1. At around 10:00, Adrienne, Jack, Brian, Bill, and I hot-footed it down the street and staked out a spot from which we watched the annual Long Beach 4th of July parade. No floats. No marching bands. No hot air balloons. But we watched decorated cars, tricked out golf carts, civic groups, and a huge family reunion parade by, throwing candy, sharing good cheer, and some people even sang pop songs accompanied by boom boxes in their vehicles.
2. Back at Brian's, Ben poured me an exquisite bourbon and ginger ale with fresh lime, featuring an upper shelf bourbon I'd never heard of and never got the name of. While I sipped on this classy cocktail, I played LPs, a rare treat for me, to listen to vinyl recordings, including Fleetwood Mac's Rumors, u2's War, some Gordon Lightfoot, and the first side of Willie Nelson's Stardust.
3. The musical highlight was when Bill found and played, on his smart phone, the cut "Lawyers, Guns, and Money" off of Warren Zevon's Stand in the Fire album, recorded live at the Roxy Theater in L. A. Suddenly I was transported back to my downtown apartment at the Altadena at 6th and Stevens in Spokane and those chilly mornings when I walked downtown to catch the bus to Whitworth for another day of teaching, without a Walkman, but Warren Zevon had so deeply impressed his music in my mind that I could recall every note of "Lawyers, Guns, and Money" and I played air guitar walking down Stevens, sporting my full length wool coat I bought for like eight bucks at Goodwill, floating in the dark ecstasy of being, to quote the song, down on my luck when it came to the miseries and confusions of my inward life as 1983 became 1984.
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