ArcaMax

One of the unfortunate realities of getting older is finding that the people you like begin to die. There are some, maybe, who are taken before their time and others who go at the end of a complete life, but either way the obituaries pile up.

When Dolly Parton died the other day, I felt the weight of another passing. I never met her, but she represented more to me (and to many others, I imagine) than her songwriting, her acting and her singing. I saw in her the way poverty can shape a person -- slash their outsides and scar them in ways that never fully heal -- while still failing to touch the goodness inside.

Dolly Parton made no secret of her penniless mountain upbringing, the fourth of 12 children born to an illiterate sharecropper and his homemaker wife in rural Tennessee. Many of her songs -- "Poor Folks Town," "Joshua," "Coat of Many Colors" -- were stories of what it's like to live, happy but impoverished, where she grew up.

Her song "In The Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)" paints perhaps the most vivid image, describing sobbing helplessly as hail destroyed the family's crops and going to bed hungry because there isn't enough food.

"I've seen daddy's hands break open and bleed," it goes on, "And I've seen him work till he's stiff as a board. And I've seen momma laying in suffer and sickness, in need of a doctor we couldn't afford."

Her signature look -- giant blond hair, bold makeup and tight, sparkly clothes -- she described as "a country girl's idea of glamour." She got surgery after surgery to maintain that glamour and became a punchline in the 1980s, though her talent and her affability kept the public firmly on her side.

I did not grow up in the kind of brutal poverty that Dolly Parton did, but I was one generation removed from it. My father's upbringing in the Greek mountains may have been half a world away from hers, but she would have recognized many of its elements.

He was the child of subsistence farmers, a woman who bore her son on a straw floor, unattended by doctors. My dad still does not know for certain his true birthdate, as the family was not able to travel to record it until much later.

When he was a toddler, he almost died of diphtheria, likely contracted by drinking contaminated water from the road one day when his blind grandfather was supervising him while the other adults worked in the fields.

He told me a story of a visit from his out-of-town uncle, who presented his nephew with a single drachma bill for a treat for him and his brother. Never having had that much money before, my father was confused and tore the bill in half to share with his sibling.

My brothers and I grew up in lower-middle-class circumstances that my father viewed as the height of luxury compared to his upbringing. We never went hungry. We had clothes and shoes. We were allowed to attend school instead of going to work.

But the specter of my dad's poverty hung over the house, and he would get angry whenever he felt we were ungrateful of the ways our childhoods diverged from his. He clung with a tight fist to the money he earned, knowing to the penny the amount of money in his coin tray.

"Where's my change?" he would ask after he gave us money to buy something on our own, and he did not mean just the bills. He looked at receipts and worried about how much was in his bank account, long past the point where privation should have been a concern.

But being poor really never ends, even if you make it through the door to more comfortable circumstances.

You still have the memories, and the habits, of a person who doesn't have enough.

Dolly Parton took her poverty with her as she moved into fame and immense wealth. Instead of trying to hold the door closed behind her, though, she tried to usher more people through, sending books to children to battle the illiteracy her father experienced and creating programs for the Appalachian community where she grew up.

Being poor can make you hard as glass, but it seemed to have softened Dolly into a puffy pink cloud.

She knew she had gifts -- a sweet voice, a genius for imagery, a stunning face -- and she used them in her own service, sure, but in the service of many others, as well.

The vestiges of her poverty -- a tight-fisted clinging to youth, a protective facade of beauty -- remained, but she kept good humor about it and acknowledged her flaws, of which there were few.

I didn't cry when I heard she died, and I doubt she'd have wanted me to. She lived a long and enviable life, and though we could have always used a few more years of Dolly Parton, we had plenty to enjoy.

Don't be greedy of me, I imagine her saying.

It's time to share the abundance of her with the universe, where she belongs.

COPYRIGHT 2026 GEORGIA GARVEY

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Copyright 2026 Creators Syndicate Inc.