The Dolly Parton I Never Met

I never met Dolly Parton.

But one Christmas in the mid-90’s, a handwritten Christmas card from Dolly arrived at my home.

And today, as the world mourns one of the greatest entertainers and humanitarians Tennessee ever gave us, I keep thinking about that card, a hot apartment in Knoxville, an old photo album, and a dear friend I only learned a few hours ago is gone too.

When I was in college at the University of Tennessee, I lived on Clinch Avenue in an apartment carved out of a grand old Queen Anne house in Knoxville that had once been a fraternity house. The first summer I lived there, my roommate announced that he was going overseas to Belgium for the summer but wanted his room back in the fall. So I needed somebody who could move in for a few months and then move back out.

I asked around at the restaurant where I worked, and my coworker Craig told me he knew exactly the person.

Her name was Catherine Perry.

Craig and Catherine had known each other since they were kids. Both had grown up dealing with Type 1 diabetes and had crossed paths through some of the same programs over the years. He was convinced Catherine and I would get along splendidly.

He was right.

Catherine was a student at UT and wanted to stay in Knoxville that summer instead of going home to Nashville. She wasn't taking classes, which meant she couldn't stay in the dorm, and she had gotten herself a summer job with the university maintenance crew repainting the interiors of some of the other campus dorms. All she really needed was a place to sleep.

Perfect.

My roommate left for Belgium, I temporarily boxed up most of his personal belongings and shoved them into his closet, and Catherine moved right in.

During those first few days, while she was unpacking, I noticed that she had some childhood photo albums that looked a lot like mine. One afternoon I suggested we sit down and compare them. So there we were, sitting on the couch in the round living room of this old, sweltering Knoxville house, turning the pages of our childhoods. The differences were hilarious.

I had grown up in rural Alabama and had photographs from Thorsby High School that included kids taking cigarette breaks in the designated smoking area at school. Yes, children had a smoking section at school. It was a different time.

Catherine, on the other hand, had attended Harpeth Hall in Nashville. Her pictures featured girls in school uniforms, including one friend and classmate who looked suspiciously like a young Reese Witherspoon. Because… it was Reese Witherspoon.

Then Catherine turned a few more pages. There she was on a trip to California with her father when she was younger. There were pictures of Catherine swimming in a butterfly-shaped pool and sightseeing around town in a convertible riding along palm-lined streets. Then another page turned, and suddenly there was little Catherine standing in the doorway of a hotel bathroom wearing a big blond wig, with a beauty mark painted on her cheek.

Standing over her in a nightgown, wearing an even bigger blond wig and wrapping her arms around Catherine, was Dolly Parton.

I think my response was something along the lines of, "What in the WORLD?"

We kept turning pages. There was Catherine with Dolly again. And again. They were at restaurants. At home. On trips. At Disney. They weren't posed celebrity photographs. They looked like family snapshots, as though Catherine were Dolly's long-lost daughter who had come to spend a few days with her.

That afternoon I learned something else about my new roommate. Her father was Gregg Perry, a Nashville musician, arranger and producer who had worked extensively with Dolly. Among many other things, he produced and orchestrated the soundtrack for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and worked with Dolly on the version of "I Will Always Love You" she recorded for the film.

Apparently, during the production of this movie, Gregg had flown his daughter out to California to spend some time with him and Dolly. These were the photos we were seeing from that trip. And Catherine, his only child, had become very special to Dolly.

Until then, I don't think I had ever really thought deeply about Dolly Parton.

Of course I knew who she was. Everybody did. Dollywood had even opened just a few years earlier, right around the corner from us in Pigeon Forge, and a lot of people I knew in the UT music department worked there during the summers as performers.

But over the next several weeks, I began learning about a Dolly Parton the rest of us didn't get to see on television. I learned about her through Catherine.

Catherine had saved the Christmas cards Dolly sent her over the years. They were handwritten, affectionate and personal. Dolly knew what was happening in her life. She encouraged her. She told her how proud she was of her. And Dolly would draw a little butterfly in them.

That first summer with Catherine turned into another summer together when my roommate again went overseas. Eventually Catherine and I lived together through the end of my college years. The first Christmas we were actually living together, I walked out to the mailbox at our second place together on Laurel Avenue and found an envelope addressed to "Katy Cat."

It was from Dolly.

I put it on the counter for Catherine. Later that evening I came home and found her reading it. She had that little gleam you get in your eyes when you're trying not to cry. Then she handed it to me.

Dolly was proud of her.

Proud that her little Katy Cat was almost through college. Proud of the young woman she had become. Proud that she was finding her own way in the world. Proud of her for continuing to overcome the obstacles life had put in front of her.

And Catherine had obstacles. Her diabetes was something she lived with every single day, but I don't think I fully understood the weight of it until one night when she was having a terrible telephone conversation with a guy she had been dating for a long time. When the call ended, she was sobbing. I opened her bedroom door to check on her and she collapsed onto the floor and began convulsing.

I knew we kept orange juice in the refrigerator JUST for this possible emergency. And, God help me, I had seen Steel Magnolias, so apparently I decided that qualified as medical training. I grabbed the orange juice, poured some into a plastic cup, pulled Catherine up and tried to get it into her mouth while she was convulsing and biting down on my hands.

Eventually she settled. And then she just lay there in my arms on the floor and sobbed. I stroked her hair for what must have been 20 minutes.

I remember feeling, in that moment, that there were struggles inside this person I loved that she had never fully communicated to me. There were things Catherine carried around that I could see but couldn't completely understand.

Years later, I would think about those cards from Dolly differently. Because Dolly understood something about Catherine too. She saw her.

Catherine's parents both visited us separately over those years, and her father once stayed with us for a few days. At some point Gregg noticed the music workstation I had set up in our apartment. I told him to turn it on and play anything he wanted.

He sat down at my keyboard. And he started playing "I Will Always Love You."

That song already had a strange hold on me. When I was four or five years old, my parents used to let me watch Dolly's television show. I remember the end of the show, Dolly in one of those flowing gowns, everything soft and dreamy, the camera lens seemingly smeared with Vaseline, and Dolly singing "I Will Always Love You." And I would cry.

I have no idea why that song affected a little boy that way. But my mother and father knew it did. They would leave me alone to watch because somehow they understood that whatever was happening between that song and their little boy was important.

So now, years later, I'm sitting in a hot apartment in Knoxville, Tennessee, listening to Gregg Perry play that song on MY keyboard. And I just about lost it.

When he finished, Gregg turned around, smiled at me and told me that was the song he had always wanted to get right. Then he told me something I have never forgotten: as I remember it, he said that was him playing piano on the version from the movie Catherine and I had been looking at in those photographs.

Suddenly all these little threads of my life had somehow crossed one another in that room.

Dolly Parton had been singing that song to me through a television set when I was a little boy in Alabama. Years later I would move to Tennessee, become a music student, and wind up living with the daughter of the man who had helped Dolly bring that song back to life for another generation.

And still, I never met Dolly Parton.

After college, I moved to Nashville to work in advertising, and Catherine eventually ended up there too. I was working three jobs and was so ridiculously busy that I had only two days off during the entire year I lived there.

I spent one of them with Catherine.

Her apartment looked almost exactly like the places we had shared in Knoxville. Plants everywhere. Sunlight pouring in. A colorful tea kettle permanently occupying the stove. High ceilings. Old wavy-glass windows.

We sat and talked as though we hadn't seen each other in years. College was behind us. Our adult lives seemed impossibly long and wide in front of us. We told each other how proud we were of each other. We talked about everything we had survived during those last years of college.

And, as young people do when they cannot yet imagine how quickly decades can pass, we promised we would never lose touch. Life had other plans.

I moved to Florida for an advertising job. I met the man who would become my husband. A few years later my career brought me to Atlanta, where I've now lived for more than a quarter century.

Catherine and I eventually found each other again on Facebook. We talked on the phone a few times. By then she was living in California, closer to her mother. She married a wonderful man and built a beautiful family. But the years kept moving, and we drifted in and out of one another's lives. Last Thanksgiving, I sent her a message after stumbling across something from our college days that made me think of her. I told her how much those years still meant to me and wished her and her family a happy Thanksgiving. She never answered. I assumed she wasn't using Facebook much anymore. It never occurred to me that something might be wrong.

Then today I learned that Dolly Parton had died, and of course I immediately thought about Catherine. I thought I had her phone number but couldn't find it, so I went looking for her on Facebook. Her profile was no longer there. I searched for her online instead, and that's how I learned that Catherine had died last July. She had already been gone for four months when I sent her that Thanksgiving message.

So somehow, on the day the world lost Dolly Parton, I discovered that the person who first showed me this very private and personal side of Dolly had already been gone for more than a year. There is something about learning those two things together that I haven't quite figured out how to process. Maybe I don't need to.

I never met Dolly Parton. I can't tell a story about the time I shook her hand backstage or sat beside her at dinner. What I can tell you is what I learned about her while sitting on a couch in a hot old house in Knoxville with a young woman who meant a great deal to me.

I saw the photographs Dolly never needed the public to see. I saw the Christmas cards she never expected anyone but Catherine to read. I saw how she remembered the details of one young woman's life, year after year. I saw how she encouraged her. How she celebrated her. How she reminded her that the things she had endured did not define the limits of the person she could become.

The world knows what Dolly Parton did on the grand scale. She wrote songs that became part of the American vocabulary. She built businesses and created jobs in the mountains where she grew up. She put books into the hands of millions of children. She gave away fortunes. She took the stories of an impoverished little girl from the Smoky Mountains, turned them into music, turned the music into wealth, and then sent an astonishing amount of that wealth right back out into the world to make somebody else's life better.

But what I learned from Catherine was that Dolly understood something else about changing the world: she never became so focused on humanity at large that she stopped seeing the individual human being in front of her.

She saw Catherine. She saw her Katy Cat.

And somewhere among the things I will always remember about my friend is the image of Catherine sitting in our apartment, holding a Christmas card from Dolly Parton with tears in her eyes because somebody she admired had taken the time to tell her, personally and specifically, that she was proud of her.

For a woman whose life became almost impossibly large, Dolly Parton apparently never lost her ability to make another human being feel seen. I think that may be as important a legacy as any song she ever wrote.

I was only a temporary Tennessean, but Tennessee changed my life. And during the years I was lucky enough to call that great state home, I learned that Dolly Parton wasn't simply a celebrity who happened to come from Tennessee. She was woven into the place. I could tell stories for hours about classmates, their parents, musicians, people in Knoxville and people over in Sevier County whose lives somehow intersected with hers and were better for it.

Today Tennessee has lost one of its greatest treasures, and the entertainment world has lost someone it was absolutely, sanctifiedly blessed to have been graced with. But today I am thinking less about the entertainer and more about the woman with the pen. The woman sitting somewhere at Christmastime writing to a college student she called Katy Cat. The woman drawing a little butterfly. The woman telling her she was proud of her.

May Dolly's memory be more than a blessing. May it be a lesson.

See people.

Love people.

Try to understand people, especially the ones who aren't like you.

Use whatever gifts you have to make somebody else's road a little easier.

And wherever you come from, whatever you do, however much or however little you have, put everything you've got into being kind.

I learned that from Dolly Parton. And I never even met her.