a memory   june 21, 2010   around the time that i wrote two princes, when i was nineteen and living in my home town, princeton, new jersey, i was walking home through the weird, kind of maze like parking lot off witherspoon street with a boom box quietly playing muddy waters’ chess collection. i was loping along the cinder block wall where my friend, ben lewis, had spray painted “the distu” (his band was called “the disturbed” but a cop came) when i happened to look up at the sky. the moon hung like a dog’s molar and made a great ring of light in the soft shroud of clouds that shifted over the sleeping rooftops of the quiet town. as muddy sang about things like mojo and new orleans and little walter, the harmonica player, backed him up, his harmonica moaning its way out of the fifties into the little parking lot by the cider block wall, the ring of the moon and the music met in the strange air around me and time stopped.