I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Author: Sheila Morris

  • this is TROUBLE = OMG!


    The little room was as cold as a witch’s you-know-what in spite of the intense glare from the bright spotlight shining down on me while I lay stretched out on the large chair now completely reclined to become an operating table in the dermatologist’s office Thursday.

    I felt like I was a member of the happy family that was visible in the 46 photos hanging neatly on the three walls that surrounded me because I had plenty of time to study them while I was waiting for Dr. Anon. The wall behind me was a small row of cabinets with a sink, disposable gloves container, assorted medical instruments and supplies; but I had been lying in the recliner long enough to study the family images in some detail.

    Dr. Anon was in a few of the pictures with his wife and four children who looked just like a combination of their parents. I recognized some of the places where the photos were taken, but the ones of the family on camels threw me off a little. Frankly, the idea that the good doctor was a camel rider made me a little anxious for some reason. Why shouldn’t doctors ride camels, my sensible self said as my irrational self felt an overwhelming desire to jump up and run out of the room.

    I was waiting for the results of my basal cell skin cancer surgery from two hours earlier. If all went well, I should be up and out of the doctor’s office by the time I could say Marcus Welby. As my mind wandered, I thought about Marcus Welby M.D. and the actor Robert Young who starred in the TV show which led me to a memory of Loretta Young as she opened the door swirling her skirts to begin The Loretta Young Show on Sunday nights which took me down the road to her affair with Clark Gable. I was almost out of mental ramblings when the door to my little room opened and Dr. Anon walked in followed by his assistant Shirley.

    The smiling man riding the camel in the photo had been replaced by a much more serious fellow and an even more solemn assistant.

    “This is trouble,” said Dr. Anon with a slight frown. The nurse nodded and began assembling the surgical instruments again.

    I had two fleeting thoughts: One was the mental image of the woman at the Verizon Center who was the subject of my post several weeks ago (July 19th.) – the woman whose first comment when she looked at the cell phone I had brought in with problems to be fixed was, Oh my God. She had continued to repeat OMG off and on for the hour she pretended to work on my phone. Many of my photos I lost that day are still lost. OMG.

    The second thought that flew across my brain was the TV commercial with the dentist who told the patient (lying in a similar recliner to the one I was on) with his mouth locked in an open position that he had one of the worst cavities he had ever seen and then the dental assistant says, It’s bad. Lunch? and they walk away because their jobs were to diagnose problems – not to fix them.

    To his credit Dr. Anon didn’t run away but went back to work on my skin cancer issue with a vengeance. After the second round of numbing and snipping, I was released to a smaller waiting room where Pretty and I sat for another hour with two very tall men who at one point switched the communal TV from the weather channel to Fox News. Ding. Ding. Ding. Not so fast, my friend. I politely picked up the remote and found CNN without any difficulty. No one said a word. Time marched on.

    Much to our surprise, Dr. Anon  himself strolled into the small waiting area/ break room to apparently have lunch since it was by now after 1 o’clock. Once again the cheerful man in the family photos, he drank his lunch from a beer mug which contained a brown liquid reminiscent of beer but of course mustn’t have been since his work day wasn’t over.

    The tall man whose ear  was in the same unfinished state as my nose suggested to Dr. Anon we might need a drink more than he did. Following some good-spirited joking around discussing everyone’s favorite bourbon, Dr. Anon went back to his office, produced an open bottle of Jacob’s Creek bourbon and offered the two men, Pretty and me a drink. The two men and I accepted with enthusiasm. Pretty declined.

    Dr. Anon went back to work while my two new friends and I chatted in the waiting room – setting any political differences aside as we shared our healthy shots of bourbon in an attempt to keep our spirits as high as our pain levels. I hated it for all those pioneers who had had to rely on bourbon instead of Novocaine for pain relief. Novocaine wins…no contest.

    Finally, six hours and 22 stitches later, Pretty and I left the doctor’s office with two prescriptions and less money than we’d had when we arrived. The two tall men were nowhere to be seen, but the waiting room was full.

    Pretty drove me home where I immediately took to my bed with the vapors and dreamed about  a doctor who said Oh my God when he saw me reclined on an operating table and a woman at a cell phone store who kept saying This is Trouble over and over again as she banged my phone on her counter.

    More meds, please.

     

     

     

  • locked and loaded


    Our guns are locked and loaded,

    Full of fury and fire.

    Our hopes of peace outmoded

    By men with war desire.

    Who speaks for those enraged

    By words so full of hate?

    We must – we must become engaged

    Before it is too late.

    Too late to hear the cries

    From half a world away.

    And yet we share the very same skies

    That weep for us today.

     

     

     

  • an extra special Tuesday


    The cover of my third book features a family snapshot of my favorite Aunt Lucille who was my daddy’s sister, her daughter Melissa, my mother and daddy, and me.

    I am the child fiddling with my gloves and not looking at the picture-taker, whoever that might be. Probably my Uncle Jay who was my Aunt Lucille’s husband and my first cousin Melissa’s father. He liked to take pictures and had the most impressive camera of anyone in our family so naturally he was the photographer for important occasions like Easter Sunday.

    I was ten years old at the time of the photo, and I’m assuming it was a picture taken right before we went to church for an Easter service at the Richards Baptist Church in Richards, Texas the little town in Grimes County at the edge of the piney woods. Population 500 counting dogs and chickens.

    My mother looked happy – no doubt because she managed to dress me in a ruffled dress, Easter bonnet and, reluctantly, white gloves. My daddy is the one with the crew cut, which I’m sure I secretly envied.

    My Aunt Lucille is the beautiful woman wearing an appropriate corsage with her Easter outfit that included gloves, handbag and hat. Melissa was probably two years old and apparently not too thrilled with either her Easter outfit, the photographer’s efforts, or a combination of irritations as we prepared to go to church that day. She’s the pretty little girl with the frown.

    I love this picture – and I love the people in it.

    Time, distance and the vicissitudes of life, as my daddy used to say, make it difficult to keep in touch with my cousin Melissa who is the only one remaining in this picture besides me. She lives in San Leon, Texas with her husband Tim and their three dogs. San Leon is a small town on Galveston Bay past Houston if you’re driving south toward the Gulf of Mexico and the Galveston beaches. Regardless of where you’re driving, Melissa and Tim live a thousand miles from Pretty and me in South Carolina.

    But today she was in Charleston with Tim who was there on a work assignment and we had made plans to get together. Pretty wanted to take me, but she was still in the business of the final push to clear out Casa de Canterbury since the new owners brought a big ol’ moving van up to the porch today and started unloading. That’s a convoluted story for another day but needless to say, Pretty was overwhelmed with no opportunity to drive me to Charleston at this point in our lives.

    In (and up) stepped my good friend Dick Hubbard who happily agreed to drive me to see my cousin Melissa for an early lunch at her hotel today. Bless his heart. Dick and I have been friends for 30 years but usually meet for lunch in Columbia so we enjoyed the extra time to visit on the two-hour ride down to Charleston and back. Gossip,  the meaning of life, his husband Curtis,  my wife Pretty, pickup trucks were a few of our topics as we drove in a slight drizzle…just enough to require his new windshield wipers every once in a while.

    The visit with Melissa was perfect. We caught up on two years’ worth of current events in our lives since we last saw each other in Texas in the summer of 2015. We talked politics, books, retirement, what Tim was doing, how Pretty was doing – but mostly we talked about the other three people in the book cover picture who are no longer here and how much we both miss them.

    Melissa and I share the solitude of being “only children” and what that means when we have lost our parents and grandparents. Neither of us has children of our own – Melissa’s daughter died many years ago of cystic fibrosis.

    But today was a joyful day because we could talk together about the people we both knew and loved when we were growing up: we are each other’s people after all. Sixty-five years of family history are ties that will always bind us, regardless of the years between visits or the distance of a thousand miles that separate us today. Thank goodness for facebook.

    Both of us actually knew the people we were talking about; and that’s a happy thing, as Melissa likes to say.

    This was an extra special Tuesday for me, a day I won’t forget anytime soon…until we meet again.

    Melissa and her playhouse in Beaumont, Texas

     

  • Father Goose Nursery Rhymes


    (funny-pictures.picphotos.net)

    Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme (circa 1725)

    Pretty good one, Mother Goose – your rhymes reflected your times.

    As for Father Goose, that rascal, what might he write in 2017?

    Little Jack Kelly

    Sat watching telly

    Eating his fish and chips;

    He answered his phone

    Because he was home

    Then said with a groan,

    “I’m it.”

    Best wishes to General Kelly in his new role as Chief of Staff. One week and counting.

    Stay tuned, sports fans.

     

     

  • ’til the river runs dry


    I will sail my vessel ‘til the river runs dry.

                Like a bird upon the wind, these waters are my sky.

                I’ll never reach my destination if I never try,

                So I will sail my vessel ‘til the river runs dry.

    Garth Brooks’s lyrics sing a song of determination that begins with his all-important first step of getting into the boat with a sense of purpose and working as hard as he can to keep the vessel from tipping over in heavy winds.

    Whether our rivers are real or imaginary, it is sometimes difficult to keep sailing our vessels in the right direction to achieve the long-term results we strive for as individuals, as families – and even as a nation.

    Carl Bernstein (of Bernstein and Woodward in the Nixon years) says we Americans live today in the midst of a cold civil war. Garth Brooks might say that sailing our vessel of democracy has gotten much more difficult as heavy winds blow against it with more suspicions of each other in every news cycle.

    Discernment of truth is ridiculed. Harsh rhetoric – whether true or not – is applauded and considered to be shaking things up that should have been shaken up a long time ago in Washington. Our vessel of democracy tilts too far leeward or too far windward with politics to the left or right that create schisms which have become as wide as the Grand Canyon.

    Earth to America: your vessel is in trouble and in danger of sinking.

    The passion we feel to protect and preserve our families must be the same passion we feel to protect and preserve our democratic ideals. A small wind of individual apathy toward basic civic responsibilities such as voting can become a hurricane force when it is multiplied by millions who have lost faith in their institutions and the people who are in charge of them.

    All of us are in the same boat with the same basic needs for clean air to breathe, food to eat, pure water to drink,  affordable popcorn at the movies…well, maybe popcorn is a bridge too far…

    We must each do our part to ensure the waters of kindness, compassion, respect for our differences, celebration of our shared humanity – like birds upon the wind, these waters are our skies and we will sail our vessels as individuals, as families and as a nation ’til the river runs dry.