What Dolly Parton meant to me: She reached back to lift others up, not get more for herself

I didn’t want to just write a Dolly Parton tribute to get my share of clicks from folks looking for something informative about her passing.

I have nothing informative to offer on Dolly Parton, who passed on Tuesday at the age of 80 – she didn’t look anywhere near 80, BTW.

No, nothing informative here, just a couple of not exactly original thoughts.

One, I served a term on the local United Way board of directors, and through that experience, I came across the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, which, I learned last night, doing some clicking, has donated more than 330 million books to kids since its launch in 1995.

When I was on our local United Way board, we opened a couple of Imagination Libraries in rural parts of Augusta County, which meant a lot to me, because I grew up in a rural part of the county, what feels like a hundred years ago now, and I know how rural kids are disadvantaged in terms of being able to get their hands on books.

Back when I was coming up, we had a brief spell, a year or two, when the county library sent out a bookmobile to my part of the county, in the Crimora area.

Man, did I take advantage of that!

From memory, the bookmobile came through every couple of weeks, and I checked out as many books as I could.

Then, again, this is just from memory, the bookmobile stopped coming.

Knowing the world as I do now, I imagine, in retrospect, that there must have been a budget issue.

In any case, no more books.

Dolly’s effort here hit home for me.

The other thought, and this one gets controversial for some, for stupid reasons – Dolly made an early $1 million donation to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center to get research on a COVID vaccine off the ground.

Early, as in, April 2020, a few weeks into our national nightmare.

The rest of us were squabbling over masks and social distancing; the Dolly Partons of the world were thinking of ways we could make things better.

We could all learn something here.

She hit it big in music, movies, TV, business, and could have spent her 80 years adding to her net worth.

Instead, she reached back to try to lift up others.

We all can’t hit it big enough in life to be able to write million-dollar checks to fund world-saving medical research and donate millions of books to make kids’ lives better.

But if we could, though …

Aspire to be more like the kind of person whose first instinct is to help, rather than to reach back for more for yourself.