There was a time in my life when I was on an airplane every week.

Invariably, someone — often my mother — would say, don’t you hate the razzle-dazzle of travel? The hustle, the bustle, airport security, the inevitable delays, and bad airline food. My response to them — often my mother — was no. I loved it.

To be fair, I was traveling so much at the time that I had reached Supreme status on American Airlines, and most of the time I was sitting in the front of the airplane, where the seats were bigger, the nuts warm, and the ice cream sundaes delicious. But that was not the reason I loved traveling so much. Well, it was one of the reasons. Warm nuts and sundaes are very nice.

And I do have insatiable wanderlust. If I have not been somewhere, I want to go there. If I have been there, discovering new things is pretty exciting too. So there is that.

But my response to people who questioned my travel schedule — often my mother — was none of those things. It was that I loved the time to myself to think. Well, not necessarily just think, but to do other things the busy, noisy world did not often provide time for, such as reading a newspaper or a real book. Mind you, this was at a time when getting Wi-Fi on an airplane was either impossible or very expensive. And getting on an airplane meant being cut off from the rest of the world for hours at a time. Add a pair of noise-reduction earphones… bliss.

I was thinking about this earlier this week when I embarked on a two-leg, 21-hour journey to our home in Rio from Chatham. Do I have to repeat myself? Don’t sympathize. I like this. And, as I have done approximately a gillion times since Elaine and I became Elaine and I, it is as routine as driving to Montclair to visit my much, much younger sister. It just takes a little more time, and the cookies are better at Marissa’s.

So I’m sitting in the American Airlines lounge at MIA — perhaps the most apt airport code in aviation — and thinking about Dolly Parton.

Really, it’s hard not to this week.

Everyone, from every political and social tribe, seems eager to claim her as one of their own. And why not? You never had to look very hard to see a woman entirely comfortable in her own skin, who regarded her success less as an entitlement than as a blessing — one she felt obliged to share with people who had not been given the same gifts God had given her.

Her kindness, decency, wit, and generosity were self-evident. Who wouldn’t want to attach themselves, even briefly, to something like that? And who wouldn’t mourn when a light that bright finally went out?

I won’t lie. I spent an ungodly amount of time doomscrolling Dolly. That is what happens when you have time to kill and free Wi-Fi. I can’t tell you how many times I heard the lyrics to “I Will Always Love You.”

Which triggered a memory for me: the first time I ever heard of Dolly Parton. It was my senior year in high school, and I, like almost every teenage boy I knew, had a gigantic crush on Linda Ronstadt. She had released her album Prisoner in Disguise. It was a seminal album for Linda and included covers of Tracks of My Tears by Smokey Robinson, Love Is a Rose by Neil Young, Roll Um Easy by Lowell George, and Hey Mister, That’s Me Up on the Jukebox by James Taylor. Back then, when vinyl ruled and the quality of your turntable was a status symbol, albums had liner notes (God, I miss them), where you could find out not only who wrote the songs but who did the handclapping. Ronstadt did all of that, but she added a twist. The entire interior spread of the album featured handwritten lyrics from the songwriters she covered, including one from Dolly for “I Will Always Love You.”

Ronstadt’s version of that song remains my favorite. Nothing against Whitney’s or Dolly’s, but at that age, Ronstadt’s clear, powerful, and almost unnervingly pure voice resonated with that boy and made him pray for a day when he would know a love that deep.

Of course, once I was down the rabbit hole, I figured we were in this far — might as well go all in. I won’t tell you how long this diversion went on, except to say I was glad I was in the far reaches of the club and people could not see the “Tracks of My Tears.” (And, not for nothing, if you have not heard the Coldstream Guards version of 9 to 5, you have not gone nearly far enough.)

What finally made me pause was when I got to Dolly’s, Linda’s, and Emmylou Harris’s version of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush.” Neil’s version is good. Theirs is better. Don’t believe me? Listen for yourself: Harris, Parton, Ronstadt on Late Show, March 24, 1999 (full, stereo) — YouTube.

The song, written in 1970, is amazingly prophetic about the world to come. It envisions a world so corrupted and destroyed by man that people need to leave the planet of their origins to find a better world.

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming
Sayin’ something about a queen
There were peasants singin’ and drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree
There was a fanfare blowin’ to the sun
That was floating on the breeze
Look at mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies
Look at mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies

I was lyin’ in a burned-out basement
With a full moon in my eyes
I was hopin’ for replacement
When the sun burst through the sky
There was a band playin’ in my head
And I felt like getting high
I was thinkin’ about what a friend had said
I was hopin’ it was a lie
Thinkin’ about what a friend had said
I was hopin’ it was a lie

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships lying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed
To a new home in the sun
Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed
To a new home

Of course, this made me think of Agent Orange (were you taking bets on how long it would take me to get there?) and the destruction he does to our democracy, our environment, and our everyday lives. Especially the last two lines:

Flying mother nature’s silver seed.

To a new home.

Is that what I am doing? Getting on a silver bird to fly to my new home in Brazil?

The truth is, that remains to be seen. What I am pretty sure of is that I can’t take another two years of unfettered, disastrous Don. It would steal too much of my soul and give him too much power over me.

Which, of course, made me think, “What would Dolly do?” I knew the answer, even though she was famously nonpolitical. She said, “I work hard at being happy.”

Those are words to live by over the next 90 days. Happiness is not a passive condition. You have to work for it — vote for it, fight for it, and refuse to let the loudest and meanest among us define the country we love.

Dolly made a life out of pairing kindness with backbone. We could use a little of both right now. Because if we don’t do the work to put this country back on track, Neil Young’s silver seed may begin to sound less like poetry and more like a travel plan.