Dolly Parton was not, as I always think of her, an Aquarius. She was technically a Capricorn, as befits her indefatigable work ethic and prodigious output. She was born in the Great Smoky Mountains, into the utterly vanished world that predated universal electrification, on Jan. 19, 1946, one day before Aquarius season officially begins. Whenever I am tempted to doubt the subtle science of planetary influences, bequeathed to us by Albumasar and practiced by his unlicensed successors in hair salons across this great nation, I remember that Parton was born on the Capricorn-Aquarius cusp. She died on Aug. 25 at age 80.

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I always think of her, wrongly, as an Aquarius, because Aquarius is the water-bearer, the chosen symbol of enlightened utopias, the sign of all things airy and aloof, fluid and free. It is a sign for changelings, and people who believe they go through life escorted by angel protectors. You get a sense of this when you look at pictures of Parton before the final stretch of old age, and a cheerfully baroque attitude to cosmetic interventions masked the natural structure of her face: those fantastically fine, elfin bones, those wide or narrowed eyes whose natural resting point seemed to be something far in the distance that only she could see. Her voice was Aquarian too, in that it was filled with water: pure and clear, bubbling with life from a Tennessee mountain spring, enclosed in glass, and ringing with the unearthly trueness of the verillon — rippling and........

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