This morning I'm feeling sad about Dolly Parton's death, yet what a good life . . . a model for how to nurture both the self and generosity of spirit. I was a child in 1970s Appalachia, so I have a fish-eye awareness of the details of the world she sang about, and dramatized, and embodied, and performed. How does one portray trashy with love, not with condescension or self-loathing? Dolly figured it out. And how to laugh and be deeply serious at the same time. How to honor but not sugarcoat a heritage. How to change her tune when change was necessary. I am honored to have shared the planet with her.

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Yesterday's school thing at Merrill Auditorium seemed to go well enough . . . at least, the listeners laughed and sighed in the right places, so I'm hoping the poem got across okay. It was very odd to read to such a massive audience. I couldn't help but recall my own entree into the world of Maine education: as a long-term substitute music teacher for 90 kids in a K-8 school in rural Somerset County--a far cry from 1,500 staff members across multiple sites in the biggest city in the state. Of course, in the grand scheme of city schools, the Portland system is tiny, not a patch on New York City or Chicago. But I daresay my Monson high schoolers would have been flummoxed at the sight of so many faces. The difference between our rural schools and our urban schools is vast. 

After I got home, I did manage to finish and ship that editing project. So today I'll be catching up on some smaller desk tasks, running a few errands, maybe weeding a flowerbed, maybe working on a poem draft. Tonight T and I will go out to watch an old Robert Mitchum noir called Out of the Past. It's nice to have a looser day ahead, a clear-ish desk, an evening to anticipate.