“Remembering is everything. I hated remembering.”
-The Secret Life of Bees
Two Dollies…two ladies…influenced me greatly when I was a little girl…
"I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde."
The first is Dolly Parton. Today is her birthday. You youngsters who claim music is “your life” would do well to spend some time with Dolly-she’s one of music’s Great Fundamentalists, a pioneer. In other words, she’s one who is imitated, but she never stoops so low as to imitate anyone else. Her style, her voice, her music is distinctly her own. She is an unapologetic country singer, which means you must forgive her for egregious sins like ridiculous fingernails and be-dazzling every garment she can get her hands on, but she wears her heart on her sleeve when she sings, and after hearing her live you feel like you’ve been allowed to get just a little too close to her. Like many of the great musical fundamentalists, Dolly is a master storyteller (listen to Joshua -don’t let that awesome hair distract you- or Coat of Many Colors for proof) and a gifted songwriter (Love is Like a Butterfly). She’s unapologetically herself-I love that. Listen to her sing “He’s Alive”…and gitchoo a blessin’ out of it:
The other Dollie was my grandma. This week marks sixteen years since she died. Grandma was nothing special to look at unless you took the time to look into her steel blue eyes. They betrayed her: steel was what she was made of.
She stood (well, to be quite honest, she stooped) only 4’10″, because picking cotton for a long time pulls one down to the land whether they like it or not. She was as round in the front as she was in the back and the huge lump in her back made it seem as though she was always looking down. But she wasn’t. Grandma looked up.
Her oldest daughter, my mother, turned out to be a hard cruel woman, the result of an evil father, a mild case of cerebral palsy, and a refusal to forgive. Grandma spent a lot of time loving my sisters and I the way her daughter couldn’t.
"Storms make trees take deeper roots." -Dolly Parton
She taught me patience (with a sewing needle and a crochet hook). She taught me kindness by letting me have the privilege of caring for her dying sister’s treasured African violets while she smoothed her hair and tended to her needs. She taught me how to love life by sending me and my sisters outside in the merciless heat of a south Texas July, stripping us, and then attacking us with the hose. I can still hear us laughing… She taught me to love to learn. she would read the Reader’s Digest cover to cover, getting all the words right on “It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power”. I remember little piles of books laying all around her trailer: she never had enough bookshelves. She exemplified self-reliance: she kicked out my grandfather when my aunt was a baby, got two jobs and never looked back.
Grandma made, by far, the greatest pickles known to man. She had, by far, the loudest and most horrible singing voice I have ever heard, and she had, to the great dismay of many in the congregation of my childhood church, a love of singing, which I inherited. She never learned to drive, but walked five miles into town to get her mail every day. She loved animals, and she knew the names of every living thing to which I pointed in an effort to stump her.
She had the deepest faith of anyone I had ever known. Her bible was my favorite book: it was full of her handwriting and her tears, her treasured keepsakes, including an unfortunate picture of me during my awkward junior high school period, and it was covered in the weary binding only loved bibles wear. She only darkened the doors of a church when forced to by my parents when she’d visit, but she knew more of the scriptures than they forgot, and exhibited a gentleness and strength that comes from a deep relationship with the living God.
She would brave my parent’s house for a month at a time (an act of courage so astonishing that I can not adequately describe its bravery, except to say that none of my other relatives ever did it. My paternal grandparents attempted it once and only lasted a week.), at Christmas and in August or September. These were the times my house became bearable, because she stood as a buffer between us and my parents. She couldn’t stop all of the blows, and I know this hurt her. I vividly remember her standing stunned looking at a door my mother had just slammed after she had ripped into me for some unpardonable sin. My cheek still red and stinging, my eyes hot with anger and tears, she took my face in her weary hands and whispered, “I’m so sorry honey. Your mother is just a bitch.” I was stunned out of my self-pity: this was the first time I had ever heard someone I respected cuss. Grandma understood the value of an honest word of comfort.
My Grandma Dollie was small and brave, funny and tender. I miss her.