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Jerry Garcia's Walking Stick Artist's comments: This piece has a good deal of sentimentality attached to it. It so happened that one of my two dogwood trees in the front yard was dying. I knew for a good while that the little tree was doomed. Had I been attentive to some of the finer points of Dogwood maintenance, perhaps its fate could have been avoided. Some beetle had been eating away at its bark and it had shown signs of weakness the previous fall season. In an impulsive moment around three o'clock in the afternoon on August 8th, 1995 I decided to cut down the faltering tree with the intention of fashioning a walking stick. I don't know what made me choose that day or that hour. My grandmother had just died two months prior. Perhaps this rumination of death compelled me to chop it down. The next morning, with the radio blaring, I found myself chiseling away at the trunk of this semi-green Dogwood. And I remember saying to myself, "I don't usually have the radio on this early in the morning." After having peeled away the bark and while commencing the first few blows of the hammer to the chisel, the DJ announced that Jerry Garcia had died. This was saddening news. For despite all the controversy surrounding the Grateful Dead, the passing of Garcia marked the end of a great American folk hero. Though I don't consider myself a "Dead Head," I had the privilege of witnessing five Grateful Dead shows. I guess at times I felt the same as Jacobsen did when he went to his first, and perhaps only, Dead show. I look like a guy who should be in a suit, not a tie-dye. Yet one of my greatest regrets is that my children will never have the chance to experience a Dead show. This sounds crazy, I know. Never in a band was there such a disparity between a recording and a live show. Many people despise the music. But most of those people either have no sense of the history of American folk music or they never saw the Dead in the flesh. Well that evening, after working on the walking stick most of the day, I decided to inscribe "R.I.P. Jerry G. 8-9-95" on the handle of the stick. The next morning I awoke to find a big crack at the base of the handle. I filled it with epoxy and the next day I stained and coated the stick with clear acrylic. When I look at the stick now, it looks like Jerry smiling."
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