多莉·帕顿去世了。她最看重的不是那几千首歌，是每个月寄到孩子门口的一本书。

Last Tuesday, Dolly Parton died in Nashville, aged eighty, of cancer.

She sang for more than sixty years and wrote thousands of songs — one of which the entire world can hum a line of.

But she said, over and over in her lifetime, that the thing she valued most was something else.

In 1995, in Sevier County where she was born, she began mailing one book a month to every child.

From the first day of life to the fifth birthday: sixty books in all, every one free, with no question asked about family income.

The post office brings it to the door, with the child's own name printed on the cover.

For a three-year-old, that may be the first object in his life with his name on it.

The starting point of all this was her father.

Her father was a man from the Tennessee mountains. As a boy he never had the chance to go to school, and he could not read his whole life.

She said one line that has been quoted ever since: my father is the smartest man I know.

The smartest man, and he could not read a single sheet of paper his whole life.

So what she went on to do was make sure other people's children would not have to walk the road he had walked.

One county, in time, became five countries.

To date, more than three hundred million books have been sent.

In America, of children under five, one in every six is receiving them.

Her father lived to seventy-nine.

Before that, he heard with his own ears children calling her, to her face, "the book lady".

She said he was over the moon about it, and felt that a part of it belonged to him.

A man who could not read, watching his own daughter be called "the book lady" by an entire county of children.

Now she is gone, and the program put out a statement whose content was one thing only: the books keep going.

Next month, still one, still free, still delivered to the door.

What a person leaves behind is usually records, or awards, or a theme park.

What she left behind is an action that happens again, from scratch, every month.

Think about it:

After a person is gone, what still turns up at a stranger's door every month?