with me?Yes, okay.