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

  • O say can you TELL by the dawn’s early light?


    I find I have been quick to judge our American swimmer Ryan Lochte for his behavior away from the pool in Rio de Janeiro during the Olympic games, and I had a few minutes to sit in my favorite chair this morning to ponder his trials and tribulations while I was waiting for T’s physical therapist to arrive. I love to ponder – particularly when the house is quiet, and today was no exception.

    I read moments ago that Speedo and Ralph Lauren  severed their endorsement relationships with Mr. Lochte which led me down the meandering  pondering  quite smug path of See there, I told you so. When you play, you pay…an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Why didn’t you stick to pool parties…I went on and on with this conversation in my mind because it’s a replay of how I’ve felt since the bizarre incident occurred in Rio. Really, Ryan, how stupid could you be. You’re thirty-two years old, for crying out loud. You’re old enough to know better.

    Whoa, Nellie…hold your horses. Old enough to know better – that stopped me in my instant replay.  Hm.  Now what was I doing when I was thirty-two years old…that would have been 1978. Hm….meander, meander some more… I was living in Columbia by then and had met the person that would become my lifelong friend but was at the time my best drinking buddy Millie Miller who was happy to spend many evenings with me at local bars until they closed in the wee hours of the morning.  We weren’t always in the best shape when they closed, either. Really, then, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones, although admittedly my glass house wasn’t part of an international Olympic Games and I wasn’t representing my country at the time. Not to split hairs, of course. The two similarities of this story were thirty-two years old and intoxicated, as I rambled along in my mind. Don’t try to make more of it than that.

    So it wasn’t the drunken public exhibition by a member of Team USA in a foreign country that continued to nag at me in the Lochte saga although that would have been enough to keep the story churning. I could finagle that around in my mind to somehow relate to his wanting to celebrate with his teammates after the medals were handed out. Something to be ashamed of when he sobered up, but mistakes are surely made by us all – usually not in front of a gazillion people but hey, nobody’s perfect.

    No, that wasn’t the nagging current flowing through my stream of consciousness this morning. It was the lying – an amazingly creative lie to be sure – but a lie nonetheless… followed by his inability to say Hey, I lied about it, and I’m sorry.  Instead, the lie became his “over-exaggeration” of the truth which sounds strangely similar to the acceptable “little white lie.” Ding, ding, ding goes the alarm bell. Don’t tell that to the Brazilians.

    Somewhere in my mind there is a disconnect between what used to be known as the truth and what now has become an inability on a grand scale to define. Lying is a way of life in our family relationships, business dealings, political discourse, religious institutions, collegiate locker rooms, football weights, beauty pageants and just about anything else you can think of. You name it – we can lie about it with gusto and embellishment.

    I am beyond weary of lies and liars.

    But this is clearly not a new problem of the 21st. century.  The major religions of today have all weighed in against lying thousands of years ago via stone tablets and whatever else they could find to write on plus probably on cave walls before that. The universal consensus was that lying is fundamentally wrong but truth is subject to interpretation. My truth might not be your truth, and vice versa.  Clearly Ryan Lochte subscribed to that theory when he invented his own elaborate version of the truth and then tried to redefine it.

    I should never have gotten started on this mind meandering today. I feel like I’m digging myself deeper and deeper into a meaningless hole and I hear the voices of my Texas heroines Molly Ivins and Ann Richards hollering from their graves to admonish me that when I find myself in a hole this big, I need to stop digging.

    And so I shall. Team USA won forty-seven gold medals at the 2016 Olympics in Rio;T and I heard the Star-Spangled Banner played for many of those medal ceremonies from her hospital room following her successful knee replacement surgery last week and from our bedroom where she continues to recover this week.  Each time we heard it was special with the expressions of the champions ranging from smiles of happiness to tears of joy to thoughtful reflections of awe and wonder…they were moments of truth we shared with them. At least, that’s how my mind meanderings like to think about it. Somebody stop me.

  • And the Answer is: What is Old People


    Every night I take three 500-mg Extra Strength Tylenol tablets from a bottle in my bedside stand – the tablets which my doctor assures me will provide added ammunition against the arthritis in my knees that aims to make it impossible for me to get the bed off my back the following morning.  I’m not crystal clear when I realized I needed to also place a walking cane next to my bed to help me keep my balance when I get up to  let the dogs out in the early hours of the morning, but I’m pretty sure it was sometime this year. Part of the perks of turning seventy.

    The same bedside stand is the home for my orange-flavored 81 mg. Bayer Aspirin that my doctor urges me to take every night to help reduce the risks of strokes, heart attacks and other Night Stalkers out and about who threaten to fulfill the part of the “If I should die before I wake” prayer.  And at the risk of too much information, I wouldn’t even have to worry about waking at all if it weren’t for the ambien I take to go to sleep. Sleep was apparently a privileged activity reserved for “pre-menopausal” years and insomnia has punished me for my giddiness at no longer needing to purchase feminine products on a monthly basis.

    At any rate, waking up is a big deal every day now. Even when I wake up before the dogs are ready to go out, I feel like it’s a good sign to be able to know where I am, what day it is and who’s in the bed with me. Today I was also filled with optimism for the week because I didn’t have to watch another national political convention; T’s favorite restaurant the Mediterranean Tea Room was opening today after their annual ten-day summer break and that meant delicious leftovers in the refrigerator. We are playing cards with friends on Tuesday and watching the Lady Gamecocks basketball team in a Pro-Am Wednesday night so the week was full of promise for fun.

    When I turned on my computer, I began my morning ritual of scanning the AOL news that long ago replaced the local newspaper. Most of the time, I click and click and click with a few stops along the way to read a story with a headline that interests me. This morning was no exception.

    Click. Click. Click. And then I saw it: Old People are Holding the Economy Back read the headline of an article written by Andrew Soergel for the U.S. News and World Report online magazine. Oh, my goodness, I thought. Seriously?

    Yes. The National Bureau of Economic Research has determined that “a 10% increase in the fraction of Americans at least 60 years old slashes national economic output per capita by 5.5%.” In other words, our country’s aging population is a drag on the economy as a whole. Hiss…I could hear the sounds of the air leaving my happiness bubble as I read the entire article. If the Jeopardy question is what is the cause of economic woes for our country, then the answer is “what is old people.”

    Please, please, please don’t show this to the Trump campaign which will add a plank to their platform calling for the deportation of all people over 60 years of age to Russia and/or the Ukraine  to go along with the deportation of all undocumented Latinos and Mexicans to Mexico. I am trying to visualize the process. You old white person – get on the bus to Russia. You suspicious-looking brown person – get on the bus to Mexico. And don’t ever come back – either one of you. Just think of the possibility of confusion in the process, however, if the old white person takes the wrong bus – which I have to say from personal experience is a real possibility.

    Thanks to this bit of news, I must guard against my old nemesis Negativity that tries to remind me on a daily basis that my becoming a senior citizen renders my contributions no longer welcome or necessary even to the point that I have become invisible to the eyes of the people I encounter as I walk through my world. Now I must also bear the responsibility for the woes of the national economy.

    Hm. Get thee behind me, Negativity. I have a pill for you, too, and I will now hit the Delete button for the AOL news. Click.

    I feel better already.