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No More Normal - Reposting

2/4/2019

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Picture
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No More Normal

From 2015:

I have a story to tell you. This is a story about a young family, leaving behind everything familiar and setting out on a harrowing journey, which forever altered the course of their lives. The year is 1969. The young father and mother, both 33 years old, have three children ranging in ages between nine and thirteen years old. They travel in their car up a one-lane dirt road, at night. It is mid spring, and still cold outside. The car is a station wagon, and the father is driving. The mother is sitting next to him and the three children are sitting in the back seat. The car is crunching over rocks, sticks and leaves as it travels up the road, heading toward a house full of strangers and a life of uncertainty.
The car is packed with blankets, clothes, and the few personal belongings they could fit. The middle child is 12, that’s me, Cheryl Lynne, painfully shy but sharply observant, mostly over-looked because I don’t make a fuss. My sister, Kay Anne, is 13 years old, she’s the extrovert, reveling in the attention she demands. Our brother, Paul, the adored baby of the family, is nine.      

My grandfather nicknamed Paul ‘Boy.’ Rushing onto the plane after it landed in Los Angeles from Portland, Oregon, to grab his newborn grandson, his namesake, from my mother’s arms, shouting, “That’s my Boy! That’s my Boy!” My grandparents were from Texas, where family is everything, the only thing worth value. And it was my brother only, in 1972, that my father’s sister brought into her home; she cut his hair, bought him new clothes and enrolled him in a nearby school. After six months, my frantic mother ‘rescued’ her son from this home.

Our car is heading away from our home, away from the known and the beloved. The house had been packed up, some stuff thrown away, more stuff given away, and what couldn’t be parted with is stored in friends’ garages in the valley. Over the years, these belongings, like so much else, would disappear.

The headlights shine up into the darkness, showing the road and bathing the trunks of the trees lining the road in light. My father is telling jokes, laughing, singing, and trying to cheer up his stunned children. Suddenly my mother turns to the back and snaps at us, “Can’t you see how hard this is on your father?”

Good god, what? Was she kidding? I felt the shock go deep into my body, and bewildered by her anger I waited, but my father went silent. His silence was more disturbing to me than her angry outburst, for I had never known him to be at a loss for words.

The car continues climbing up to the top of the ridge, to the unfamiliar house, where my family will stay for a few weeks. This will be the first stop in a long line of other strange houses where we will stay for a few weeks, maybe a few months. I have no idea where we are going as we grind slowly up the road, just a vague notion of “staying with friends for a little while.” My father parks the car and we go inside with our small bags, the otherness of the place and the strangeness of the people make me hang back.

Our house, our home, nestled in the hills of Lagunitas and perched at the top of a small, winding road, had always been filled with love, books, and music. Famous musicians -   Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, John Cippolina and Jim Murray of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Michael Bloomfield and many others - were always dropping by to jam with my father. Banana of the Youngbloods, living in West Marin at the time, bought a banjo from my father.

My dad would take us over to the Grateful Dead’s house on Arroyo Road and we would swim in the pool, splashing and screaming while Bob Weir jumped off the diving board and landed in the water near us.    

My father put his heart and soul into our home. He brought home a gypsy wagon that became my sister’s bedroom. He built a huge bathtub out of redwood and countless coats of resin for waterproofing. The yard was filled with his sculptures (artwork which the neighbors considered junk!) and all kinds of stuff he found on his travels around the Bay Area and dragged home to add to his future-art pile.

The light in his woodshop (his sanctuary) always burned bright long into the night. This was the happiest time of my life. I wandered all over the hills, a tomboy, and my sister and I played among the Manzanita trees. Using the lichen growing on them, we made houses and clothes for our Barbies and troll dolls.

The three of us kids shared a room, my sister lording it over us in her single bed, and my brother and I sharing bunk beds. Knowing beyond a doubt that monsters were hiding in the darkness beneath my bed waiting for me, I would run from the doorway of the bedroom and leap into the lower bed, taking careful aim so as not to smack my head on the upper bed.

Susu, my precious cat, gave birth to her squirming litters of kittens in my bed. My mom wasn’t too happy about that but I was ecstatic.

The school bus picked us up next to Cliff’s Grocery Store, a quarter mile down the hill on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, the main road in the Valley. Wandering down to the bus stop every morning wasn’t too bad; we usually had plenty of time to catch the bus. It was having to drag ourselves all the way back up the hill after a long school day that I objected to, and I would beg my mom to drive us to school and pick us up. It hardly ever happened.     

Now, suddenly, my family is homeless. Our home, bought for us in 1963 by our beloved grandparents, is lost, forever. I didn’t understand it then, I found out many years later that the house had gone into foreclosure proceedings after my grandparents stopped paying the mortgage and didn’t tell my mother. She received the notice of foreclosure two days before Christmas, 1968. Six days before my twelfth birthday.

We are to be sheltered by friends, by strangers who sometimes become friends and by friends who turn into strangers; we also seek refuge amongst strangers who just remain strange. We finally come to an uneasy rest at the scattered homes of Peter Coyote’s commune, a loose tribe of people known as “The Family.”

We, the children, do not realize, in the darkness of the car, just how our lives have changed. Sitting in the backseat, wedged together among our belongings, we don’t understand what was happening to us, or why.  

There is no more normal, everything is viewed through a prism of “before” versus “now.” There would be no more school for us two oldest  - the daughters. I would have no more schoolyard friendships, or awkward but happy-to-be-included sleepovers.

There are, also, no more dentist visits, no more doctor visits, and the clothes we wear come from “free boxes.” We learn to do without. Uncertainty and change are the constants. There are times when we don’t know if we would eat at night. There are times when we don’t eat.

My father had made some mistakes, and his young family was paying the price. We had no idea what those mistakes were at the time, how could we know that what he had done was wrong? My father was unquestionably right about everything, wasn’t he? Even when Travis, the young sheriff, came to question me, a 9 year old, about whether I would have slashed tires on our road, how was I to know this was harassment of my father? Travis had it out for my father, he wanted to clean the Valley of the hippie element and would stoop to interrogating a child in his efforts to intimidate.

Even after I was old enough to know the truth, I did not have the capacity to judge him. When he didn’t come home for days on end, I just missed him terribly. The senior sheriff waited, parked on the road outside our home until I came home from visiting friends, forced his way in to search our dark, empty house for my father, as I stood trembling and scared with the comforting arms of my friend’s mother around me. Even when we went to visit him in the Marin County jail, separated by a thick glass panel, I was just bewildered but accepting, never angry or judgmental.  

My fragile mother paid a price for my father’s mistakes as well. Unfortunately this was a price that we could not afford. Her madness took her so far away from us, to a place where no one could reach her, and it began that night in the car as she watched her world collapse. She has never fully returned; not too many years later she and I switched roles and even today she is still dependent upon me for her survival.

My father was not a stupid man. Although his high school refused to divulge his scores back then, I’ve been told that was because his IQ was so much higher than the other kids, he was on the genius level. My father wanted to create a life of art, beauty, music, poetry and love. A rebel from early on, he lived on the edges of societal norms, and he truly, deeply, believed that art is life, life is art. He had a restless intellect. He was infinitely curious and not satisfied with the way things were. His friends were musicians, artists, free-thinkers, intellectuals, and radicals. His wife, the mother of his children, wasn’t always comfortable with his radical way of thinking, however, she was especially alarmed with his interest in the philosophy of the Summerhill School in England – where children are free to choose what to do with their time, based on the founder Alexander Neill’s belief that ‘the function of a child is to live his own life…” But they both raised us, at least in the early years, with love and pride.

My father lived, breathed and composed music, endlessly. He loved the joy of creating it. He was trained on the piano and guitar, but he chose the banjo because that best expressed the music he felt in his heart. I would come home, walking wearily up the hill after school, and I could hear him playing as I neared the house. He would be sitting in his woodshop or in a chair in front of the house, playing his heart out. The sounds he was making expressed his joy in life and it would make me so happy to hear it. I felt safe and comfortable - his music made the world okay for me.  

In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, folk music was the politically correct music of the day, but he and his friend David Meltzer listened deeply, for hours, days and months on end, to all music available on LPs: blues, jazz, gospel, country, bluegrass. The New Lost City Ramblers, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker, Flatt and Scruggs, Ravi Shankar; David and my father collected hundreds of records and listened to them all. During their improvisational sessions they strove to recombine all the sounds they had heard. Most folkies disdained their attempts, with the exception of some of the musicians who went on to form the seminal bands of the early psychedelic rock scene of San Francisco: Jim Gurley, Dino Valenti and David Crosby. David Meltzer and my father played their unique music at the Coffee Gallery in North Beach, San Francisco, in the early 1960s, unsettling the hootenanny crowd but exciting the hipsters. Janis Joplin sang with them, during her first trip to San Francisco from Texas. Jim Gurley accompanied them, and the music they played at the Coffee Gallery shaped and defined the musical style, psychedelic rock, that would later sweep the nation.

When it became urgent for me to learn more of the person my father had been and to try to understand why he made the choices he did, I reached out to David Meltzer, to fill in some of the blanks. He shared these stories about my dad with me, a friend he grieves for to this day, and along the way helped me put my life into perspective. 

Drugs have been used by musicians and artists for decades, and my father and his friends were not exceptions. Marijuana was the most common drug, and smoking it was considered to be a harmless recreational high, shared among friends and strengthening creative bonds.   

The first time my father tried methedrine, however, he said that he “saw the face of God, and the Universe opened up” to him. His awareness expanded to “touch the farthest reaches of space” and he thought he had found “the answer to life, to higher creativity and productivity.” His use of methedrine was casual at first, to “add fuel to creating art and music.” His banjo playing, already legendary for his lightning fast fingerpicking, picked up in tempo.  

In early 1968, a friend and fellow user in the Valley betrayed my father to the police, in order to reduce his own jail time for a prior bust. This “friend” helped an undercover cop entrap my dad with a marijuana buy. Jail was a brutalizing experience for my artistic, creative and sensitive father. It seared his soul. Once released, methedrine offered comfort and escape.

He missed court dates. My sister remembers his mood swings would be radical, some days he would be happy and playing music or working in his woodshop, and other days his mood would be darker than dark. He would be gone from the house for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. My mom, I realize looking back, became depressed and would stay in bed for days. The house became messier, and the over-full yard alarmed the neighbors. The last time I spoke with my father’s sister, in the fall of 2007, she told me that in 1968 the sheriff had called my grandparents and threatened to arrest them (they were the title-holders on the house) because the house and yard were health-hazards. Since much of what she said to me during this shockingly anger-and-hate-filled rant on the telephone later proved to be lies, I don’t put any belief in this.     

My sister, brother and I were pretty much on our own. Sometimes young women would show up at our door, sent by my father from the hippie houses he visited in San Francisco, to cook, clean and take care of us. We grew attached to one of these young women and we nicknamed her Mary Poppins, followed her around like puppies and happily ate her vegetarian meals.   

In summer of 1968, the children’s beloved grandparents came up from San Diego, along with the sister and her attorney husband, to plead with him to enter a mental institution. To them, his behavior could not be anything other than sheer madness, insanity. He refused.


  • I don’t know what my grandparents thought when they stopped paying the mortgage and signed the house over to my parents. I know that they did not tell my mother, and when she learned that the mortgage had not been paid for three months, and the house was in foreclosure she did not have the money to pay the overdue mortgage and save our home.

My father thought he could control the drug, and the drug destroyed him. After we moved from our home in Lagunitas I rarely saw him. He spun off into a world I could not imagine, inhabiting a surreal netherworld of drugs, low-life characters and lost opportunities. I know it was not a world he would have chosen. With his intellect and his musical talent he could have been one of the stars of the psychedelic rock era, but the twists and turns of fate and fortune placed him into this particular hell.

As David Meltzer wrote about my father, “…We realize our prison only after we design it and move in.”

In the end, my father lost so much that was dear to him: first his home; then his cherished parents and sister who could not understand him. Finally, two months and two days after his thirty-sixth birthday, his life. I believe that his heart was broken by those he trusted, whether that trust was well-placed or not – drug users, hippie friends, and his family – and he lost his will to survive. 

His only son, named after his father, also died, two months and nine days after his own thirty-sixth birthday. I often wonder if Paul would be alive today if he had been allowed to stay with my father’s sister when he was twelve.  Never able to defeat the demons few knew about, Paul struggled for years with an addiction to drugs, and finally gained sobriety nine months before his death from AIDS.  Paul lived every minute of his last years with gratitude and love, and he bore the unknowable pain and indignities of a fatal illness with grace, courage and strength.

My mother is fragile still, and unable to understand, or take responsibility for, the choices she made as a young mother that left her children vulnerable.  

His daughters, my sister and I, survived. We have finally learned, although we paid such a high price, to live our lives with joy, strength, dignity and intelligence. I founded a nonprofit organization, named after my brother, and my husband and I travel the world promoting the mission of the organization: to improve health and elevate consciousness worldwide. KayAnne has built a good life for herself as an artist, living with her husband in the mountains of Colorado.  
Although I never spoke with my father’s sister again after the toxic phone call in the fall of 2007, I have learned so much about her since then. She was still so angry, decades after my father died, that her parents had “never denied him anything, he never lifted a finger to help them” and she “was forced to do it all, they bought a washing machine, and then a house, for him” and they never bought her a thing, “she had to work hard for anything” she wanted. And although I found out (much too late) that my grandparents had left us an inheritance, I came to understand that although I had loved her blindly because she was my connection to the father I lost, I actually never knew her. This became so clear during the lawsuit my sister and I filed against her to try to claim our inheritance. In the summer of 2007, out of the blue, I started wondering if my grandfather had left a will. Following my intuition I went searching to see if I could find if a will was filed after he died in 1993. Quite easily, I found my grandfather’s will in the Probate Court of San Diego, and as I sat there reading through it, I was stunned to find that his son’s children were named as beneficiaries. Our grandparents did love us, and did consider us family! .  

I would have loved to ask my father’s sister, the woman formerly known as my aunt, a couple of questions.

Were you the one who convinced my grandparents to stop paying the mortgage in late 1968 on the house they bought for their only son and his young family...

and not tell my mom?

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The Banjo

7/23/2015

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Amazing Grace Music is an acoustic music shop specializing in guitars, banjos, mandolins, ukuleles, Uilleann bagpipes, etc., in San Anselmo. It’s been there for decades.  

I brought my father's banjo in to have the owner, John, place the bridge (I tried without luck!), and tune it up.

He expertly put the bridge in, strummed it a bit, and said it was a sweet banjo. 

He said the pot and the peg head were original, pre-1920, Fairbanks Vega tubaphone, and that the neck was newer, possibly mid-60’s or so. I know that my father built banjos, and if he built this one, this banjo would be even more special to me!

Then he started playing it in earnest, and I quickly picked up my cell phone and to video him playing my father's banjo. Listening to him play brought out strong emotions in me, my father played this banjo in our home when I was a young girl, and John brought it to life!

John asked where I got the banjo, and first I told him the story of finding the fifth string peg in Olema, and then I told him how a friend of my father, Jack M., reached out to me on Facebook recently and offered to send me the banjo he bought from my father in 1963. He and his wife (who works there with him) were astonished and delighted.

He said that hadn’t heard of my father before, which he attributed to his moving to Lagunitas in 1975, after my father passed away.

Then, he exclaimed, “Wait a minute, someone came in to the shop just last weekend, and while we were talking he rattled off a bunch of names of musicians he’d played with in San Geronimo Valley years ago, and J.P. Pickens was one of the names!” He didn’t remember the guy’s name, unfortunately.

When John played the banjo, it was one of the sweetest sounds I’ve heard in a long while.

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A Father's Unexpected Gift to his Daughters....

7/6/2015

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PictureJ.P. Pickens, 1964
 My father, J.P. Pickens, was a spectacular banjo player, with a soaring, searching intellect. When I was young, his rapid-fire picking floated and shimmered throughout our house. The sweet and tart resonance of the banjo melodies and the joy he felt as he played his music infused our home and lifted the spirits of anyone in earshot. His music comforted me and made me feel safe; when he played his banjo, everything was perfect in my world.

J.P. was blessed with the inspiration, creativity and musical chops to seize conventional banjo music, infuse it with new traditions and influences and transform it into new musical forms that still exist today among his musical heirs, which include Bela Fleck, Mumford and Sons, and many more.    

My father studied music when he was a child in the dusty town of Vernon, Texas, a small agricultural community near the Oklahoma border. His parents insisted that he take piano lessons and he excelled at that instrument. In his teenage years, in Los Angeles, JP discovered an expanded universe of music— classical, jazz, blues, and the traditional folk and hill country music of the banjo. He was delighted by all of it; by the beauty, joy and transformational aspects of sound itself—the music of the hollers, cities and towns of America and the world, of overheard conversations, of motors and clanging metal, and the sacred symphonies of nature. He discovered the banjo, and in that instrument discovered also the perfect expression for his creativity and joy. 

Many of his friends were musicians, and as my sister and brother and I grew older their visits to our homes were a constant. These creative men and women would come to our home and jam and sing with my father for hours. His happiness, and theirs, was palpable, and wrapped us all in the joyous embrace of love and connectivity, during those times. The music carried their love and virtuosity out into the heavens like prayers.

My father taught himself to build banjos, first in his living room in Topanga Canyon, and then, after we moved to Lagunitas, in his woodshop, and soon his life was immersed in the instrument:  he traded banjos, he sold banjos (Banana of the folk/rock group Youngbloods bought one) and he began to teach banjo music. 

In 1961 or so, he met David and Tina Meltzer, David a Beat poet and musician, and they soon became inseparable friends, collecting hundreds of records, competing to delight one another with new discoveries and playing banjo and guitar for hours on end, searching for mastery of old sounds and incorporating the new ones they discovered. As I wrote in a blog post, “No More Normal” ...“During their improvisational sessions they strove to recombine all the sounds they had heard….”  

In 1962, J.P. and David Meltzer brought their unique, avant-garde music to the San Francisco Coffee Gallery, confounding the crowds who arrived anticipating a conventional ‘Hootenany.’ David and J.P. were sometimes joined onstage by James Gurley, who later co-founded Big Brother and the Holding Company.
  • In 2009, I reached out to James Gurley, and had several wonderful telephone conversations with him.  He remembered my father fondly, and he told me that my father and his music had influenced and inspired his own, and had helped to shape and define the San Francisco psychedelic music genre that, not long after the Coffee Gallery days, swept the nation. A deeply generous soul, James had offered to give me a tape recording he had of an early performance of my father, David Meltzer and James backing Janis Joplin at an early Sixties performance at the Coffee Gallery. Unfortunately, days before our scheduled meeting, James suffered a fatal heart attack and the tape disappeared.

In 1964, my father (who was also a master carpenter) helped his friend Gene Estribou build a recording studio in the attic of Estribou’s home, in the old Spreckels Mansion on in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco. In this studio they recorded an album which they named Intensifications— Gene playing acoustic guitar on one side, and my father playing banjo on the other. (In this same studio in1965 Gene recorded the Grateful Dead’s first single.) It was a grand house, and I remember playing in the attic while they were building the recording studio, and then later when they were recording their music. I still have vivid impressions of dark wood and honey-colored lighting, and a secure and comfortable place to sit and read while my father and Gene worked. 

J.P. and Gene’s album was a vanity project, a labor of love by two extraordinary musicians who never expected to sell and give away more than a few hundred copies to friends and relatives. In 2004, however, Locust Music purchased the rights from MEA and re-released the album as a CD. I discovered this when a family friend sent me an excited email announcing the re-release. I immediately contacted Locust Music’s founder, Dawson Prater, who was delighted to hear from me, and confessed to me that this album was special to him. This review from Pitchfork.com delighted my heart:
  • …..Pickens' portion of the record smokes from the start. On "Coo Coo Bird", Pickens begins with a wash of strings before launching into some swift and hyper-rhythmic but still remarkably melodic Americana banjo. Burner "Shady Grows" sounds like a Celtic woodwind ditty performed at Rescue Ranger speeds, albeit also with a high degree of melodic retention. And the sprawling "G.R." is Pickens' answer to the variety of playing styles Estribou displays on "Eeee Minor", as he places non-gimmicky rubato one-liners between dense, swift packets of terrific strumming. In a fictitious world where virtuoso folk guitarists contest for title belts, "G.R." would cinch Pickens' victory over Estribou. But there's no need for a grudge match here: Intensifications features impressive performance from both artists.

When I told my mom that some reviewers were noting that one of my father’s songs on the Intensifications album appeared to be played “at warp-speed”, she laughed delightedly and informed me that Gene had sped up the tape so that all of J.P.’s songs could fit on the record.


My father pushed the limits of banjo music farther than anyone else at this time. In 1965, he equipped his banjo with electric pickups—something of a “first” for the instrument. In 1966, David and his wife Tina were recording an album and asked JP to back them up with his electrified banjo on one song. The album, ‘The Serpent Power,’ achieved cult status and in 2007 Rolling Stone Magazine published a special Summer of Love issue, and  quantified ‘The Serpent Power’ as number 28 on their list of ‘40 Essential Albums of 1967,’ making special mention of the song “The Endless Tunnel,” featuring my father’s electrified banjo.

On July 6th, 1973, I was sixteen years old when my father died suddenly and tragically.  His death broke my heart and his absence has been an intense ache. 

Thirty-eight years later, in the fall of 2011, my sister and I were revisiting the site of Peter Coyote’s West Marin commune that my family and I had lived on all those years ago. We had never been back in all those intervening years. When we returned we discovered that the land become a part of the Point Reyes National Seashore, all the structures had been razed and nature had taken over and erased many of the foundations. As I wandered around the property with my sister, we recalled buildings that no longer existed, trading long-buried memories with one another.

It had rained the previous day and as we walked past the bare ground where the old barn had been (which my parents had converted into a living space), I looked down and saw something small and white partially exposed in the mud, about the size of a white navy bean. Curious, I pried it out of the mud, and showed it to my sister. She instantly exclaimed, “That’s a fifth string tuning peg for a five string banjo!” We were both stunned at this miraculous, unexpected connection to our long-dead, beloved father, and the sense of something important missing, which had been a recurring tone in my life since his death, lifted and lightened, leavened by the sense that he was still around and watching over us. You can read the full story here: http://www.jppickens.com/watering-the-toasters/archives/11-2011

As if that were not enough, I recently discovered that JP had left another, greater gift for us.      

On June 15, 2015, idly scrolling through my friends’ Facebook posts, I remembered that some private Facebook messages were stored in a separate folder by Facebook if you weren’t “friends” with the person who sent the message. One would never know unless you clicked on that tiny box on the Messages page marked “Other.”

I did and there was one lone message resting there, dated from the prior year—October 24, 2014. The message was short and astounding. It said.
  • I was a friend of your father back in the 60's. I also have one of his banjos that I bought back in 1963. You might be interested in having it back, and if so let me know and I would be happy to send it to you...Jack M.

This appeared to me as a second miraculous gift from J.P., an event that could only be of God, and so magnificent that it has no measure.

I immediately wrote back to him:
  • Jack, I just now saw this message, it was stuck in my “other messages” box. I would LOVE to have the banjo, thank you so much!

I was so excited to get this message, and so a few minutes later, I wrote this:
  • I don't have words to say how your message has touched my heart. I can't wait to hear how you knew my father, your memories will be so appreciated!

Jack posted the following on my Facebook wall:
  • Nice to hear from you. I met your father in 1963 while he, your mother, you, your sister and brother were living in Lagunitas. How I met him, I wanted to learn to play the 5 string banjo and he had advertised as a teacher in the newspaper. I took lessons from your dad for a year or so and used to go to your house for the lessons. I also was with your dad when he bought the 1935 Gibson Mastertone. As you probably have heard he had a 5 string neck made for the pot and played it in coffee houses downtown San Francisco. I was also with your dad when he had his appendix taken out at San Rafael General Hospital. I bought your fathers Vega Fairbanks 5 string at that time. Although I still putter around with my other banjos, when I found you and read your story about your father etc., I thought if you were interested you or your sister probably should have the banjo for sentimental reasons. Anyway, if you are interested or interested in any other info I might be able to help you with, please get back to me. My Email is ………………... Jack M.

Just this morning, Jack told me that the banjo has been shipped out today (July 6th!) and I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my father’s banjo. The decades-long ache in my heart has finally evaporated, replaced by a sense of connectedness and love watching over me and my sister, reminding us with occasional gifts that he is still there; that he  “whispered” “in his former student’s ear, urging him to contact me. He wanted his daughters to have his banjo.

UPDATE (July 14, 2015):


Picture
I opened the box, and inside was the original case, in remarkably good condition. I opened the case and found the most beautiful banjo I've ever seen inside. This gift is something I will always treasure. The mother of pearl inlay is remarkable, especially on the peghead. Jack took such loving care of this banjo all these years, and he and his wife sent it to J.P.'s daughters with the purest of intentions, incredible generosity and the largest hearts!

We are truly blessed.


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Across the Decades, my father sends his love......

11/28/2011

1 Comment

 
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My family and I lived at Olema Ranch, CA, in the late sixties and early seventies, one of the communes of "The Free Family." There were communal houses and land scattered over Northern California: Olema Ranch in West Marin, the 'intentional community' Black Bear Ranch on the California/Oregon border, Ron and Marsha Thelin's Red House in Forest Knolls, and the Clipper Street House in San Francisco, to list just a few. The Free Family was a loose tribe of people going "back to the land," as described in Peter Coyote's critically acclaimed memoir, 'Sleeping Where I Fall.' Many of the people I shared my life with back then were shifting the paradigm by studying acupuncture, herbal medicine and sustainable farming.

I lived at Olema Ranch with my father, J.P. Pickens, my mom Mary Ann, my sister KayAnne and my brother Paul (nicknamed 'Owl' by Peter Coyote) for a couple of years, starting when I was twelve. My parents, actually my father, built a room in the large barn, and he filled it with his collection of stuff, things he'd find in his travels around the Bay Area. All kinds of things, he always had a plan to incorporate the objects he brought back into works of art. A renowned banjo player, he also built his own banjos and he collected banjo parts to repair his instruments. 
 
Just recently, KayAnne was here in the Bay Area for Peter Coyote's 70th birthday bash, and a couple of days after the party we went for a drive to west Marin to look at our childhood home in Lagunitas, where we lived before we were enfolded into the 'Family.'
 
After we drove up Alta Road, next to the Lagunitas Grocery, and inspected our former home and the changes made to it since we lived there (for the umpteenth time!), we decided to continue driving out to the Point Reyes area, it was a nice day, maybe we'd drive all the way out to the beach. As we drove past the overgrown, nearly-hidden driveway up to the ranch just before the town of Point Reyes, we looked at each other and KayAnne said, "Why don't we walk up to the Ranch?" So, we parked the car by the driveway, and we walked the familiar road three-quarters of a mile up to the Ranch.

I had not been back to the Ranch for 40 years, but I wasn't surprised to see that all of the buildings - the main house, outbuildings and barns -  were completely torn down, in most places as if they never existed. Only fencing outlined the area were the barn had been. The land is now part of the Point Reyes National Seashore.  
 
All that was left of a vibrant community of people were memories whispering in the wind.
 
While we were walking about, we poked around in the mud just to see if any small items from our childhood were to be found. We discovered some shards of pottery here and there, an unbroken small brown bottle in the mud by the creek, and what looked like an ancient Native American hide scraper, among other small things.

I walked up toward the hill, past the fencing of the former barn. I was thinking of my father (he died when I was sixteen), the memories crowding my mind, while I kept a sharp lookout for anything stuck in the earth.     
 
Looking down, I glimpsed a small something, white, half hidden in the ground about six feet uphill from the end of where the barn would have been. Curious, I pulled it out, and went over to show it to KayAnne.

She immediately exclaimed, "That's an Earl Scruggs fifth string tuning peg, for a five-string banjo!" We just stared at it, in awe and slight shock.
 
Although many musicians spent time at Olema Ranch, our father was the only banjo player who lived and played there.
 
Imagine a world of possibilities: although I have always believed in magic and miracles, my faith has been deepened through this unusual, unexplainable gift!
 
KayAnne and I feel blessed to have received this special gift, an object that without doubt belonged to our father, placed there by fortune forty years ago and waiting patiently for us through time and space.........

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First Post!

11/28/2011

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    Cheryl Lynne

    I have a fierce love and devotion to my father, and I promote and preserve his musical legacy.

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