I went to a small choral music school, Westminster Choir College, during the late 1960s. I enjoyed walking into town leaving the campus and turning right onto Hamilton Street until it became Wiggins. When I passed by Princeton Cemetery, I’d love picking up a stick and running it across the iron fence bars as I walked by, something about the percussive sound and feel of the stick in my hand was reassuring. I also held my breath until I had safely reached the other side of the graveyard. Just in case a parasitic spirit was looking for an unsuspecting host. That cemetery always made me think of my first gin and Wink, a tart cocktail that was offered to me by an upperclassman who lived off campus in a rented boarding house room on Madison Street. One night, loopy after consuming more of the grapefruit flavored potion than I should have, I somehow got turned around as I made my way back to campus and ended up in the cemetery at Aaron Burrs’ grave. Somebody on the sidewalk—it must have been another Choir College student—seeing me on the wrong side of the fence called out, “Westminster’s this way,” and I followed him home.
Hold your breath passing cemetery’s view to the corner your safe a break would prove the first to go might well be you A children’s game on a summer afternoon as the sun shines through iron fence casting bars on the sidewalk —March 1968