Waving Under a June-Blue Sky

Tuesday

Oct262010

Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 6:47AM

It's been a rainy few days and my mind wandered back to reading Johnny Cash's autobiography and listening to June Carter Cash's last recording, Wildwood Flower, which traces a life that has its memories in seven decades of music. June's voice is very frail on this CD and I love the way it shows its wrinkles.

Rosanne Cash writes in the liner notes of Wildwood Flower:

This record 'Wildwood Flower', is the musical summation of an extraordinary life. I first heard it on May 10, 2003. My dad played it for me on a boom box while we took a short break from our vigil at June's beside during her last illness. Halfway through the record, I realized that I was listening to more than a collection of songs, I was hearing an autobiography, nearly cinematic in nature, and completely comprehensive in the scope of June's unique life. By the time we got to "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone", I was wiping away tears, and chilled to the bone. I knew that it was her farewell and her mission statement, and that her soul, on some level that was greater than everyday conciousness, had directed its creation. The pain of imminent loss was like a mist surrounding my dad and me while we listened, and the poignancy of hearing a musical and cultural past that is now a part of history was, and is, so deeply moving.

I love biography of all kinds for this reason. It wipes away the illusion of fragmentation. We are not as separate as we think and we should not be as separate as we try to be. When we are tempted to crawl into the corner and hold our heads over the immense and very real suffering around us, biography is a shouting reminder from the great crowd of witnesses. Beauty and hope continues to be deeply formed in every human life even when we can't see it because hurricane winds are blowing or leaders are lying and people perish for the lack of a few pennies worth of food or medicine.

Rosanne Cash also includes June's eulogy on the Wildwood Flower liner notes. The whole transcript can be found here and I highly recommend a careful reading of this tribute. This part will stay with me as I head out to look at the Fall colors:

June gave us so many gifts, some directly, some by example. She was so kind, so charming, and so funny. She made up crazy words that somehow everyone understood. She carried songs in her body the way other people carry red blood cells-she had thousands of them at her immediate disposal; she could recall to the last detail every word and note, and she shared them spontaneously. She loved a particular shade of blue so much that she named it after herself: "June-blue". She loved flowers and always had them around her. In fact, I don't ever recall seeing her in a room without flowers: not a dressing room, a hotel room, certainly not her home. It seemed as if flowers sprouted wherever she walked. John Carter suggested that the last line of her obituary read: "In lieu of donations, send flowers". We put it in. We thought she would get a kick out of that.

She treasured her friends and fawned over them. She made a great, silly girlfriend who would advise you about men and take you shopping and do comparison tastings of cheesecake. She made a lovely surrogate mother to all the sundry musicians who came to her with their craziness and heartaches. She called them her babies. She loved family and home fiercely. She inspired decades of unwavering loyalty in Peggy and her staff. She never sulked, was never rude, and went out of her way to make you feel at home. She had tremendous dignity and grace. I never heard her use coarse language, or even raise her voice. She treated the cashier at the supermarket with the same friendly respect that she treated the President of the United States.

I have many, many cherished images of her. I can see her cooing to her beloved hummingbirds on the terrace at Cinnamon Hill in Jamaica, and those hummingbirds would come, unbelievably, and hang suspended a few inches in front of her face to listen to her sing to them. I can see her laying flat on her back on the floor and laughing as she let her little granddaughters brush her hair out all around her head. I can see her come into the room with her hands held out, a ring on every finger, and say to the girls, "Pick one!" I can see her dancing with her leg out sideways and her fist thrust forward, or cradling her autoharp, or working in her gardens. But the memory I hold most dear is of her, two summers ago on her birthday in Virginia.

Dad had orchestrated a reunion and called it 'Grandchildren's Week'. The whole week was in honor of June. Every day the grandchildren read tributes to her, and we played songs for her and did crazy things to amuse her. One day, she sent all of us children and grandchildren out on canoes with her Virginia relations steering us down the Holston River. It was a gorgeous, magical day. Some of the more urban members of the family had never even been in a canoe. We drifted for a couple of hours and as we rounded the last bend in the river to the place where we would dock, there was June, standing on the shore in the little clearing between the trees. She had gone ahead in a car to surprise us and welcome us at the end of the journey. She was wearing one of her big flowered hats and long white skirt, and she was waving her scarf and calling, 'helloooo!' I have never seen her so happy.

So, today, from a bereft husband, seven grieving children, sixteen grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, we wave to her from THIS shore, as she drifts out of our lives. What a legacy she leaves, what a mother she was. I know she has gone ahead of us to the far side bank. I have faith that when we all round the last bend in the river, she will be standing there on the shore in her big flowered hat and long white skirt, under a June-blue sky, waving her scarf to greet us.

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