Walking with Dolly: Fathers, Quiet Acts of Love, and Pride
Robert Lee Parton: This video was from 2016, and I had never seen it until Thursday morning. I fought back my own stifled sob when Dolly choked up with tears while telling about her father scrubbing her statue. Dolly Parton had immense love and respect for her father often calling him one of the smartest men she ever knew. Dolly also treasured his strong work ethic, humor, and grounded nature. She admired how hard he worked to provide for their family.
Oliver Haven Caylor: My father and I had several things in common: intellectual curiosities, spiritual curiosities, and curiosities about nature. What struck me most, as I have reflected on this over the years, is how those shared threads kept weaving themselves back into my understanding of who he was — and who I was becoming.
My father was a genius. I have no idea about his Intelligence Quotient (IQ), but when he took the 1960’s postal exam to be a United States postal worker, he scored the highest IQ score which was at the “genius level” ever recorded at that time. I am not a genius, so when it came to school grades, I loved it when my excellent grades pleased him. It was so cool to talk to Daddy about my core curriculum activities as well as world events in an “adult manner”.
My whole, nuclear family, Daddy, Mama, Karen and I, were all baptized into Christ the same night … Tuesday July 31, 1979 ..( thanks for the refresher, Google… LOL), so for the next three years after we becoming Christians until his death, Daddy and I had a brother in Christ bond. Whether Daddy and I did scripture reading, announcements, lead a prayer or whatever church related, we would discuss and critique each other.
My father’s life was FISHING. I did enjoy fishing but not like he did. As I have grown older and “come to know myself” I enjoy being active even if it is piddling in the house or the yard. I don’t like sitting down and watching television or staring at a computer/phone for 12 hours straight nor did I want to be fishing for 12 hours straight, but my father could and would. Our strongest Nature Smart connection was being in the woods with hunting dogs. Daddy had raised and hunted with several hounds such as King, Queen, and Bolivar as a boy into teen years. I was riveted to his tales of hunting and being in the woods. It was Daddy who got me my first coonhounds, Copper and Chief, in 1982. He knew how badly I was wanting coonhounds, so he secretly investigated, found, bought, and brought me home those two awesome coonhound puppies. We raised them together.
I know Dolly told her parents she loved them and they told her they loved her. I told my father I loved him, and he told me he loved me. But, there is something about those actions speaking louder than words, right? That story made me think about my own father and Lee Parton, who were some 18 years apart and yet were very similar in some of their child rearing. The video I have embedded was not what I was expecting. I had heard two separate stories about Lee Parton’s feelings about a person’s pride, and how he felt about her statue. He did not seem to like pride, nor did my father. Until I saw this video on Thursday, I had only seen some 30 year old videos where Dolly admits she was deflated with his words of “… to the pigeons you’re just another toilet”. One evening on the way to Wednesday night Bible study, I was discussing the difficulties of the school day, and Daddy was sharing how I need to concentrate more in good ol’ Algebra II. My father was excellent at all branches of mathematics, and I was not. However, I was learning a foreign language which I knew was a talent with which God had blessed me, and my father had never taken a foreign language. I quickly turned the tables, and told him how I had been respectfully correcting my Spanish teachers’ errors on tests and keeping my high A average. I then arrogantly quipped, “Why didn’t you take a foreign language, Daddy? Didn’t you think it might help you in your future”? Without skipping a beat, Daddy quipped back, “Well, what has it done for you? You’re still just as self-centered as you were before.” With a sudden pride deflation, I kind of melted in my passenger’s seat and thought, “Gee thanks, Daddy.” I don’t think I said a single word to him until after we left the church building that evening.
Fast forward about nine months after this dialogue to another dialogue about a month after Daddy passed. I was commiserating with Nanny, Daddy’s mother regarding his death. She and I leaned on each other after his passing. As I have written before, she had lost her father when she was in high school, so she and I now shared this unfortunate bond. I was in a depressed state sharing how I did not think Daddy was proud of me, and I was sitting beside her with tears silently rolling down my cheeks. “Son, he was so proud of you. One night after he brought me home from evening church, and it was just him and me, we sat and chatted for a few minutes. I asked him what he thought about your latest accomplishments (Spanish awards, band awards, academic awards, running in the woods with coonhounds), and he said, ‘He continually amazes me. There is no one else like him in the world’.” I was dumbfounded and elated at the same time.
So, back to Dolly and the video about her statue and her father. When she started telling the reporter about her statue and her father, I thought, “Here we go again. It’s the tale of her father telling her she is just a pigeon’s toilet.” Nope. Her father would come to the courthouse at night when no one was around and scrub her statue. That’s where the quiet acts of love come in.
The comparison isn’t that Daddy and Lee Parton’s lives were nearly the same, but that both fathers expressed their deepest pride in ways their children almost missed entirely. Dolly did not get to spend three teen years with her father where it was just her and him. For three years, I got to have my father all to myself in my household. My sister Karen had married and was out of the house when I was thirteen, and Daddy died when I was sixteen. Dolly had to share her father with 11 brothers and sisters. She did not have the precious gift of continuous, one-on-one bonding time with her father. Dolly did not get to see him scrub her statue, but I got to see my father sit up with me and work Algebra II word problems when I was moaning that I did not understand the process of turning words into equations. He knew my wants and desires for coonhound puppies and secretly bought and brought those special fur babies home to me, and he told my Nanny, his mother, how much my accomplishments meant to him — words accompanying actions. This is what Dolly Parton’s father helped me recognize about my own: love doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it shows up at midnight with a scrub brush, or with two coonhound puppies, or in a quiet conversation with a grandmother when no one else is listening.
Looking back, I can now see that both Dolly and I were loved fiercely and quietly by men who didn’t always say it in the ways we expected — but who never stopped showing it.
What quiet act of love or pride do you remember from your father or father image? I’d love for you to share it in the comments here or on my social media pages.
