The beatniks next door — part 1

Molly

We lived in the lesser canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains, within the Hollywood Hills district of Los Angeles, where my father was landscaper to the stars in the 60s – it’s a long story – but he sketched a garden (he was always sketching gardens) and six degrees later this little drawing made it into Elizabeth Taylor’s hands and next thing you know my father’s in Hollywood designing it for real and before long he was the guy to hire if you wanted an extraordinary garden – and everybody in Hollywood in the 60s wanted to be extraordinary.

Fall we came back home to Ontario, to our beloved Lake Superior’s northern shores where it’s so rugged and so beautiful you wouldn’t believe, where you can hear ghosts in the wind and all of us around here know the ghosts are the Indians and you’d know it, too, because when you get a gust of them, if you catch it right, it changes you, and if you can keep them coming, which is tricky, the effects, also tricky, are cumulative.

But this story is about our California neighbour Molly who wrote songs that she sold to the much younger musicians in the neighbouring Laurel Canyon, and if I told you some of the songs she pretended not to write you wouldn’t believe me, believe me.

Every so often my father brought Molly trembling plants blemished in some way and not fit for celebrity gardens – the riffraff with cracks in their velvet – and she’d gather their balls of earth like black wool into her arms and say come on we’ve work to do and I’d tip-toe in her petaled wake like it was a dream. 

Where? I asked at first the garden so full. 

The plants will tell you where they want to go and she was right, it was like gravity. 

When we were busy like that, apart but together, is when she got the songs. 

She’d nudge crazy twirling things into the air with the same mixture of care and abandon I pressed roots into the earth. She’d hum and do-re-me around the garden, lean her voice into the diminishing light, hold it up to the moon. The sound went clean through me – no residue just like the Indians – and then as if they’d been in her mouth all along, the words came and from the darkness fell a song.

I still hear them. Everybody knows Molly’s songs by heart. 

She told me they came to her with a sort of centrifugal force and you could feel it in the songs if you know what I mean so smooth and gorgeous they were absolute perfection and pretty soon after she mentioned hers, I started thinking about my own centrifugal force and that’s when the words started coming to the page and why  Molly, the original Beatnik, deserves the first story.