Carter: Jimmy Carter, President of the United States, 1977-1981.

Spiral Staircase: American band that had one hit in 1969, "More Today Than Yesterday."

Martha Reeves: Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, a 1960s soul trio of such hits as "Dancing in the Street" and "Heat Wave."

singles/forty-fives: a seven-inch phonographic record made of vinyl. Containing a song on each side, the disc is played at forty-five revolutions per minute.

In 2012, after the Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman shot and killed the unarmed, black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, I began to have flashbacks to my own incident when I was sixteen and a white thrift shop keeper almost shot me because he feared I was going to steal his records. I located my account of the incident in a 1980 diary, but even then, the incident so disturbed me that I blotted out the gun and wrote cryptically, "I was scared of him." Thirty-three years later, after much psychic excavation, I drove four-hundred miles to visit the now shuttered shop where I could have died.

I am now taking a songwriting workshop. I combined two assignments that my teacher gave me--to write a social commentary song without being preachy and to write a song that emulates my musical hero. I chose to write about being held at gunpoint by a secondhand shop owner, and to emulate my musical hero at the time, the late Tom Petty.

Picture Google.

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