I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

For any who want more, complete list of all posts by month since 2011

  • How Did Stella Really Get Her Groove Back?


    I was talking to one of my favorite soul sisters tonight and she said something that crackled across the phone and smacked me upside the head with a satellite wave whack. It’s time for me to get my groove back, she said, and I understood immediately what she meant because I knew that was my problem, too. I’d lost my groove. Somewhere in the midst of the vicissitudes of life, as my daddy used to say, I’d buried my groove as surely as I’d buried the ashes of my mother in the little Fairview cemetery ten months ago. I hadn’t heard the reference to “getting your groove back” since I watched the movie How Stella Got Her Groove Back a hundred years ago, but I remembered the essentials. Apparently a young sexy shirtless Taye Diggs was the spark plug for a middle-aged Angela Bassett’s recovery of her misplaced spontaneity and optimism for her life. As I recall, Stella (Ms. Bassett) located her groove in less than two hours of screen time and happily rejoined the human race that she had forsaken. Sigh. Now, that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Fixer-upper for lost groove. Quick and easy.

    I’m fairly confident a shirtless man won’t be my impetus for getting my groove back and I know with certainty the process will take longer than two hours. Regardless, I do recollect Stella’s outlook became brighter and she seemed more hopeful for her future at the end of the film. I’m beginning to feel a small crack in the tortoise shell of grief that has covered me during the last year. Death and dying are two separate but equal tragedies and both exact a price on those who watch and wait. The tragedies remind me of my own mortality which brings questions of legacy and the life I chose to live. For those of us who tend to be contemplative and who ponder on a regular basis, facing our own mortality is a daunting undertaking. Undertaking. Hah. Get it?

    The grieving doesn’t end, but the images I carry from the tragedies dim and dwindle away and I am left with a knowledge of the importance of this moment in this day in this time because I am not promised another breath. I’m thinking that’s my first step toward getting my groove back. Stay tuned.

  • Thank God for Unanswered Prayer


    One of my favorite country western songs has the catchy title  Thank God for Unanswered Prayer.  Garth Brooks wrote it and performs it and it’s played regularly on my Country Legends radio station that I live with when I’m in Texas.  If I were straight and young, I would be a Garth Brooks groupie.  Seriously.  Alas, I am neither so I will be content with listening to him every day along with his other gazillion fans.  Garth Brooks is in the same  category of record sales and awards as Elvis and The Beatles.   I kid you not.  Look it up in your Funk and Wagnall’s or, as I did, on Wikipedia which has the answers to all questions.  Elvis, The Beatles, Garth Brooks.  Chew on that for a minute.

    In this particular hit tune he and his wife have a random encounter with an ex-girlfriend and he remembers the intensity of that passion and the fervent prayers he uttered to his God for things to work out with her.  As you might imagine from the title of the song, he concludes his life is much better without her and that some of “God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”

    My theology is suspect.  As I grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist environment in the 1950s and 60s I developed serious misgivings about my place in the hereafter, but I’m not wrestling that old demon today.   Instead, I was reminded of a few of my own unanswered prayers when I heard Garth’s song.   A funny flashback came to me of a deep-sea fishing trip off the Oregon coast when I was in my early twenties.  A couple of the older women I worked with at Brodie Hotel Supply in Seattle invited me to go with them and their husbands on a salmon fishing adventure early one cloudy Saturday morning.   To make a very long fishing tale short, I have a vivid memory of praying to God from the boat’s only bathroom where I spent the day.  The captain’s apologies to me from the other side of the restroom door for the roughest seas he’d sailed in years mattered not.  I begged him to contact the Coast Guard to send a helicopter to rescue me from the wretched or retched boat and I promised God if He would just get me off that boat I would never bother him again from the open seas.  The prayer went unanswered until the eight-hour expedition was complete.  Too little, too late.  I counted it unanswered.

    Regardless of my theology and its well-documented demise in my later years, I confess to praying for outcomes in situations that were desperate during the vicissitudes of life.  One particular time I believed I wouldn’t survive the loss of an eighteen-year relationship that ended when I was fifty-four years old.   I was undone.  Woe was me.  But just like Garth Brooks in his song, I thank God for unanswered prayer during those difficult days.  This week I celebrate my twelfth anniversary with my version of a gift.   My partner Teresa is the spicy salsa for the rather tortilla chip person I’ve always been.  She’s brought laughter and love with her as she breezed passionately into the core of my being.   We are not strangers to struggles nor immune to heartbreak in the years we’ve been together, but the joys comfort us when we are called upon to share the sorrows.

    Life is good, and I am grateful for unanswered prayers.