Is it love that music feeds? On a trip to Orlando (no megare-sort in those days, but a bigger town, with a shopping center, an escape from the confines of Titusville), I am set loose on my own in Jordan Marsh while my parents wander separately somewhere in the big department store. I have a small stash of dollars. I gravitate toward the records, I stroll the bins until I come to the section labeled opera, as if its pull were gravitational. I flip through the single and boxed albums with their lovely, fragrant names: Tannhäuser, La Forza del Destino, La Traviata: all mysteries, no evidence as to what they contain but the titles and the cover photographs: women with imposing domes of hair, brushed up from the forehead, their makeup heavy, their shaped eyebrows and muscled throats also imposing. How do you ever choose one, where do you begin? I linger a long time, and at last, because I have no criteria by which to make a decision, I choose something hastily, almost arbitrarily, because it has a friendly-looking pink cover and appears to be a comedy, a man and woman in Versailles satins and powdered wigs making faces at each other across the pink field. I carry my purchase to the counter, count out the bills, meet my parents with my first opera album, the first record I have ever bought for myself, in a plain brown bag. I display it: Don Pasquale, by Donizetti. “Oh,” they say. “Oh.” At home, played on the big cabinet stereo whose wooden lid lifts to reveal turntable and controls, the record proves difficult to listen to; it is, after all, in Italian, and seems to spin around some axis I can’t apprehend, as if it involved not just one language I don’t know but several.