LIFE Master AJ: Jess:
I thought I would share something with you tonight ...
its 03:32 AM. I am wide awake, despite having taken an OTC sleep aid and some sinus meds. (Which usually makes me sleepy.)
I walked into the bedroom tonight, and on Channel 04 was the "Arts" (channel) ... they were playing the "William Tell Overture."
This caused a real "flash-back," it was so powerful in its intensity ... that I am at a loss to describe the feelings with mere words ... (but I shall try).
Everyone who knows me now thinks I am "Mister Macho Man." The guy who did military service. The guy who took martial arts. The guy who is afraid of (perhaps) nothing.
---> Yet I was so different as a child.
I was truly afraid of my own shadow. I disliked physical confrontations, I literally ran from bullies. When I was in third grade, my mother and father got divorced. The pain of this affected me tremendously. One counselor at school said I was "emotionally retarded," (I would not speak to even my class-mates.); and recommended that I be (temporarily) institutionalized.
I grew up in a truly deprived and poor neighborhood. We did not have much in the way of physical goods. There were four children in our family, myself, two sisters, and one brother. But our deprivation was in things other than the things of this material world.
In terms of culture, my life was almost a zero. No art. Little beauty, except for maybe what I saw in nature. Our music was mostly country music that came out of a small AM radio that sat on our tea-cart ... in the kitchen of the rented, wood (poorly constructed) "shot-gun" house.
In the third grade, the New Orleans Harmonic Symphony came to Pensacola, and we took a field trip. I had to beg for the few dollars that it cost to pay for a ticket.
The music began, and I was speechless. I sat there, with tears running down my face, and not even understanding why I was crying. (Tears of joy?)
At one point, this bully - someone whom I was normally terrified of, and was much older than me - began acting up and making noise. I reached over and squeezed his shoulder, until felt the bones move under my hand - like they were about to pop. I remember telling him: "If you open your sorry mouth one more time, I will wring your neck, like one of my grandmother's Sunday chickens!" (He sat quietly through the rest of the performance.)
I cannot tell you how powerful my first exposure to Classical Music was. It literally changed my life. I endured endless teasing about this concert, and even a few beatings from neighborhood bullies.
Yet, I no longer cared about that - I had a new outlook on life ... an indescribable inner joy. I grew up, (secretly) thinking that the grandest job I could ever have was to be the conductor of a major symphony.
Of course, life is strange. I went into the Army, and later the Air Force.
But I have never forgotten that day in the third grade that changed my life forever.
Kibitzing
) 46...Bd5 47.Kc3 (47.b8Q+ Nxb8 48.Nxb8 Bb7 
