I learned of Dolly Parton’s passing tonight at the dinner table. I tried to say something, but my voice trembled and became hoarse, my eyes grew moist, and I found myself teetering on the edge of a soft sob. I didn’t want my wife to see me like that, so I tried my best to hide my emotions. I don’t know if I succeeded.
About seven years ago, I taught for a year at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. I had a BMX bike then, a pretty expensive one, and I rode it every day on campus. I tried just about every spot I thought might be suitable for bike tricks and stunts. It got to the point where every building manager seemed to know me. Even when I was still some distance away from the property they were in charge of, the moment they saw me coming on that bike, they would rush out and plead with me:
“No, sir, no! You can’t do it here!”
All the while, every day when I was done with my teaching, I would put on my earphones and ride around campus, scouting for a place to jump off, or a flight of stairs to hop onto, while a playlist a girl had put together for me blasted in my ears—from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Dolly Parton.
Yes, Dolly Parton.
I had half a dozen of her best-loved songs on that playlist: “Jolene,” “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” “Backwoods Barbie”—you name it.
That fall semester, I taught a class in which four of the students were from the Netherlands. One day, for some reason, I mentioned “Jolene.” To my great surprise, all four of them immediately started singing:
“Jolene, Jolene…”
And I joined in.
So there we were, four Dutch students and their Chinese professor, in a classroom in Shanghai, singing Dolly Parton together.
Yego’s Chronicles 