The beatniks next door — part 1

Molly

We spent our summers 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. 

Every fall we came back home to northern Ontario where it’s rugged and beautiful and overflowing with blue lakes and rocky shores. You can hear ghosts in the wind and all of us around here know the ghosts are the Indians, more properly referred to as Indigenous Peoples, and when you get a gust of them, if you catch it right, it changes you. If you can keep them coming, which is tricky, the effects, also tricky, are cumulative.

The first beatnik to the page is Molly, our California neighbour who wrote songs that she sold to the young 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.

Every so often my father brought Molly trembling plants not fit for celebrity gardens – pots with misshapen occupants, torn velvet, imperfect leaves, balls of earth like black wool buoying lazy greenish swirls. Molly gathered the struggling crew into her arms and said to me, her shadow, come on we’ve work to do, and I’d tip-toe in her petaled wake. 

Where? I asked at first, her gardens so full. 

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

When we were busy like that she got the songs. 

She nudged them into the air with the same mixture of care and abandon I pressed roots into the earth. She’d hum into the diminishing light. Her voice went through me like wind, it left no residue like the Indians – and then – as if they’d been in her mouth all along, the words fell into the notes and there in the darkness, a song.

Everybody knows Molly’s songs by heart – they are embedded in our common interiors - when all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray, they are in the cool, fragrant breeze.