In the late 1960s, one of the hippest places in Los Angeles was Venice, especially the area known simply as “The Canals.” Small wooden houses fronted on the waterways and backed on narrow alley-like streets.
My parents rented a small apartment near the school where I started the first grade. With her new curvaceous figure, my mom got a job as a cocktail waitress and moonlighted at Winchell’s Donuts. She started taking voice lessons in Hollywood, and took me along in her convertible. I wandered the grounds of her teacher’s “mansion,” during class, spotting Dionne Warwick waiting for her private lesson.
My dad soon moved out again, this time for good, but just down the street. He grew his hair long, added a bushy beard, got a job as a baggage handler with Pan Am, and hung out at the beach with a group of hippie acolytes who called him “The Reverend.”
Sometimes he’d take us out for hot dogs or a movie, sort of like a doting uncle. He was a likable guy who never mastered behaving appropriately as a father, but I’d rather concentrate on remembering the few things he did right.
The summer of 1968 we practically lived at the beach, Joe and John and I, and only went home to eat and sleep. Ages nine, eight, and seven, we swam like fishes and could spend all day playing in the surf and sand, or wandering the boardwalk. When we moved to the Canals, we lost none of this since it was only six blocks inland. However, the Canals were such a full world that leaving them, even for a day at the beach, was always hard.
In the Canals in those days, each house held at least one family, some two or three—sort of mini communes. The peak lifestyle to be achieved was to spend as little time as possible at work and devote yourself to matters of consequence—which could be anything from gardening to cooking to patching your jeans, all while pondering obscure political stances. There was much talk of the Vietnam War, and of peace.
The small house on Linnie Canal had two tiny bedrooms and a large backyard, and we loved it instantly. We moved in with nothing but clothes, books, and my beloved pink canopy bed.
Blissfully unaware of how hopelessly middle-class it was, I slept in my bourgeois bed, while my mom put her mattress on the floor and hung an Indian print blanket on the windows that faced the alley. The final touch was a huge wooden cable spool. Laid flat, it formed a wide round table surrounded by big pillows, and we all sat around it on the floor in a nook off the kitchen, which became the gathering Place.
My mom cooked constantly, seemingly with no effort. When people stopped by, plenty of thick soup, fresh bread, and salad appeared. She would stir a pot, carry on a phone call and a live conversation while listening to music and breaking into song. People were captivated by my mother, by her beauty and energy, myself included. She looked like Joan Baez and could hold a roomful of people mesmerized as she read her poetry or talked about her dreams. Our house always had room for one more. Kids hitchhiking to a semester at Berkeley who needed a place to crash or coming home from the “summer of love” and not quite up to the reunion with the folks. They always moved on with a poem in their hand, a new patch on their jeans, or a “new” tie-dyed shirt on their back.
A few even had new names, courtesy of my mother, never one to stand on ceremony. “You don’t look like a Richard,” she’d say, and before they left, they’d become D’Artagnan. My mother made everything an adventure, and people were caught up in the drama and the fun.
A turntable sat on a cinder block and plank shelf beside the spool table, with two big stereo speakers on the floor beside it. One of my favorite activities was to lie there, head between the speakers, and fall into the music. Raised on reading, I became obsessed with lyrics. Most of our albums, including The Beatles’ White Album, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Judy Collins, had lyrics printed on the album cover, but deciphering the meaning was challenging. What was a “harlequin,” and why would it “hover nearby”? I invented stories to explain it all, my imagination fired by the enigmatic poetry.
Outside the kitchen door was a grassy, overgrown yard with fig trees and a path to the low white picket fence at the rear. I woke early, before even the ducks were awake and would creep out, barefoot and shivering, to the canal gate and stand watching the world come to life. Snooping was my joy; to be honest, other people’s lives fascinated me. I would walk the dirt edge of the water and peek in people’s yards and even, given the opportunity, their windows. (Related: The One Where a Couple Rides Wicked Swells in a Tiny Boat to See Giants)
One neighboring couple even found me inside their house after I followed their Doberman-Weimaraner mix in through the dog door. I loved dogs, and the canals abounded with them, many roaming free in the alleys. I’d impersonated a canine from the time I was old enough to bark. A note in my baby book says in my mother’s hand, “Jenny thinks she’s a dog.”
We listened to the moon landing on a transistor radio at the beach while we barbecued hot dogs. I toasted marshmallows and stared up at the big moon, imagining what was going on up there as the astronauts’ voices were relayed to Earth. My brothers played at being spacemen as readily as soldiers, despite having “No War Toys,” but space was scary. Picturing myself floating alone in blackness, I yearned to see my cozy little house.
Walking down the dusty alleys, we siblings joked about kids in what we called “Charlie Brown neighborhoods” who had every toy they wanted, but even as we envied them, we felt special. Taking our little oasis for granted, we never lost sight of its uniqueness.
We thought at that time that the people we knew were leading the way, that all of us were. And soon the world would be a peaceful place of communal brotherhood.
We relished being different, revolutionary, and precociously political around adults, but at school we tried to blend in. Among the schoolyard gang we resented anything that marked us as outsiders, the hand-me-down clothes with patches and embroidery and our healthy brown bag lunches. I would trade my peanut butter and honey on whole grain for bologna on Wonder Bread. Apples and granola became Twinkies and Fritos.
As we walked the dozen blocks home, we transformed back into flower children. My braids were quickly undone; Joe and John shed windbreakers and untucked their shirts. Shoes came off last, sitting on the first canal bridge, pulling off our socks. We tied our shoes together by the laces and walked barefoot, our calloused brown feet nearly impervious from months of walking on hot sand and asphalt. We sang the Beatles’ anthems out loud, teaming up to harmonize and chime in with horn sounds. I knew that all we needed was love. We had that and never truly wanted for more.
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This article originally appeared on Womancake.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org
Featured Image Credit: atlantic-kid/Istockphoto.
