Walking in the silence and Cicadas
We lost Dolly Parton today, although it will no longer be today when you read this.
Strange to open a newsletter about music to say that this will also be about silence, but maybe the truth of music is hidden in that. Like that old joke, where jazz is about the notes that aren’t being played, which has never really been my experience of jazz, but has been my experience of people who don’t really like it. This will be about many things, and it will be about silence, and we just have to trust this will all make sense when it’s over.
There is no word for loss that will suffice or feel right, because that’s just the way of things. Loss is an inescapable truth that crashes like wind against the unsteady windows of the heart. It rattles and shakes at you until you think it’s over, only every now and then it’ll be back to remind you that there is always something to think and feel.
We lost Dolly Parton today, although it will no longer be today when you read this. It might be yesterday, and it might be a year from now, but let the windows rattle to remind you of the wind. There will be an outpouring of grief, it will feel like a river that will flow forever. Let it feed the dirt and the soil and all that might grow in its wake. That’s just the way of things.
I was out for a walk with our dog Bowie this afternoon and tried to call my mom, who didn’t answer. This is a common occurrence. Sometimes she can’t find her phone, and sometimes it’s on silent and she doesn’t know how to make the silence go away. Often when she doesn’t answer right away, she’ll call back immediately to say that her phone must be broken. I’m not sure my mom knows how her cell phone works, and at this point it doesn’t matter. She knows how she uses it, and that works most but not all of the time. Today, or yesterday or last year depending on when you read this, she didn’t answer or call me back at all. So I walk alone with Bowie, quietly but not in silence.
I made a playlist a while ago based on the transition between two songs that seemingly don’t go together. “Sugar Kane” by Sonic Youth, into “She’s Got You” by Patsy Cline. Hear the windows rattle. Here the past is alive. The Sonic Youth is for me, Patsy Cline for my mom, who doesn’t always answer her phone and often leaves me worried, although I would never tell her this. My mom is older, but not yet old, and not always in great health. Sometimes when we talk she tells me about her friends who are dying and her fear of aging further and it fills me with immeasurable sadness. My mom, like all moms, is not the woman she was when I was young, although neither am I.
My mom loved to play her music loud in the house as a kid. Where my dad had wild and eclectic taste, my mom’s was a little more refined, more reflective of her heart. She loved Randy Travis, and Dwight Yoakam, and her favourite Emmylou Harris, which is how I first heard Dolly. She’s there in the backdrop of “Greener Pastures”, and her longtime friendship with Emmylou and Linda Ronstadt would result in frequent collaborations, most notably perhaps their 1987 alum Trio. I grew up in a Emmylou house, and so I grew up in a Dolly house in my own little way. Her voice was there in the speakers perched on the floor in the living room, a note in the background that was different from all the rest. That was Dolly, not front and centre but present all the same. Waiting to be discovered.
I heard “I Will Always Love You” as a Whitney Houston song first, because I was 10 years old, and The Bodyguard was so omnipresent it swallowed the world and I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. My sister, older than me but not yet old, played it as loud as she was permitted on her little stereo atop the dresser in her bedroom. I memorized every chilling octave by listening through the wall. Before too long, I learned it was a Dolly Parton song, and she changed in that moment. Dolly became an icon, who wrote the most beautiful song in the world, who was so loud and bold about who she was.
My mom would sometimes make fun of Dolly, all big tits and hair to match, although she would always balance that by saying how great of a voice she had, and what an exceptional musician she was. She was an Emmylou fan after all, and you can’t love Emmylou without holding space for Dolly in the same heart. When my mom would talk about music, about all the musicians she had seen, she said she never got to see Dolly and always wished she had. She had seen Emmylou and Linda Ronstadt, but neither of them were Dolly, and even she could admit that.
I don’t like to listen to music in the park, because it feels like a special place, even though the perimeter is lined with discarded McDouble wrappers and cigarette butts. I like to be present with Bowie when we’re there, because there is more grey hair on his snout than ever before, and who knows how many more years we will have together in this park. I pause my playlist just as the bridge-of-noise in “Sugar Kane” kicks in, and listen to the wind rustling the leaves in the trees.
Bowie sniffs at the ground, and while he walks slower on the sidewalks than he did as a young dog, he is young again on the grass. He sniffs and pulls me in directions his nose begs him to follow. I happily go along, in silence now, save for the drone of cicadas overhead. I didn’t grow up with this sound, as there are no cicadas in the frozen parts of the world, and it’s still a welcome part of the summer. Cicadas en masse signalling that they would like to find a mate, or that they would like to die, and maybe what I find beautiful about it is how honest a life that is.
Bowie sniffs and pulls, I say come on every now and then when he gets a little too turned around by all the thrilling scents around us, and we walk slowly around this giant empty park. He is older but not yet old, and i am older but not yet old, and we enjoy what sun we can find out here in the silence and cicadas of the day.
In the silence I think about my mom again. She hasn’t called me back, and maybe it’s because she’s busy. Baking bread or cakes she can’t eat, or going for coffee she can only drink in small amounts. She just likes the rituals around all the things she used to love, and there’s a simple beauty in that too. How she wants to hold on to the life she had, preserve it in amber in the life she lives now. Maybe she’s at her doctor’s office, or her specialist, or both. It’s often one of those two things, and I feel guilty for not knowing. I think about how I know, when we’re out of the park and the music is back, I will listen to Patsy Cline and think about my mom baking in the kitchen when she could still eat the scones and muffins that would appear on the counter. How she is older but not yet old, although she would argue with me and say that she is. When anyone dies, she feels her age that much more.
I don’t want her to feel the weight of time conspiring against her, even though I feel it myself now too. I’m an age I never imagined being, and no one tells you how to be old when you once planned to be young forever. It’s a gift to be here, to feel tired and weathered by time. It’s a gift to feel like you desperately want more of it.
I hit play on the music after we leave the park and return to the sidewalks that will take us home. Sonic Youth finishes their noise breakdown, return to a more calming rhythm, and then they fade quietly away as Patsy Cline fades in. The sun strikes my face as we move from the trees to the open air. The cicadas are behind us now, muted by the music in my ears, and while the silence is gone the ideas of it remain.
At home, on the internet, I read a post about not wanting to live in a world that no longer includes Dolly Parton. I can’t believe it, and I yell what! and No! so loudly it scares Bowie just a little. I google the words I’m dreading being true, and a broken internet returns inconsistent truths. For a second I don’t think she has gone, it’s just that she’s unwell and uncertain about her future. I think about my mom being aware of her age. How she talks about being so old now. Just as I relax in believing Dolly’s not gone, it’s confirmed, and I say Fuck! So loud Bowie just looks at me, his grey snout and tired eyes.
Lysh is away at the studio, recording and rehearsing with her band, and I’m alone with this news. Silence now, not even the cicadas. I dig though our record collection and put on Here You Come Again, a pop-leaning record she released in 1977. It has “Two Doors Down” on it, which was a favourite of mine as a kid. It’s fun and vibrant and playful. Dolly sings "But I here I am crying my heart out, feeling sorry" and the song is every bit as joyous as it was when I was young, made sadder just a little in knowing she is no longer here to sing it.
Dolly was from Tennessee. She grew up poor, working class, in a family org 12 children. She started performing when she was 10 years old, which means she had 7 decades of time in her pocket when she went. She wrote "I Will Always Love You" and "Jolene" in the same day. She had a charity that ensured kids had access to books. She was a million women, and she was singularly herself. I will never do her story justice, but you can read Natalie Weiner's beautiful memorial here, or and also here. You can also read Lynn Melnick's beautiful book I've Had To Think Up a Way To Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton. There are so many people with stories to share of Dolly, of the world around her. Maybe this is her lasting gift, her love of literature manifesting in a thousand stories told.
When I was young, never to be old, music was something that came with stories told by my mom in her kitchen. I write little notes in the app on my phone about the silence and the cicadas. I think about Dolly being gone. I make coffee and move through our apartment, Bowie is asleep in his bed, the cats the same, and I’m alone but not really alone. Dolly on the stereo. I text Lysh to tell her the sad news, then my mom, who did not call me back but does respond to my text with a heart emoji. We text back and forth about her, about her music, about how my mom saw Linda Ronstadt once, a story she has told me countless times before. I will listen to it again, I will listen to all of them forever if I could. I will absolutely be annoyed at times about her repeating stories, and I will miss them when they’re gone. It will destroy me when the stories stop.
Maybe this is why Dolly’s death has hit me so hard. Her stories have ended, they will never be new. They will repeat again and again. Let the windows rattle. Her voice was one of the first voices I ever knew that wasn’t my moms, not my dads or my sisters or anyone else. She was the backdrop of Emmylou, then she was the star, and I have always had her there in my head. If you say her name I can hear her voice, the beautiful notes that only she could hit. How her voice seemed to waver a little, like it had flown too high to be real, but she could always hold it. There is no one like her, there never was, and she will be forever the stories of her songs and her life. What a way to leave this earth then, as eternal memories of everything she has done. All the lives she has touched. How she was always so loud and bold as herself. Even when people made light of her looks, she never made herself smaller in response. She was always a story, told by moms and dads and daughters. She will still be there when it’s silent, gone but never quite gone, and I will hold her and everyone in my memories until I am older but no longer old.
