Creative Nonfiction by Alexandra Ernst
Love is a burning thing And it makes a fiery ring Bound by wild desire I fell into a ring of fire
While pregnant with each of my children, I would often inadvertently hum Johnny Cash’s song Ring of Fire. We were living in Paris at the time, so I would walk around our Montparnasse neighborhood humming this iconic country music hit, sheathed in mostly black pregnancy wear and carrying a large panier, or shopping basket, that I would fill with delicacies from the boulangerie, the cheese shop, Italian specialty shop, or from the outdoor market. I am a big hummer, and my husband Garret, who has an incredible knowledge of music of all genres and a terrific musical ear — we often joke that he could be a prize-winning contestant on the classic television show Name That Tune — often helps me to identify the songs I am humming.
As humming is somewhat of a nervous habit for me, I don’t always realize that I am doing it. It was my daughter who finally revealed to me over the course of her lifetime — she is now almost twenty-three — that she has always been able to identify where I am in a public bathroom because I am the only one humming behind the stall door. As it turns out, I even hum while peeing. Many times when I am humming, my husband will try to guess what tune I have stuck in my head. I don’t always agree with his analysis as sometimes I feel as if I am simply humming my own tune and don’t want to know that it is actually that Roto Rooter commercial from the 1970’s or some Wham song to which I have long forgotten the lyrics. But humming Ring of Fire while pregnant seemed ok, if a bit strange, so whenever he told me that I was humming it, I would simply chuckle and exclaim I am?!
Garret and I saw Johnny and June perform in Paris twice. The first time was when we were in our mid-twenties, well before our kids were born. Every Stetson and pair of cowboy boots in Île-de-France turned out for the concert, most of them sheathed in black clothing, out of respect for The Man in Black. Garret and I were amazed by how many Parisians seemed to deeply embrace American country music and, in particular, Johnny Cash. I, myself, was a convert. In junior high, my best friend and I thought country music was for losers. Our favorite song at the time was September by Earth, Wind, and Fire; we played the 45 over and over again in her bedroom after school and dreamed of a glittery, energetic future. Down the hall, we could hear the hiss of beer bottles popping open as her unemployed, alcoholic step-father played Sunday Morning Coming Down or Folsom Prison Blues, songs that we considered at the time to be both cheesy and total downers; we were simply too young to get it.
In 1963, Johnny Cash made famous the song Ring of Fire, credited to his future wife, June Carter Cash, and singer/song-writer and manager Merle Kilgore. Johnny’s first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash, claimed in her autobiography of Cash that he actually wrote it but gave song-writing credits to June for monetary reasons. But this bit of history is up for debate, particularly as a version of the song was originally recorded by June’s sister, Anita Carter. Either way, Johnny Cash’s signature arrangement included the sparkling addition of mariachi horns which, as the story goes, came to him in a dream.
The Ring of Fire is the name given to a large horseshoe-shaped area of the Pacific Rim known for extensive volcanic activity and earthquakes. From Ancient Times until late in the 18th century, volcanoes were incorrectly thought to be caused by fires within the Earth, thus the term Ring of Fire. According to most sources, the song Ring of Fire is based on an Elizabethan poem called Love’s Ring of Fire that June Carter used as inspiration and is thought to convey Carter’s feelings about falling in love with Cash. The song was recorded around the time that Johnny and June Cash first met and were, indeed, falling for each other. June would say that being around Johnny felt like being around a ring of fire, in part due to his drug addiction and turbulent lifestyle. Cash, in fact, went in and out of recovery throughout the years — his final stint in rehab was in 1992, eleven years before his death at age seventy-one of respiratory failure due to diabetes. And one of the main foundations for his getting clean, besides his deep faith, was his marriage to June. Their iconic romance as well as their musical collaborations would, of course, extend on for decades and, though June had two children from two former marriages, she and Johnny would have a son together, John Carter Cash. A singer-songwriter and music producer, in 2007, he published a biography of his mother, Anchored in Love, which was turned into a Lifetime movie titled (you guessed it) Ring of Fire.
Once, almost twenty-five ago, when we were on vacation in Jamaica, Garret, in one of life’s completely random moments, actually got to meet Johnny Cash. This occurred when we were in our early thirties, just before we had children. We had started trying to conceive in our late twenties, but during six years of attempting to get pregnant, I had numerous miscarriages. It was heartbreaking each time a pregnancy did not hold. We also had trouble conceiving and so I did fertility treatments — which involved Garret injecting me in the rear with Clomid every day for weeks at a time — as well as multiple artificial inseminations. I remember that friends and family told us that we should try to take the pressure off, that all we perhaps needed was to go away alone together and try to see if the change to a relaxed setting would help us to conceive. The idea that we could step back from the doctors and medical procedures, or démédicalisé the situation as the French would say, seemed very attractive, yet it was hard for us–-being realists — to believe that a magical vacation setting could help us after so many years of disappointment.
In Jamaica, we stayed with my dad and step-mother in a villa they had rented for the whole family, including my brother and his wife and their infant son and my teenage half-sister and her best friend; at the time, it was the first family vacation we all had taken together in quite a few years. The morning Garret met Johnny Cash, I had gone to have a reflexology appointment — offered to me by my step-mother — in the small spa near one of the swimming pools at the Half Moon Club, a luxury resort located in Montego Bay; the resort, popular with celebrities and politicians, was, in fact, a walled-in enclave complete with armed guards.
I remember laying in a darkened spa room that smelled like coconut oil — I was undoubtedly humming — having what I believe was my first professional reflexology session, when I heard two men conversing. I recognized Garret’s voice saying hello to someone and, to my surprise, heard him blurt out, Are you Johnny Cash? The next thing I heard was a deep, gravelly voice with an Arkansas drawl responding back, Why yes I am. Though I was in a blissed out state and thoroughly enjoying my massage, I suddenly could not wait until it was over. Perhaps I too could get a close-up glimpse of the country legend. When I exited into the strong sunlight a few minutes later, I saw Garret beaming, his blues eyes filled with excitement, and, yet, Johnny Cash was nowhere to be seen. He held up his right hand to me and kept repeating, I just shook Johnny Cash’s hand. I will never wash this hand again!
Now, Garret is not normally one to take interest in celebrities. Over the years, whenever I have spotted someone famous in the street whether in New York or Paris or some other location, he will generally say, Whoop Dee Doo! In fact, earlier on that same vacation week, we had spotted the director Spike Lee and his family having lunch outdoors at the Cedar Bar and, though I was fairly pumped about it, Garret was nonplussed. But, Johnny Cash, now that was different. Garret’s father loved Johnny Cash and, as he died young — at the age of forty-three when Garret was only thirteen — he has, of course, preserved a very deep attachment to anything connected to his father’s memory. I did not get to see Johnny Cash that sunny day in Jamaica, but the fact that Garret got to meet him, one of his idols — and I got to, at least, hear his voice while having my feet massaged — will always burn bright within me.
Our daughter was finally conceived, as it turned out, the following year on a trip to Jamaica at the very resort where Garret met Johnny Cash. We rented an airy room on the beach, had romantic candlelit dinners, and sat side by side under palm trees looking out at the vastness of the sea. The rest is history, or sort of. In the end, I was able to keep the pregnancy by taking baby aspirin — an American friend who was a midwife recommended this treatment to us and our French doctor agreed that it could help — and staying in bed for the first month, a small price to pay for the beautiful gift that is our daughter.
In 2015, Garret and I, along with our fourteen-year-old son and seventeen-year-old daughter, were poised to move from France back to the USA after living abroad for twenty-six years. Needless to say, this move would be very destabilizing. During the months before the move, in the period that we were preparing to pack up both our apartment and small office and dealing with a zillion other details, including overseeing the building of a new home in Vermont, I started to hum Ring of Fire again. My husband noticed it right away as we crossed the boulevard on our way to the Metro stop at Edgar Quinet, or Eddie Q. as we liked to call it. He said, It’s Ring of Fire time again, huh?! We were walking in our own neighborhood down rue Delambre, the main shopping street, the same street where our kids’ old maternelle or pre-school is located. After I reassured him that I was not pregnant, I smiled and thought about what we were about to do. Though we had been contemplating our move for six months, convincing ourselves that it was the right decision, the right timing to settle back in the USA, it was starting to feel very real and more than a bit scary.
Leaving Paris would be hard, perhaps one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. I don’t think I let myself realize that fully at the time. I was excited about the future, about living in our new house, about my daughter starting college in the US, about being in the country full-time and getting to experience the change of seasons in New England again, about being closer to family. I pushed away the feelings of loss or separation that are naturally part of any move.
I love Paris more than any other city. I even love Paris more than New York, where I was born, went to college, have great friends and family, and where I met Garret. I love Paris more than any other city because it was my adopted home, because it was where I raised my children, where I met so many wonderful and interesting people — a number of whom have become lifelong friends — and because it was where I got to be me, truly me. For, when I arrived in Paris at twenty-five, I was just a person forming, a person-yet-to-be. Paris definitely shaped me. I had also learned to be assertive in two languages and, by the end, understood a lot more about how to enjoy life. I had become French, if not in nationality, than in spirit.
During our last week in our apartment, while we were finishing up packing, so many memories came flooding over me. Every object and piece of furniture, every painting and photograph, even the area on the kitchen door frame where we had marked the kids’ heights over the years called out to me. Our whole apartment told a story, the story of our lives. What is strange is that I had stopped humming Ring of Fire in the period after our daughter was born, but started right up again as soon as we conceived our son. I had given birth to our daughter in October of 1998 and our son in mid-November 2001, a little more than two months after 9/11. Tragically, New York was on fire for weeks. I tried not to hum, and certainly not Ring of Fire during those last two months of pregnancy. It was such a surreal and somber time, a time of intense mourning. In Paris, neighbors came up to hug and kiss us with tears in their eyes. We love New York, they would say in French. We love America. We really feel for you.
During the period after moving into our house, besides having to deal with sometimes hourly episodes of hot flashes that felt like lava oozing down my limbs leaving my whole body drenched with sweat, I began to put on more weight than I ever imagined possible. It was as if my newly bloated body had been taken over by some force outside my control, and I spent my days having to pretend that this outer body experience was, in fact, normal. My mind processed these changes as you would expect; perhaps not recognizing my body, it shut down at times, narrowing the scope of my perception to the point that I could not concentrate well on anything. I was distracted all the time and feeling distracted made me feel crazy. I felt anxious and my anxiety made me high strung and left me to act as if everything I did was of hyper importance, as if actions as banal as putting away the dishes or peeling carrots were of vital importance and had to be done quickly and efficiently or else everything would fall apart.
My savvy and very caring teenage son analyzed the problem for me one day. He said that we had just gone through a very busy period with our move to rural Vermont from Paris, building a new house and getting him and his sister settled at their new schools and, now that things were calmer, I must not have adjusted my internal rhythms. The fight or flight instinct that had been put into play during an intense time had not yet been switched off even though the current moment was far less demanding. My husband and I had, in fact, landed at JFK almost a year before with our twelve pieces of luggage, including one suitcase full of important documents and files we did not trust to the moving company. All of our other worldly goods had been packed into a giant container and were to arrive by boat once our house was completed. A month earlier, we had deposited the kids in Maine, where they were both spending time at a summer camp — my daughter was working there as a counselor and my son was a senior camper. We had also done a site visit and met with our architects, among other things, before returning back to our Paris apartment to complete packing and tying up all the loose ends. This was, in fact, one of many trips over the Atlantic during our last year and a half in France. Each time we passed through an Air France terminal, whether in Roissy or New York, during those hectic back and forth journeys, I hummed Ring of Fire, and Garret was reassured.
Even with this last difficult year and half of living through a pandemic, with all the stresses and deprivations, with all the loneliness and uncertainty, the most difficult year for our family came in the year before the pandemic. In 2019, our daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumor. During the time after her initial diagnosis until she had brain surgery to remove the tumor, Garret and I often held each other close. We also held our daughter and her brother as close as we could in both our hearts and minds without letting go, and we all gave each other enormous — or what we in our family call gianormous — hugs. But these were terrible months. Eventually, it was the day of our daughter’s surgery at New York-Presbterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. Waiting for her to come out of surgery with my mother-in-law, who was our rock, Garret and I talked with the parents of a young man who, like our daughter, was having brain surgery — a more complicated operation that he had postponed until after he had graduated with honors from a prestigious college. We wished them good luck, and they wished the same to us. The hours went by very slowly and, at one point, about an hour into the wait, I thought I saw a gurney roll by in the distance with our daughter on it. Later, the surgeon came out to explain that there had been a delay; they had to take our daughter, who was still fully sedated, to another area of the hospital to get a better look at her brain in an MRI as the machine in the operating room was not working well, and they needed to find one with a higher resolution before he began the procedure. I decided after that to take a walk outside in the hot, July air and find us some coffee and lunch.
I tried not to hum as I walked down the overly air-conditioned halls of the hospital and went down in an elevator crowded with patients, hospital staff and other visitors. I tried not to hum as I crossed the lobby. But, outside, on the sticky Harlem streets, I let myself hum as much as I liked. I don’t know if I hummed Ring of Fire or some lullaby I used to sing to the kids when I put them to sleep. All I know is that as I walked, I kept thinking about how this was a moment like no other I had ever known, a moment filled almost entirely with terror and sadness, a moment that could shatter me if I let it, but I chose instead to leave open an avenue of hope. Perhaps the humming let in some breath, a way of connecting body to mind and to some sort of path to healing, for my daughter, but also for myself.
After the surgery, Garret and I leaned over our daughter’s bed in the recovery area and loved her with all our hearts. Looking at her bandaged head and hearing her first waking thoughts — unbelievably, she actually told us a joke — as she came out of the anesthesia, we loved her more than we had ever loved her, even more than when she was born — if that is possible. A month after surgery, we went back to the hospital, me, Garret, our daughter and her best friend, who had flown in from Paris to be there; it was the day that we were to find out the pathology of the tumor. When our daughter’s surgeon announced with a smile that it was benign, we all went quiet. It was a silence of tremendous relief. I stopped myself from humming and hugged my daughter as tight as I could. In the hallway, she broke down crying. My husband and I and her dear friend all surrounded her and wiped away her tears. Life is a lot sometimes. The beauty is you get to live it. Even the terrible moments can be beautiful in a way. Knowing how you feel, knowing that you can love and be loved, is what we are all after. And love is a burning thing. If we are lucky, we love recklessly, with abandon. If we are lucky, we meet our true love, get to live out our dreams, have amazing children, maybe even hear a mariachi horn section. If we are lucky, we get to feel what love is, right deep down to our core, to the fiery center, that ring of fire.
And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire The ring of fire The ring of fire The ring of fire — Ring of Fire, song by June Carter Cash and Merle Kilgore and popularized by Johnny Cash
Alexandra Ernst was born in New York City. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her poetry has appeared in Oranges & Sardines (Poets & Artists), Stepaway Magazine, All Things Girl, BluePrint Review, among other literary journals. Having lived in Paris, France for twenty-six years, she currently resides in Southern Vermont, where she recently began writing personal essays.
Arcturus 