I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Author: Sheila Morris

  • between hell and hackeydam


    As if the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t enough, apparently the weather has also turned against us. I hear the wind howling in the trees tonight outside my window – with the possibility of tornadoes on the way according to the weather forecasters. I feel like we are caught between hell and hackeydam, a place most undesirable. I first introduced the phrase and the man who shared it with me to my followers eight years ago, but the story will be new for some. Whether you remember him or not, Bubba Sage should give you a smile. 

    Once upon a time not long ago and certainly not far away a great Texas storyteller held forth on a Sunday afternoon as his audience gathered around a small dining room table, and it  was my good luck to be there for the performance. He was the last guest to arrive for the barbecue luncheon but proved to be quite the addition to a little band of friends and family who gathered for a traditional birthday celebration for my cousin Martin at his brother Dennis’s home outside Navasota.

    I should’ve known I was in for a treat when Carroll “Bubba” Sage announced his presence with an entrance worthy of royalty. This very large man with a closely trimmed grey beard moved into the kitchen as the screen door slammed behind him. He balanced a homemade German chocolate cake in a single layer aluminum cake  pan as he came in, and I felt the energy in the little house went up a notch. When he retrieved a package of coffee he’d also brought and declared he never went anywhere without his own Dunkin’ Donuts coffee because he couldn’t possibly drink anything else with his cake, my antenna was up and ready for the ride.

    What a ride it was. Bubba grew up as the younger child of parents who owned and operated what was affectionately known by its patrons in the 1950s as a beer joint. He was born and raised in Navasota which was, and is sixty years later, a small town in Grimes County, Texas, a county that was dry back in those days so his folks opened their establishment across the Brazos River in Washington County which was wet. Dry county equals no adult beverages allowed. Wet county means go for it.

    In addition to serving beer, the best barbecue and hamburgers in the state made the place standing room only for a long time, according to Bubba’s stories. I know barbecue like that from years of chasing brisket in Texas hole-in-the-wall restaurants and could visualize the scene as Bubba’s daddy cooked the barbecue outside behind the tavern on a long open pit built out of bricks with a crusty black grill to put the meat on. I swear I could smell the aroma, or maybe that was my cousin’s chickens and sausage cooking outside in a smoker for our lunch.

    And my, oh my, talk about entertainment. The Sage Place had music on the weekends when Bubba’s daddy played the fiddle in the band. As Alabama sings, if you’re gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddler in the band. The women’s petticoats swirled to the fast music and then swayed to the slow tunes as they danced the Two-Step. The female patrons particularly liked the little boy who was always there and let him wear their costume jewelry sometimes when they saw him eyeing it with lust in his eyes. He was in heaven.

    The young boy grew up to become one of the teenagers that puffed the magic dragon in the middle of the Brazos River at a place he and his friends appropriately dubbed Smokey Point. They also created a theater of sorts at Smokey Point where Bubba developed a reputation as the Star of the Brazos. I was mesmerized by this big man’s recitations at our dining table. He took me totally by surprise when he began quoting a section of Young Goodman Brown, an obscure short story by the nineteenth century novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. I could picture him standing on the rocks at Smokey Point as the Brazos River flowed past the theatrics this young teenager performed.

    As all good storytellers do, Bubba threw in a few words to grab his listeners’ attention and he grabbed mine when he said, “I’ve had  close calls – been caught between hell and hackeydam more times than I like to remember.” Excuse me I said as I interrupted him.  But what does that mean and how do you spell it? Bubba laughed and said it was like being between a rock and a hard place but for some reason his family used this phrase instead.  (He added he had no idea how to spell it so I’ve spelled it phonetically here and will now use it as if I created it.)

    The lunch was delicious. Bubba’s German chocolate cake was the best I ever tasted which  includes both of my grandmothers’ efforts so that’s high praise. I stayed to play dominoes after we ate and then began to say my goodbyes when the game was over. As I cut a piece of cake to take with me, Bubba made one final rendition in the kitchen. He recited portions of “The Hill”  from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology which ends with the line, “… all, all are sleeping on the hill…”

    Honestly, does it get any better than that?

    view from my cousins Dennis and Martin’s place 

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    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.

     

  • hallelujah! revive us again


    Aha. I see those hands, as the Southern Baptist revival preachers used to say from the pulpit during the altar call or “invitation” as we called it back then when we sat on the small wooden pews with the large ceiling fans moving too slowly to stir the air in the Texas summer heat – even in a church as tiny as ours was in the 1950s when I was a child. The revival preacher would be shouting loud enough to keep everyone awake when he was preaching about the fire and brimstone hell would bring to all sinners who refused to repent that very night – who knew if you would make it until the next night of the week-long revival.

    “Bow your heads. Close your eyes, and pray,” he would say as he grabbed for the white handkerchief in his suit pocket to wipe the sweat dripping from his forehead to the tip of his nose.

    “Sister Selma, let’s have some music while everyone prays, ” the preacher nodded to Mama who would rise from her seat on the front pew next to Daddy to play the invitation hymn softly in the background on the piano. Uh oh, here we go for the Big Squeeze tonight, I thought, from my seat in a pew toward the middle of the church between my grandparents who had obediently bowed their heads and closed their eyes.

    “Now with every head bowed and every eye closed, just raise your hand if you know you are a sinner bound for hell unless you get right with God tonight. That’s it. Just slip that hand on up right where you are without anyone looking. Yes, I see that hand.”

    And so did I.

    Because of course, I had to look. My head was kinda sorta bowed, but my eyes were not closed. I confess I wanted to know who was going to hell. I wanted to make sure all the people I loved weren’t raising their hands and I was always particularly focused on one of my uncles who was suspect. Luckily, his hand wasn’t raised, but tomorrow would be another night.

    ***************************

    Pretty said to me last night she had enjoyed spending the year with me this week. We both laughed because the days don’t seem to fly by as fast for either of us as they usually do when she is out and about wheeling, dealing, surveying her antique empire. But then she redeemed herself by saying she thought the year had been one of our best in a long time. I agreed. I love having Pretty supervise my self isolation. We both consider our time together to be one of the few perks in the pandemic.

    David asks God in his Old Testament hymn book (psalms 85, verse 6) to send a revival. “Will you not revive us again so that your people may rejoice in you?”

    Bill and Gloria Gaither’s version is the one I remember in the revival services of my youth. “Revive us again, fill each heart with thy love. May each soul be rekindled with fire from above…hallelujah, thine the glory. Hallelujah, amen. Hallelujah, thine the glory. Revive us again.”

    Today, Easter Sunday, I’m thinking about a revival of our hope for tomorrow for each of us, a resurrection of our faith in a future we can recognize, celebrate and rejoice in together across the entire world. Revive us again.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • sally and chance – an unusual love story


    This is an excerpt from a post first published here in September, 2011 and later included in the 2013 Texas Folklore Society Anthology titled Cowboys, Cops, Killers and Ghosts. A little longer than my usual posts, but I hope you’ll take time to read and enjoy.

    The frame shop was empty except for Sally and her husband Bill. The first thing I noticed about this woman was her hair. She had big hair, as we used to say when we described my Aunt Thelma’s signature beehive hairdo. Sally’s suspiciously colored reddish blonde white hair was swept up and back and appeared to be longer than it probably was. Regardless, it was big and suited the woman who greeted us with a smile the same size as her hair. I tried to figure out Sally’s age and guessed her to be in her early seventies.

    My friend Carol who drove me to Tomball from Montgomery told me to go first with my items before she slipped away to browse through the shop. I put a few pictures on the counter top in front of Sally who sat down and reached for her measuring tape. But then, she seemed to lose interest in the job ahead of her and launched into a monologue about the heat this summer. Sally interspersed her stories with getting down to the framing business at hand, periodically producing a frame for me to consider along with mats of various colors and textures.

    I glanced around the shop while she worked and remarked that I thought the pictures in her shop were great; I loved Texana.  She stopped measuring and her eyes lit up with the excitement of discovering a kindred spirit. She asked me if I had noticed the pictures at the front near the cash register. I hadn’t.

    “Well, I want you to go take a look at them right now,” Sally said. “They’re pictures of me and Chance, the love of my life. Go on. Have a look.”

    I obediently followed her instructions and walked over to see two 8 x 10 glossy photos hanging on the wall next to the check-out counter. One was a black-and-white photo of a younger Sally in a western outfit with three not unattractive cowboys posing with her.   They stood next to a large Brahman bull. I tried to pick out which cowboy was Chance.   The other photo was in color. Again, it was a younger version of Sally in a rodeo outfit with her arm around the same bull. I walked back to Sally and told her I thought the pictures were great but wondered which one was Chance.

    “Chance is the Brahman bull,” she said and pronounced it bray-man. I had always called it brah-man.

    “Wasn’t he beautiful?” Sally asked in a reverent tone. I must have looked surprised because she chuckled as if she and I now shared a wonderful secret: Chance the bull was the love of her life. I waited for the whole story.

    “I got him at an auction when he was ten years old,” she said. “My husband at the time, not Bill, said I ought not to take a chance on him but I looked right into that bull’s eyes and we had a connection. A real connection. It was love at first sight. So we got him, and I named him Chance. I had him for more than eleven years. That bull was the sweetest and gentlest animal I ever knew; I’ve had dogs meaner than him. I used to ride him in rodeos and the parades for the rodeos since he never minded the noise and fuss people made over him as long as I was with him. He was oblivious to everyone but me. It was love at first sight all right, and he loved me as much as I loved him for as long as he lived. I’ve never felt the pure love I felt from that bull from any person in my life including my husbands, children and grandchildren.”

    She took a breath and continued.   I didn’t dare interrupt her.

    “He got to be so popular in Texas that Letterman’s people called and asked us to come to New York to be on The Late Night Show. So we put Chance in his trailer and off we went to New York City to be on television. The deal was supposed to be David Letterman was going to climb up and sit on Chance in front of his live audience. Of course I would be standing right there with him. Well, honey, you should’ve seen those New York City folks’ faces when I walked Chance through the TV studio. I was never prouder of my big guy because he didn’t pay them any mind at all.”

    “Really?” I exclaimed.  “Did David Letterman climb up on your bull?

    “I’m just getting to that,” Sally replied as she warmed to the storytelling.  “I was waiting in the little room before we were to go on, watching the commercials at the break when I felt someone standing behind me. You know how you can tell when somebody’s behind you.”  I nodded, and she went on.

    “Well, it was David Letterman in the flesh,” Sally said.  “I must have looked kinda funny at him because he said, ‘Listen, lady, are you going to make sure nothing happens to me with that bull of yours?’  So I said, ‘Mr. Letterman, as long as I’m with Chance, you’re as safe as if you were in your own mother’s arms.’ He smiled and said that was good enough for him.   But the funniest thing was when we went on the air, he chickened out at the last minute and wouldn’t get close to Chance. But, then, the audience took over and made such a production that he ended up getting on him for about a second. He couldn’t believe how gentle my Chance was but he wasn’t interested in pushing his luck, let me tell you.” Sally laughed and stopped talking. She began to fidget with the mats for my pictures.

    “Wow,” I said. “That was some story. You and Chance were TV stars. Amazing. Whatever happened to him?”

    “Oh, he died an old man’s death,” Sally said. “Peaceful as he could be, but it nearly broke my heart. I cried for days when I lost that bull. But, I’ll tell you something about Chance.   Some of those professors over at Texas A&M took skin cells from my big fellow –  they cloned him. Yessiree, they cloned him and called him Chance II. First successful cloning of a Brahman anywhere.”

    “You’re kidding,” I exclaimed. “Did you ever go see him?  Was he just like your Chance?”

    “I didn’t go for a long time,” Sally said. “But my husband at the time finally convinced me to go and yes, he looked exactly like my beloved Chance. Exactly like him. But you know what was different? The eyes. They were the same color as my Chance’s eyes but we had no bond. No connection. He let me pet him but I wouldn’t trust much more than that. He didn’t have Chance’s soul.” She took off her glasses and wiped a few tears from her eyes. I was mesmerized by the story and pictured her trying in vain to recapture her lost love in an experimental lab at A & M. So close – and yet so far away.

    Sally told me other stories that afternoon while I made my selections for frames and mats from her suggestions. She had started riding wild bulls in rodeos when she was forty-one years old and had ridden for a year but retired when the broken bones and bruises became too much for her battered body.  She finished with my items and gave me a total that was reasonable for the work she and Bill were going to do. And a bargain when you consider the storytelling was free. I looked at the clock and realized we’d fiddled with my pictures for forty-five minutes. Carol must be ready to kill me, I thought.

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    Stay safe, stay well and stay tuned.

     

  • thank God for unanswered prayer


    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 via Alexa along with his other gazillion fans. One of my favorite country western songs he wrote and performed has the catchy title Thank God for Unanswered Prayer. In this particular hit tune the singer and his wife have a random encounter at a high school football game with an old flame of his that stirs a memory of the intensity of the passion he felt for this ex along with the fervent prayers he uttered to God for things to work out with her back in the day. 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. Because I was raised 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 supervised 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 most of the day as grown men pounded on the bathroom door – begging me to please get out. The captain’s apologies to me  for the roughest seas he’d sailed in years from the other side of the bathroom door 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 She would just get me off that boat I would never bother her again with prayer from the open seas. The prayer went unanswered until the eight-hour fishing expedition was complete. Too little, too late.  I counted it unanswered, and I was not thankful.

    Regardless of my faith and its well-documented decline in my later years, I confess to again praying for specific outcomes in situations that were desperate at moments during the vicissitudes of life. On one particular occasion 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, drowning in a different kind of sea with very rough waters. I fervently prayed my relationship would survive, although my psychiatrist at the time wasn’t encouraging during our sessions. She did, however, prescribe fabulous drugs

    But just like Garth Brooks in his song, I thank God for that unanswered prayer twenty years ago. Pretty became my personal Coast Guard that rescued me from the depths of my despair with her laughter and love as she breezed passionately into the core of my existence. Pretty  is the spicy salsa for the rather tortilla chip person I’ve always been, and her rescue gave me hope for happiness. We have had that happiness – and then some. 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.

    As the world around us tilts on its Covid-19 axis today, I confess my fears for all of our futures. I spoke to an old friend from Texas last night who reminded me we had been through and survived many health crises during our lives including polio, HIV-AIDS, smallpox, the bluebonnet plague – to name a few. Pretty and I laughed so hard about the bluebonnet plague when I got off the phone that I called my cousin Melissa who lives in Texas. She was equally entertained and added that the bluebonnet plague was definitely seasonal which caused Pretty and me to laugh uproariously all over again.

    Share a laugh, stay sane and safe wherever you struggle today.

    Stay tuned.

     

  • no one is born hating


    “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.  People must learn to hate, and if they learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013)

    My heroes when I was a child growing up in Grimes County, Texas were always the cowboys in old western movies I watched on Saturday mornings with my daddy. They were men who settled their differences with guns but fired only at the bad guys who were easily identifiable as thieves, cattle rustlers, or other desperadoes out to do wrongs to innocent ranchers or townspeople. The bad guys were often found drinking whiskey in saloons in the company of women with “loose” morals – women that sometimes turned out to be damsels in distress.  The movie cowboys rescued damsels in distress whenever they spotted one and fought to bring justice to the lawless frontier that was the American West.

    As I aged, my heroes have thankfully changed, but the people I most admire are still the ones who try to lift my vision toward higher ground; and by higher ground I mean a place where justice and equality reign in tandem against the forces of unfairness, dishonesty and outright evil. My cowboys have been replaced by men and women who choose to settle their differences with words that effect change more powerfully than did the guns of the Wild West. They are people whose examples give us hope of rescue when we find ourselves in the saloons we make of our lives.

    Nelson Mandela was such a hero to me, a man whose extraordinary personal sacrifice changed the politics of his own South Africa which inspired dreams for peace and democracy around the world. Facing the death penalty for sabotage at his trial in April, 1964  Mandela spoke these words:

    “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

    He was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in 1990 by President F. W. de Klerk who then negotiated with Mandela’s party to end apartheid in South Africa. Twenty-seven years of his life with no personal freedom, and Nelson Mandela became a symbol of freedom for his nation and the rest of the world.  In 1993 Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to end the oppression of apartheid in their country. Mandela became the first black president of South Africa in 1994.

    For me, Nelson Mandela was as brave as any cowboy I watched in the Saturday morning westerns of my childhood. In a world today where the ideals of democracy and personal freedom are under attack by forces as evil as the Covid-19 virus which claims the lives of the poor,  people of color, the elderly – those who are marginalized by our own divisive institutions as surely as the institution of apartheid did in South Africa – I look to Nelson Mandela for his sacrifice and courage that showed me the power of peace in the midst of turmoil, hope for unity in a world divided artificially by the hate we’ve learned to love.

    Nelson Mandela-2008.jpg

    (photo from Wikipedia)

    Stay tuned.