Story Time: Me & Johnny Cash

The following is a transcript of a video I recorded about Johnny Cash, My grandmother and COVID-19.

Some unexpected things Johnny Cash and I have in common.

We’re both ordained ministers

We are both former residence of both Ojai California, and Nashville TN

AND

Both of our parents were at one time residence The Natural State — Arkansas.

We both survived pretty wild life-changing attacks by flightless birds.

John was going through a rough patch at the beginning of the 80’s in the middle of a bitter cold Tennessee winter. He was walking the grounds of his estate when one of his pet Ostrich — the “alpha male” — felt threatened by the Man in Black and jump kicked him right in the guts.

The bird’s talon broke four ribs and filleted him from his sternum to his waist and was only stopped by Jack’s belt buckle — effectively saving his life.

Johnny was wildly addicted to speed at the time and before he was medevacked to a local hospital, he shoved his stash of pills under his bandages to hold him over during his hospital stay. Unfortunately for Johnny he was high as fuck when he did that and didn’t realize that all of his pills would dissolve and immediately be absorbed into his bloodstream causing him to nearly overdose by the time he arrived at the hospital — kind of perfect timing really.

My bird attack was slightly less cinematic — for most of my life my grandparents ran a commercial chicken house near Royal, Arkansas all by themselves and when I was a young boy, I’d help them collect eggs whenever I came to visit. The chicken house was a sea of feathered chaos as far as you could see and when I was young, I could barely keep my head above the white caps.

Chicken houses are mostly filled with hens, but you have to keep a few roosters around so the females will still produce eggs. The roosters can be extremely territorial, particularly around cowardly children from California.

One such rooster found me and definitely had a point to prove. He flared up and gave me an arm full of talons and beak and I immediately broke out whaling and coward until my grandma ran over and saved me from this 30lb feathered dinosaur.

She grabbed him by his ugly head and cracked him like a bullwhip — snapping his neck instantly. Then casually walked to the back of the chicken house and threw him on top of the burn pile.

From then on out I knew that as long as my grandma was alive — I was safe. Whenever I’d get scared on the farm, I’d just hold her hand and I knew everything would be fine.

Johnny and I also both share the loss of family member to circumstances as tragic as they were preventable.

When John was a boy his brother was splitting fence posts with a table saw that had had its guard removed so he could work faster. One of the boards he was cutting kicked back and John’s brother ended up getting pulled over the blade gutting him like a deer and causing him to die week later from the injuries. It haunted John for the rest of his life often saying that he looked forward to meeting up with him again in heaven.

A few months before she passed away, my 87-year-old grandmother was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer — the same conditions that killed her daughter — my mother — a few years earlier.

Unlike my mother, and much to our astonishment — grandma was strong enough to endure chemo for long enough for her cancer to go into remission. She returned to her farm house where she’d outlived two husbands, where she’d won Ragweed Vally’s Farm Family of the year in 1976, where she’d shot water moccasins with a rifle off her porch just a few weeks before — and she thought — we all thought — that she had outrun death for just long enough to catch her breath for a minute.

Which was true, it just ended up being a little more brief than we’d hoped.

Just a few nights after she’d been cleared she spiked a 104d fever and had to be rushed to the emergency room where it was discovered that she had contracted COVID-19 and immediately quarantined in their COVID ward, Within 24 hour she was intubated, within a week she dead.

We can get very caught up in numbers. We can balance statistics and survival rates — and it can make us feel much better, almost comfortable.

I think about Johnny and his brother Jack. In 1944 there were hundreds of thousands of people in the carpentry industry, of those only a hundred or so died on the job. Jack represented less than one percent of carpentry-related deaths that year — yet it was important to John and it needed to be accounted for.

I think about that day in the chicken house. There were a thousand chickens, but the one that died was important, and it needed to be accounted for.

The day my grandmother died there were nearly 300,000 positive COVID-19 diagnosis. There were 2,600 deaths. She was less than 1%. But she is important to me, and she needs to be accounted for.