I first became fond of music when I was but a toddler, and took up the fiddle at age nine. Like all beginners, I was not very good. For a short time, my mother offered me two dimes not to play during the day, and my father offered me two dimes not to play during the night. I quickly grew in skill, and was able to play for much higher prices - and this time, due to the high quality of my songs and not the low. All throughout high school I played the fiddle. (I've never attended college.) When I was, perhaps, fourteen, I took a liking to chess. It was an odd fondness, one that I had never experienced before. The simple thrill of crushing an opponent in the opening moves, the joy of knowing that your enemy thinks he may be able to win - right before you kill him...ah. It surpassed even the delectable feeling of arson.
When I was twenty, maybe twenty-one years of age, I watched as my parents were murdered by a serial killer who had escaped from jail. He left me alive, I think, that I could attest to his evil. He labeled himself as evil, in any case. Worse. "There's good, bad, evil...and me," as I recall. Similarly to how I watched him kill my only living relatives, I watched my own hands kill him nearly sixteen years later. It was difficult getting in and out of the prison where he was being held, and even harder to do so with the intent of killing him, but it was an enjoyable challenge. Almost fun.
There is no doubt in my mind that if I had tried to do the deed before being touched by the Black King's love, I would have been shot down or captured. But the greatest weapon in chess is, as they say, to have the next move. That night, I had already won the game. All I had to do was prove it to my victim. To my King. To myself. To my parents, who, in retrospect, were not worth avenging. The reason I had to kill the killer was to show him true evil. Something all men and women must come to respect and understand if they are to survive and thrive.
Fiddler
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