  In the time slot after I drop Aidan off at preschool, NPR has been playing musical appreciation bits. Since the Yo-Yo Ma piece affected me so, I’ve kept the radio there more often than not. This morning I got in the car after dropping him by and was pleased to find myself just a few minutes into a urlLink story on Johnny Cash . I really love Johnny Cash’s music, but the man himself represents a sort of an odd bridge between my mother and me. Sex ’s Big pulled Henry Mancini’s Moon River out of his box of his parents old records and Top Gun’s Maverick pulled out Otis Redding’s Sitting on the Dock of the Bay . Anyway, the record I, as a young child, pulled out of my mother’s old box was Johnny Cash’s Live at Folsom Prison .
The NPR story explained that cutting that album was Johnny’s last real act of rebellion, that shortly thereafter life and God and June’s love drove Johnny to personal reformation, but he would forever carry the reputation of a bad boy due largely to the album’s popularity. My mother never called on me to play this album for her, in fact the most response I ever really got from her when I found the dusty boxed jewel was a half smiling smirk, followed by a veiled look of what anyone who didn’t know her as well as I would think was reminiscing. She has always been one to never regret and reminiscing implies missing. She must have just remembered how good the music on that record was. We didn’t play the record then, I had to wait until later to play it by myself. By the time I pulled out the dusty boxed jewel, she had moved on toward her own redemption and much preferred Terms of Endearment and Neil Diamond to play the soundtrack of her days.
I didn’t hear Johnny Cash again until I was at school in Europe in 1993 and he reinvented himself for a new generation of fans. Levis played his Ring of Fire for a commercial that captured the classic western allure of America. The NPR story explained that June Carter Cash wrote that song when she fell in love with Johnny as one of his backup singers.
She was a devout Christian, which made her love for him extra forbidden in light of her marital status. They played the song again and I heard tones of longing desire in it that I had until now missed. Five years after he cut that song, they were married. Five years! Five long years of unquenched (we assume) love. And now we can understand why those five years, peaking at Folsom Prison, were Johnny’s bad boy years.
His heart was crying out and the hard living was the only way he could push past that pain. The next I heard of Johnny in my life was on the U2 album. I remember showing the tape to my mother who immediately copied it and still plays it while driving. Finally, Johnny’s urlLink rebirthed anthems found a media that hit her heart in a way they both could accept. His remake was so completely accepted by this newest generation of music listeners that websites dedicated to him abound. A few weeks ago, he missed his scheduled appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards due to health problems. It seemed like a temporary thing. By now you must now what at that point in the car I did not. The commentator began wrapping up the story by listing the amazing career highlights. The realization of what he was getting to was so slow that at first I thought, man, they’re talking about him like he’s already dead.
What must it be like to be so old that when you remake your career, people pull from your someday obit file to tout your accomplishments? It’s been raining pretty steady all day and I got stuck in line behind a crossing guard and so there I was sitting in the rain, staring at this slow-moving freight train as Noah Adam’s words hit my heart. Johnny Cash died early this morning of complications from diabetes. I had been thinking of how great the story was and how I would go right home and blog about it. I would call the entry An Unlikely Bridge and write about how my mom and I are out of sync right now, but the music could still bridge us. But those words pierced my heart and I began to cry. Everyone knows the theme of my year has been change. It’s no paradox, I know the answer. You can’t step in the same river twice because things change and people change. It’s all very kitschy, I know I’m growing up because I can see the blanket of relativity that falls over every single relationship in my life.
Chronologically speaking, the river is only what it is at that exact moment that that one molecule of water flows over your foot. And your foot will never be the same again. But man. Sometimes people don’t change. They die. I don’t know how to wrap that one up in my head. In May, June died of complications from heart surgery just as Johnny was recovering from pneumonia himself. They were married for so long, a forbidden romance and a great career of paradigm-bashing tunes. I don’t think Johnny Cash died because of diabetes at all. He died because of a broken heart. 
