On the news of Johnny Cash's passing, I rememered the red eye flight I took to Prague in the Winter of 1993 and when walking the dimly lit corridors of Kennedy Airport in NYC I met the man in black. Just me and him. Alone. Nearly dark.

It was during the dawn of the internet I was asked to speak at a conference in Prague for the European Journalism Network At the time my brother Jon was a working journalist in New York City. I was asked to speak about technology as it related to delivery of journalistic content while my brother was to speak on journalistic practices in a free world.

So I arranged to take a flight that would stopover in New York City. This way my brother and I could fly together to Prague. A great plan and we worked the flight schedules accordingly.

My flight arrived in the red eye early morning in New York's Kennedy Airport. I recall landing sometime after midnight. The international terminal was quiet and mysterious in its dim lighting with the caged storefronts bolted shut. Starbucks had yet to penetrate the airport market and there were no consumer services open at the time. The stopover was a couple of hours and my brother was already in the airport gate waiting area.

I decided to journey into the darkened terminal to find the rest rooms and to explore the dead of a major city international airline terminal on a early May morning. As I strolled through the corridor toward the bathroom the tan speckled tie of the dated sixties airline terminal basked in the cold fluorescent lights — complete with flickering strobe effects from dated ballasts — when in the shadows a tall man dressed in a dark suit slowly emerged from an intersecting corridor. The sound of his boots echoed in the empty corridor as he walked closer toward me.

There was something oddly familiar about him as he moved into the light. Then it hit me. My god. It's Johnny Cash. I had seen him play the Crazy Horse Saloon in Santa Ana California many months prior. His whole family played. June Carter Cash. And his daughter, Roseanne. Lip locked and stunned, but not in a star struck way, I didn't know what to do or say. As we started to pass like two ships in the night the only words that escaped the endless ideas swirling in my mind were "How's it going, John?"