If you read my 8x8 series last week, you know that I'm a fan of both lists and the 70s, so it shouldn't be surprising that from time to time I like to tune to the 70s on 7 station on the satellite radio in my car, especially on Saturdays when they replay an entire edition of Kasey Kasem's American Top 40. They choose an episode from the current week, but in some year of the 1970s.
As I listen, I reach back in time and try to place myself where I might have been when the playlist was new. It's often pretty hard to figure out what was going on during some random week of nineteen seventy whatever, but not so yesterday. The date was July 4, 1970. I was 8 years old and my family walked down the street and around the corner to watch the town Independence Day Parade.
It was hot and the sun was shining in my eyes uncomfortably when I noticed my parents chatting with two strangers, a couple who, it turned out, had just moved in across the street from us. When the parade was over, our new neighbors invited us over for a cold drink.
Their house had air conditioning, which was a novelty in New Jersey back then, and they had the curtains drawn to keep the refrigerated air in. They also had wall to wall carpeting, and I'll never forget the cool, dim, silence that greeted us upon entering their home for the first time. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, it was clear that they did not have any children-- everything was cream and white, and there was nothing of interest to my brother and sister and me, so we sat stiffly on the couch next to my mother. The men drank beers, and the women had wine, but the only thing they had for us was ginger ale or diet ice tea. I picked the latter, and immediately regretted my choice after the first saccharine sip.
We didn't know it then, but these folks would become some of my parents' dearest friends: playing bridge and drinking together almost every weekend, double dating for the church charity balls and casino night, celebrating our birthdays, trick or treating with us on Halloween, and adopting one of our cat's kittens. And when their first child was born a two years later, he spent his first Christmas with us because his mom was visiting his dad who was stationed in Okinawa for the year.
Over the next fifty years we would visit them in Jacksonville, NC, Monterey, CA, and Bangkok, Thailand. My mother would move to Virginia Beach, VA when she split from my dad, because they were living there, and my sister, brother, and I, and eventually even my dad, would all follow. We lived in two different houses, right down the street from them. My sister and I babysat their kids, and we took their son to his first concert.
Like the long and winding road the Beatles sang of in the single that was number four that week, our common story will never disappear, but it first hit the charts on July 4, 1970.
One advantage to spending so much time at home is that we reorganized our upstairs deck. No exaggeration: I've spent more time out here in the last two months than I have in the last 21 years. It catches the sunrise, it's shady in the afternoon, and it's almost always breezy up here in the trees.
There, above the classic summer cumulus clouds, was a wispy cirrus cloud with a rainbow at its center. It turned out to be a circumhoriztional arc, also known as a fire cloud or a rainbow cloud.
