Dolly Parton died, and damnit, why?
Today, the day after she died, I put on the important songs for my first hour class to listen to. My assistant and I talked about how great she was, after he had reminded me about “Islands in the Stream,” which I can’t believe I forgot.
It was day three of school.
As class went on, one of our students was antsy, asked to go for a walk with another staff member. “Nope,” I said. “But I can take you.”
Student squirmed in frustration, but let it go. There’s a lot of testing the rules in the first days.
Toward the end of the hour, student said, “I’ll go for a walk with you.”
We went out to the parking lot, across the parking lot, onto an expanse of grass recently cut, and chunky clover patches. It was damp. Driving to work, I’d seen several clouds of fog still trying to wake up and fly.
I didn’t say anything, and the kid didn’t, either. Two hawks flew right over us, so low we could see their feather patterns clearly. One landed on a pole, and another on the roof of the school. We just watched them. I thought about the bald eagles we’d watched the year before, in some park in California. Shadow and Jackie, the eagles, had raised three scraggly babies.
I heard over the summer that Jackie had died.
I took up my phone to photograph the hawk, but it flew on, to the line of trees in the backyards that edge the school’s fields.
The student sat on the metal bleachers nearby. I sat, too.
The light was so nice on my sandals, and on my feet, as I had walked, this image had lulled me. Anxiety about our day, which had an odd schedule, and included new students and new challenges, had slid off my shoulders.
We walked back. I stopped on the blacktop near the school when I saw a brilliant Monarch butterfly lying on its side. “Aw,” I said.
My student tried to lift it by the wing that was showing. “He’s stuck there.”
“Poor guy,” I said.
I saw a bit of metal and kicked it gently with my foot. Something rolled. The kid picked it up. “Treasure!” I said.
“It’s just rusted metal.”
We went back inside and plowed through the rest of the day.
In the afternoon, I peeked into the hall to see what was going on, and as I chomped down on my gum, a piece of my tooth pulled away with it.
Oh my teeth.
Without dental care during five or six years of wildly underpaid employment, my already disastrous teeth had struggled. Now I’ve got two empty slots, luckily on the sides, where I don’t feel embarrassed. Much.
Sorry, I have three empty slots.
None of them hurt, and I have an appointment (finally!) at my local dental school to get rock-bottom prices on some brand new and improved teeth.
Yes, all of them on the sides, where I don’t think people see them… much?
I realized while writing this that both parts of my day connected to the wonderful nonfiction writer Sarah Smarsh.
First, she wrote a powerful article on how “bad” teeth label and limit people in the United States. It’s perfectly usual to discriminate against, or make fun of, Americans who are missing teeth, or have terribly crooked or messed-up teeth.
She also wrote a book about Dolly Parton, She Come By It Natural, and it’s lovely.
A love for the vulnerable and a passion for human connection unites those pieces.
And made me return to Parton’s words to bless the deaths of the day, including another one of my lil’ old teeth:
I talk to God like he is my best friend. I just go around talking to him. Sometimes I think if somebody saw me in my house, they’d think I was an absolute lunatic. I just talk to God and sometimes if something great has happened, I just raise my hand, give God a high five or a thumbs up.…
If you try to shove that down people’s throats or you come on goody goody, that ain’t going to work. You live by example. You teach by example, you learn by example, don’t you think?
The Bible says, let every man seek out his own salvation. And that means to save himself, whatever it takes to save you. And if you can get to that place and you find your own peace, then you can do good for other people, if you’re at peace within yourself.
There was this old church at the foot of the hill where we were living, and it just had an old piano in it. All the windows were all busted. People used to go down there, drink, make out. They were dirty pictures painted on the walls.… I spent a lot of time looking at them, studying the way the sexual organs had been drawn in that time, trying to add to them.
And I just remember being in that church and I felt something. I remember it just came to me. I didn’t hear it like a voice. It came to me as a feeling that was a strong as a voice though. And I felt like I found God that day, and I felt like I knew who I was that day.…
Yeah, the sexuality, the spirituality, the sensuality, and the music, all that is me. And I remember when I left that old church, I was still walking around the road back up our house and Vonny Owens, one of my old uncles that owned a sawmill up the road, and he came down. And I was just jumping. I was just flying, just jumping up and down. I was skipping around and he said, “Where are you going on this fine day?” And I said, “I’m on the road to paradise.”
[My connection to God is behind something] like a little invisible wall. I can just kind of go through there and be in my God place, and I can stay there until I’m restored or healed in my spirit, if something’s really troublesome. And nobody can go there but me, I can’t take nobody with me.…
And as far as what happens after we [die], like I say, I’m no saint so I’m hoping just as a Christian faith person, that we go on to a greater thing. I believe that we’re all part of that great divine plan, and I’m hoping to get on up there, and do some more writing, and singing, and playing with those golden harps, and write some more songs, and have my own mansion, and walk them golden streets of glory, and keep doing it forever and ever and ever. So I’m going to get in the angel band, for sure. I want to play in the angel band and I want to maybe play the harp up there. I don’t know.
…You don’t really know. You just hope and you have faith. That’s what faith is. But I believe that it’s going to be better. I think it’s not the end of me. I don’t think it’s the end of any of us. I think we’re recycled and if nothing else, we just go back into that great flow of divine energy, and hopefully we can spread ourselves around in other wonderful ways. That’s what I hope.
Me, too. Me, too.
Dolly’s words from the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America.”
Going On 