I first came to Idyllwild in 1976, when I was 13. My mother and stepfather, Jean and Jim McEwan, left their Orange County jobs as RN and aerospace engineer to try their hands as innkeepers. They bought the Blue Bird Motel, which at that time encompassed both sides of 243, 26 units. I cleaned rooms on Sundays, chopped and delivered firewood, painted during the summers. I took the bus to Hemet Junior High and High school. Jim and my mom put a lot of attention into the Blue Bird, but working together for three years revealed unreconcilable differences and put an end to the marriage.

My mother, now once again Jean Jerome, stayed on in Idyllwild and began to work at Meadowlark, Dr Evarts Loomis’ holistic health retreat in Valle Vista (now a Coptic Nunnery.) I spent my senior year at Desert Sun School. Mom kept her place up here for many years, and while she did spend a few years with her niece Gina in rural New Mexico, and helping a friend recover from surgery in New Orleans, she eventually came back to Idyllwild.

I went away to college at UC Berkeley and stayed over 20 years in the bay area. I did whatever I could to survive, and kept playing guitar. I spent my last ten years there teaching guitar full time. It was quite a treadmill surviving in that dizzyingly expensive environment.

In 1998 I went back to school to get a master’s in guitar performance at Cal State Hayward, now Cal State East Bay. I was motivated by a desire to remedy my deficiencies and pursue a research project I had started, into the life and music of a Brazilian guitarist, Dilermando Reis. At the end of four very eventful years I secured a Fulbright grant to live and continue this research in Brazil for a year.

While in Brazil I heard from my brother Rob that mom was starting to have trouble finding her way around, even in this small town. I was happy to come back here to write and try to keep mom on the tracks. Although mom had always intended to leave the hill “feet first,” after two years she began to ask to be in a more structured setting, and so Rob and my other brother Neal found her the first of several group homes and assisted living facilities closer to Rob. She passed away in 2010.

In Idyllwild I almost immediately began to play music in restaurants, starting with Café Aroma. I played there every Saturday until the pandemic. I kept weekly year-round gigs on the hill and off, and made ends meet until 2020. In 2021 I began writing for the Town Crier.