I am on stage at the Ryman Auditorium, the most famous concert hall in Nashville. A photographer tells me to smile. I hate getting my picture taken, but that day smiling came easy.
After years apart due to the pandemic, my family was reunited: my mother and father, my husband and children, and my sister and her husband and kids. We were in Nashville to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. My parents drove from Connecticut, my sister flew from Dallas, and we drove from St. Louis. It was the first time the ten of us had taken a vacation together.
We didn’t know it would be the last.
Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of country music’s holy ground. Legends surrounded me: Willie, Dolly, Hank, and my favorite, Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, who sang with the weariness of reconciling mortality with morality; Johnny Cash, apocalyptic and American to the end.
There is no better music to ride out a pandemic than Johnny Cash. That’s a truth I never wanted to learn. Twenty-first-century truths are like that.
