Friends, as I write this, it’s not an adult beverage, but rather Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with me. And forgive the occasional all caps. I’m in Nashville at the moment, where the Tennessee Country Queen, Dolly Parton, has left us. Like many of you, I’ve been avidly soaking up all the tributes and the suggestions that we can improve humanity by following her examples. I’m here for it…so much so I was motivated to do this blog post, something I’ve neglected for two years. Except. Among the myriad speeches and (rightful) accolades celebrating Dolly, there lay my sinful nature in wait. Which right now, wants to gleefully poison the agenda-driven vermin who are bound and determined to steal her goodness for their own ends. I’m astounded at the level of misuse of her persona that rises with every day. So, yeah. That didn’t take long for the sun to fade. Help me, Dolly (and my aunt Dorothy, who I will get to, shortly). It’s possibly time to break into stronger drink…and remember that Jesus himself begged us to “love our enemies.” Hmmmph.

It’s not a stretch to say that this loss has reverberated worldwide, whether you really liked Dolly’s music or not. When you hear people quoted as saying, “I’m gutted. She just seemed like this light that would always be there,” you don’t dismiss them as morons. (Unless, of course, they’re like the aforementioned rats. Trying to attach her many charitable causes to THEIR beliefs…”She had progressive values! You don’t get to mourn her if you voted for Orange Man!) Even worse, her FRIEND yammering to a reporter that yes, Dolly was a feminist (she denied it for years, citing she believed in equal pay for equal work, but she wasn’t going to be privy to a label. Why? She said she was a businesswoman who loved men). But in a recent interview, Jane Fonda, whose botoxed, lopsided lips looked too big for her mouth and as if they would explode at any moment, insisted Dolly was on the front line, because… “she took charge of her life!” So….this is the bar now for equality? Pleeeze. The things Jane talked about were quite nice up until then, as they were real life experiences she’d had, working with Dolly. But, no. Can’t leave it at that. We must speculate and opinionate, and then do the exact OPPOSITE of what Dolly expressed. Why is God’s name was she badgered on this issue, not once but repeatedly, for years?? Oh, and let’s not forget the Washington Post article asserting allll the lessons Dolly taught young women by choosing childlessness…ignoring her medical history and her many quotes about this particular struggle. (Cue the lethal arrow quivering in my hands and evil heart). If you need a dead celebrity who is unable to even defend a position foisted upon them without their permission (!) to help validate YOUR life decisions, welp…I can’t even list the huge amount of toxic adjectives and profanity that comes to mind.

Dear God, muzzle these idiots, I pray.

We cannot even have one week or more of solidarity in mourning, or one day of not drowning in a cesspool of divisive algorithms, before we are witness to Marxists contending her song “9 to 5” is actually a stab at capitalist exploitation. I am not making that up. These social media pervs will re-write history, besmirch legacies, and essentially go to any lengths to gain clicks and spread narratives. It turns my stomach, and I feel bad for Dolly’s family, who will likely never a breathe a word about any of it out of respect for her. As Dolly said to that pathetic reporter who baited her about Trump:

“I will not address that.” And she went on to say it wouldn’t matter how much he tried to get it out of her, she’d learned in show business to “keep your damned mouth shut.” This particular dope couldn’t seem to get the message, and kept it up: “But you’re a role model.” Dolly: “I know I am. And that’s why I don’t talk about anybody.”

This. This is (partly) why some of us of a certain age are so saddened by her passing. We have a generation now who demand that any noteworthy figure “use their power” to further a cause, and if the said figure says or supports the wrong side, (according to them, of course), out they go. Immediately. She didn’t play that game, and was likely the last of the Old Guard who fiercely believed in privacy. That though she was an entertainer, did not mean she had to expose fans to her every single point of view. And this is the important part: she let her lifetime of good works SPEAK FOR HER, which is worth mountains more than blabbing on stage because you have a captive audience. Or God forbid, giving that platform to the cauldron of post-mortem witches just waiting to plagiarize and profit from those works somehow.

Dolly was human, flawed like us all, and openly admitted to that fact. She loved the spotlight but from what I saw and read, didn’t love being put on a pedestal. Regardless. The one point that is inarguable? Don’t come at me if I miss some demographic, either: Gay, straight, men, women, (and the whole alphabet), atheist, Christian, Jewish, black, white, brown, voters red, blue, and green, fans of every musical genre, the poor and the rich…she was deeply cherished by those from every walk of life. And that’s becoming more and more rare.

I grew up with parents who were country artist fans. My mom, an avid antique-er, found an old jukebox somewhere filled with 45’s and put it in our basement. My faves were “Delta Dawn,” “The night the lights went out in Georgia,” and “Half-Breed,” by Cher. Pretty eclectic, right? At some point, I decided the twang and the angst was for old people, that rock n’ roll was my vibe. I remember my dad liked Dolly (of course) and my mom liked Kenny Rogers and thought he looked like my dad. I can’t say I was a big Dolly fan until probably when “9 to 5” came out. Can anyone forget the best line in the entire movie from her character? (“I’ll get my gun and turn you from a rooster to a hen!” ) Then as an adult, learning more about her life, it was impossible not to admire her. She managed the impossible: swathed in a sea of bling, she remained authentic to the core. How does this happen, coming from a dirt-poor, uneducated family of 12 siblings, to be so self-assured of who you are and what you want? To blossom with an essence that is so noticeably absent in the floundering readers looking to the Washington Post for advice? To have even Hanoi Jane, when asked to sum you up, say, “She was love?”

In a world where troubled women are murdering their children and then gaining huge numbers of female “supporters” for these heinous actions, where mental illness among women has never been in more rampant numbers than now, where adolescent females are enticed onto tik-tok and IG and bullied into suicide, I feel like we should be…concerned? Admittedly, content creators want us to believe the world is coming to an end, so that we keep scrolling and subscribing. We don’t get to see there are tons and tons of thriving families and girls in the universe. So, I think we must make a concerted effort to remember what is normal and what is not in the development of a growing human, and in a healthy family. To stand up to the gaslighting of the current culture that screams men and fathers are useless patriarchs, among other nice attributes. If you have littles or grandlittle girls, or even if you don’t, or if you have nieces or sweet neighbor girls, we absolutely have to show them decent role models and BE them. We must.

I am lucky to say I had them. One was my mother-in-law, Mary, and one other very special lady was my paternal aunt.

Dorothy Jean Geils, maiden name South.

I had others, as well, but “Aunt Dodie” stands out to me for several reasons. She had more than a few things in common with Dolly, so that right there gives you a clue. The first might be that although Dorothy didn’t grow up in the kind of poverty Dolly did, they were by no means well off. There were four kids in an intact family, and Aunt Dorothy recalled only fond memories of her parents. They both passed before I could form any memory of them. Dorothy loved her siblings deeply, including my biological father Jesse, who I will state right now was not worthy of that devotion. He was, to put it plainly, a bad seed. Handsome, charming, with an incredible voice (barbershop quartet), he was likely also a sociopath. He was a compulsive gambler and stole from everyone to feed his habit; thieved off his own family, to the point various members basically disowned him. I can’t even describe the havoc he wreaked on my lonely, widowed mother and my siblings. She married him thinking he’d be security and a good stepfather. She couldn’t have been more wrong. I don’t remember him except in brief flashes, and though nobody ever made me feel guilty for being a physical reminder of him, I learned early on not to ask my mother anything. The person I did ask was Aunt Dodie. She was always honest, but she wanted so much for me to think better of him. Even as he’d hurt her, too.

As love defined Dolly, so did it define Dorothy. She married my uncle, Lawrence (Lornie) Geils, equally wonderful and devoted, and they built a rock solid life together. Sadly, there were no children. I found it puzzling. She was this fountain of giving and warmth to her many nieces and nephews, so it didn’t make sense to me why she didn’t have kids. I was probably around ten when I asked her why one day. “Well, it just didn’t happen. We wanted a baby very much. We doctored, didn’t really get answers, and so we decided all of you would be our children.” Also, like Guess Who.

And did they ever spoil us. Every year there would be birthday and Christmas presents, cards throughout the year with money for no occasion, and each niece and nephew got separate time to spend with them, weekends or weeks at a time (as the case was with me, since I didn’t live close by). During these visits there would be back-to-school shopping trips for brand new clothes at an impressively huge mall, (Woodfield, in Schaumburg, Ill) and memorable visits to “fancy” restaurants, places our parents wouldn’t take us to. It was fantastic. They were fantastic, and one of my greatest regrets is that I didn’t spend more time as an adult visiting them. I wish I could tell her, especially, the impact she had on me.

When I would be there for those weeks in August, I hung out a lot with my cousins, but there was also treasured downtime with her. She didn’t work, which I also asked her about one time. (I was a nosy kid, yes, but she was also very easy to converse with. And, she loved to talk). She’d had secretarial jobs when younger, but after marriage, she said, “Uncle Lornie likes me to be here when he gets home, and I like it too.” That was it. He provided, she doted on him, and they were happy. And before anyone shrieks “white privilege!” they had their share of loss and heartache and starting off with nothing. Like Dolly, she was married to one good man for her entire life. Not working obviously left her with more time, and she spent the majority of it helping others. This didn’t occur to me until much later, that she literally was the hands and feet of God. I accompanied her when she visited her widowed and somewhat crotchety mother-in-law, Millie, whom Aunt Dodie never had a cross word for. She’d bring treats or food, chat and listen extensively, while I sat on a plastic covered couch in Millie’s preferred mode of seen and not heard. Still, I was taking it in without consciously knowing– This is what you do.

Another stop would be to check in on her dear sister-in-law Maxine, who had terminal cancer, to see if she needed anything. She would cry sometimes afterward in the car, not knowing how much longer those visits would continue. Another day we’d head to Bensenville to see my other cousins, where the first thing she’d do is start cleaning. That aunt and uncle were divorced, and my Uncle John lived there with their wayward and older-than-me teenaged kids. Aunt Dodie could be tough when needed. I remember her marching upstairs, wrangling them out of bed and giving them what-for. But they adored her too, so she was likely the one person who could get them to listen, do their chores, and whatever else needed doing. Again, I watched. This is what love looks like.

When we ventured to my other cousins’ house, it was the same. She’d bring cookies, straighten the mess in the kitchen, lecture my cousins they weren’t helping their mom enough. Then she’d do the dishes, the laundry, all without blinking an eye, and all of it without judgement. And there I was, watching this unfold over and over again. Serving others is love.

As I reached my self-involved teen and young adult years, contact with them decreased, and Aunt Dodie and Uncle Lornie became like Dolly…seemingly immortal. In my limited worldview, they’d always been there and would continue to be. Until, of course, they weren’t.

My uncle died first, and like Dolly, she was not the same after that. She developed Alzheimer’s and passed in 2011. I was stunned and heartbroken, as was everyone who knew her. You always think you have more time until you don’t. They left an extremely generous legacy to their many nieces and nephews…maybe not to the extent of Dolly’s, but you get the message.

The question is, what are the messages we are sending our girls today? Lord knows in this social media soaked toxic landscape, the “influencers” are all too eager to fill their minds, if we don’t. So. Are we teaching them to think critically instead of outsourcing that difficult process to others? To not follow the crowd full of narcissists, and never, ever, need the crowd’s validation? To be sure of who they are without arrogance, to be humble, kind, real, to leave this world better than they found it? That the surest way to heal is to look outside one’s self? To see a need and fill it without thinking? Dolly told a story once about Christmastime and her mother. The church had a collection of gifts for all the Parton children, and as they were opening them she noticed her mama off to the side crying. It was clear there were no gifts for the adults, so Dolly sat next to her and said, “Here, Mama. You can have my present.” Her mama tearfully hugged her and said, “Oh, no, honey, that’s for you. What a good, good heart you have.” And Dolly never forgot that, saying in the interview that “being a person with a good heart” was what she always wanted to be.

Shall I summarize? It’s not rocket science, it’s hopelessly trite, it’s overused and underutilized, but the amount of dysfunction out there suggests we need to be schooled.

Be love in action, not what Insta or X or Facebook says is the right way, but strong, authentic love that cares not for what is returned. Society will tell them this is a recipe for being a doormat, getting crushed, taken advantage of, blah blah blah. Well, maybe. Jesus said to deny oneself, follow Him, and take up one’s cross. Suffering is the human condition. He did not say one should take deranged videos of one’s mental breakdowns in an attempt to piggyback off of another lunatic’s carnage. If we are showing our girls that selfless love and mature self-love is the antidote, they will take note and do likewise when life threatens to defeat them. And they will come out winners.

Be like Dolly. Be like Dorothy.

(This is also a reminder to me, since I wrote earlier of wishing death upon idiots. I mean, I don’t, but maybe some karma thrown their way??) Sigh. The devil is always at the ready…and we will shoot his minions down with…love.

Cheers!!