I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Author: Sheila Morris

  • The Subject is Betrayal


    I feel strangely torn between the euphoria of our marriage license issued on the 19th. of November and the depression I felt four days later on the 23rd. when Columbia City Councilman Cameron Runyan wrote a column in the State newspaper entitled “Why I Cannot Support the Redefinition of Marriage” to explain his solo vote against extending marriage benefits to same-sex partners of city employees.  In the editorial Councilman Runyan asked us to respect his “worldview” which he said doesn’t include a city with equal rights for all of its employees.  And I totally would respect it except…

    His “worldview” mysteriously changed the day of the vote.  Was he the same Cameron Runyan Facebook friend who visited our Guild and other GLBT meetings during his campaign for City Council – the same Cameron Runyan who asked us to raise money for his election because he was a fresh new voice that pledged to speak for fairness and equal rights for all the citizens of Columbia – apparently not.  Then who was that masked man who spoke with forked tongue and whose hand I shook in friendship.

    With friends like Cameron Runyan, who needs enemies?

     betrayal n. 1. treachery, treason, sedition, disloyalty, unfaithfulness, falseness, breach of faith, bad faith, perfidy, double-dealing, double-cross, two-timing; deception, chicanery, duplicity, trickery.       (Webster’s everyday thesaurus)

    Ferguson has become a new word added to the vernacular of shameful American tragedies involving betrayal mixed with violence and the loss of too many young people in too many different parts of our country as a result of too many guns.  Columbine…Sandy Hook…Trayvon…Ferguson…is this the Legacy of the Lost that will haunt us as a nation for generations.  Is this the breach of faith that defines us as a people in the eyes of the rest of the world and, more importantly, is it the duplicity that we fail to see in our own eyes and hear with our own ears.

    I hear the sounds of betrayal at night when sirens scream to answer the calls from gunshots behind my house.  I hear the cries of betrayal when a young woman who lived not far from me was killed by youthful gang members who shot her by mistake.  This is the ultimate betrayal of a nation and a community, yet it is often impossible to trace the footsteps that led us to an environment of distrust among ourselves and the inability to change our culture of violence.

    We cannot look to our elected representatives in the Houses of Congress or, indeed, the White House, for different directions of positive change in our own houses and neighborhoods.  They are unfaithful to their electorate and poor examples for any of us to follow.  They are double-dealing double-crossing contentious factions which display no real interest in the daily lives of the people they supposedly represent.  Their betrayal is creeping and insidious and creates an atmosphere of indifference and disrespect from their citizens.

    We must look to ourselves then and accept our responsibility for our part in Ferguson.  Columbia is Ferguson.  South Carolina is Ferguson.  Texas is Ferguson.  We are all Ferguson.  We must examine our own lives – what we do, how we feel – and whether we have a sense of urgency in doing good for others, in treating everyone fairly and with respect.  We must turn betrayal into loyalty and faithfulness, into safeguarding and protecting.

    Margaret Mead said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

    And that, Councilman Runyan, is my “worldview.”

    Onward.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Thanks Giving: Good News Travels Fast


    My friend Bervin is a retired serviceman who has helped Teresa and me in our assorted yards in the houses we’ve lived in for the fourteen years we’ve been living together.  I’m not sure how old he is…my guess is he’s in his mid to late fifties.  He is divorced and doesn’t have children of his own but has tons of nieces and nephews that he loves dearly.  He took care of his father for a number of years until his dad passed away the same year my mother died.  Bervin and I talk politics and football regularly when he comes to our house to work on one of his days off from his full-time job at Wal-Mart.  He is a tall handsome African-American man with a soothing voice.

    This morning Bervin called me to say he’d seen Teresa and me on the news last night.  He called to tell us congratulations on our marriage license and added “ain’t nothing wrong with that.  No, nothing.”

    Austin is a seventeen-year-old senior at Montgomery High School in Montgomery, Texas.  He was our next-door neighbor on Worsham Street for the last year we had our house there.  Austin is a terrific baseball player and recently got a scholarship to go to Angelina College in Texas next year.  He is a scholar athlete with super good grades to go with his good looks and other talents.  He used to come visit me sometimes and often brought food that his mother Melina had cooked and sent to me.  We moved from Worsham this past April, and I miss our talks.

    Yesterday Austin sent me a text that said “hey mrs. Sheila I’m proud and happy for you and mrs. Teresa!  love you both!”

    From Bervin and Austin and our neighbors across the street on Canterbury Road to family and friends in Texas and South Carolina to cyberspace friends in Mexico, South Africa, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada… from friends in the USA in California on the west coast  to New York on the east coast and everywhere in between – literally from sea to shining sea… we have received incredible messages of love and support over the past two days as the State of South Carolina became the 35th (or 34th depending on who’s counting!) state to make same-sex marriage legal.  Personal translation: Teresa and I were issued a marriage license by Richland County Probate Judge Amy McCullough late yesterday afternoon in the midst of an avalanche of good wishes.

    We have been touched and overwhelmed by the media and social media response and are beyond grateful for the support.  Teresa refuses to watch the TV interviews on the internet because she was unprepared to actually go into the courthouse yesterday morning.  I was going by to pay the fee ($42.50 for anyone wondering) and she was staying in the car with the engine running to keep warm.  When Judge McCullough informed me she was able to complete our application process, she also told me Teresa had to be there to re-sign the paperwork we had signed in October.  I texted T to come in, and the media began filming when she joined me at the desk.  Teresa was horrified because she hadn’t washed her hair!

    I, on the other hand, did watch the interviews last night and realized I clearly turned into a pillar of salty tears when the reality of the moment hit me and I was asked about my feelings…my feelings?  I had no words then and not many more now. I wonder how any couple feels when they apply for a marriage license?  Excited, nervous, joyful, proud, like something good is about to happen?  I wonder how the suffragettes in South Carolina felt when they voted for the first time…I wonder what the people of color in South Carolina felt when they saw the “colored” signs coming down…I wonder what the illegal immigrants who have lived in South Carolina for decades will feel when they get a driver’s license…maybe I had those feelings or ones like them.  Regardless, this member of the “older couple” couldn’t have ever imagined a moment like this when she was a little girl who asked another little girl to marry her in the early 1950s.   Wow…was what I felt.  Jubilation T. Cornpone…was what I felt.

    One of the interesting comments made in a TV interview I watched was that Teresa and I had been “dating for fourteen years.”  Gosh, was that what we’d been doing for fourteen years?  Maybe that’s what young people call living together these days, and I know this youthful reporter was not intentionally offensive.  Or maybe this was a tiny example of why marriage equality is necessary: to say hey this isn’t dating – this is my family we’re talking about, a family that has been through the same highs and lows your family goes through except we lacked the piece of paper that your parents had to make it legal.  Dating, to me, is a trial run.  Teresa and I are already in the race together and way past the starting gate.

    To the GLBTQ activists we have worked with for the past thirty years in South Carolina and around the country – thank you for each goal we set and each victory we made happen together.  The burdens have been much easier to bear when they are shared, and we’ve had warriors with Great Spirit walking every step with us.  We admire and respect your leadership and bravery over the long haul that is the task of changing a culture and fundamentally altering the political landscape.

    I often say the battles are for those who will come after us and that the next generation will benefit from our efforts in the state, and there is truth in that.  But I also want to remember my sisters and brothers who did not live to share these celebrations with us.  Last night we went to dinner with one of my oldest friends Millie who took Teresa and me and another good friend Patti to an Italian restaurant.  Millie had made the plans a week ago so we weren’t there to celebrate the excitement of yesterday but I confess I did carry the license with me.  I wasn’t leaving home without it.

    pasta fresca pic

    The waitresses were fabulous and came to our booth to congratulate us when they realized why we were ordering champagne and snapping pictures and brought our desserts with candles to end the dinner with a bang.  Our server was a young woman with a great smile, and she drew “hearts” on our to- go box.  Really sweet.

    pasta fresca 2

    But Millie’s partner of fifteen years, Cindy, wasn’t with us because she had died earlier this year.  Millie said Cindy would have wanted them to be next in line to apply for the marriage license.  This was not to be for her and many of our brothers and sisters who have gone before us.  We will always honor their memories.

    One week from today we will observe my favorite holiday of the year, Thanksgiving Day.  Teresa and I will make our usual trip to the upstate to have a late evening family meal with her mother’s people in the fellowship hall of the First Baptist Church of Fingerville, South Carolina.  I always love being with her family because they are good people and because nothing is more important to me than family.

    This year I’m getting a head start on the holiday and giving thanks for the woman who loved me enough to say yes, I want to marry you.  That’s the Good News tonight.  Tell it.

  • Not What We’d Hoped She Would Be


    This past summer we visited Flannery O’Connor’s home at Andalusia Farms outside of Milledgeville, Georgia.  It was my kind of place – her mother’s old dairy barn, Flannery’s peacock coop, a small frame house where their caretakers lived, and a bigger white farmhouse with a screened-in front porch that overlooked the pine tree – lined road leading up to the farm from the highway.  Rural, agrarian, somewhat secluded.

    The author and her mother lived there together until Flannery died at the age of  thirty-nine from lupus.  The illness limited her activities and apparently a highlight of her last years was sitting on the front porch and visiting with relatives and friends who came from near and far to entertain and be entertained.  On one of these occasions several people were chatting while they sat in the rocking chairs on the porch and a cousin was relaying a particularly boring story that did not entertain Flannery.

    She leaned over to the person sitting next to her and said in a voice loud enough for everyone on the porch to hear, “She’s just not what we’d hoped she would be.”

    I have laughed and laughed and laughed again when I think of her saying that in that setting…so much that Teresa and I will look at each other sometimes and mouth “she’s just not what we’d hoped she would be.”  We are easily amused with our own inside jokes.

    Actually, though, I believe there’s more truth than poetry in the remark.  Disappointment is a universal experience that strikes when we least expect it and lingers longer than we’d like for it to.  When it comes from a person, it invariably comes from a person we love and trust or at least one we admire.  When it comes from a place, politics, organized religion and/or the weather are usually involved;  and when it comes from a football team, losing is the culprit.

    Here’s my remedy for disappointments: lower your expectations.  Forget lofty idol worshipping – it didn’t work well for the followers of Baal in the Old Testament and it’s likely to run into trouble with people we put on pedestals today.  Pedestals topple like the walls of Jericho with just as much noise and confusion and pain and suffering, so recognize none of us live in a glass house and can afford to cast the first stone.  If a particular pedestal falls in your life, add a dash of forgiveness…seventy times seven is about right.  Where little has been forgiven, little love is shown.  The Bible tells me so.

    Politics and organized religion tend to merge in disappointing convergence with resulting noise and confusion and pain and suffering and the paving of Paradise to make it a church parking lot.  Leave those to the weather.

    Finally, as for football teams, losing occurs in the midst of much noise and confusion and pain and suffering but don’t lower your expectations.  Simply fire the coach.

    He’s probably not what we’d hoped he would be.

     

     

     

     

  • The Longer I Serve Him, the Sweeter He Grows…


    The more that I love Him, more love He bestows.

     Each day is like heaven, my heart overflows –

    the longer I serve Him, the sweeter He grows.

    ——– Words and music by William Gaither

    Certain songs move me – they take me to places with memories that lie deep, deep, deep in my mind.  Today I listened to a piano instrumental while I was driving around in my old Dodge Dakota pickup truck which has been resurrected by a second engine that sputters in fits and starts but manages to get me and my three dogs to our favorite destination: a field and woods next to the skateboard park in Rosewood.

    This day is one of those days that I can forgive South Carolina for almost anything, including the ongoing struggles for very personal social justice issues.  Yes, it was that kind of day.  Perfect weather, incredible fall colors everywhere, and cloudless blue skies.

    As I drove my little dog Red who barks incessantly when he gets in the truck and my big dogs Spike and Chelsea who fling themselves from window to window and jump back and forth on the console from the sheer excitement of the anticipation of running free, I thought to myself, you are a lucky person today.  You are healthy enough to take your family to do what they love to do most, and for you in this moment, life is good.

    On the ride back to the house, the dogs were exhausted and I decided to play a CD made by an old friend here in Columbia…a collection of hymn arrangements that I recognized from my Southern Baptist roots in rural southeast Texas.  I listen to this CD a lot.  It’s the only one I carry in my truck and when I can tear myself away from sports talk radio, I’ll play it.  I know almost all the words to almost all the songs.  I’ve been sporadically listening to them for sixty-eight years.

    While I listened to the Bill Gaither song, I was transported to a time with a vision of my mother practicing  the piano for the Sunday morning hymns at the church.  She was a church pianist for small Southern Baptist churches for more than sixty-five years before her dementia stole the music from her mind and fingers.  She had magical fingers that moved with precision to hit the right notes but also played with an emotional abandon that eluded her in her everyday life.

    And she practiced and practiced. She sat very straight and glanced at the hymnal every once in a while, but mostly she looked at her hands because she knew all the notes.  She watched her hands make music.

    You know, I wonder if those were her “life is good” moments.  I never thought about it until today, but she looked in my memory as happy as I felt this afternoon.  Maybe that’s why she always wanted me to sing when she played.  She hoped the music would connect us – draw us closer – carry us to a higher ground of understanding.  I’ll never know.

    What I do know is that for me on a glorious November day, a piano player carried me home.

  • His Holiness the 14th. Dalai Lama


    A walk in the woods on Saturday afternoon, an interview with a community leader for my new book on Sunday afternoon and a WordPress blog that I read first thing this Monday morning – what do they all have in common?  And the answer is…who is the Dalai Lama.  I find that borderline bizarre or mildly convergent.

    First, a walk in the woods.  Saturday morning my young bestie Meghan texted me with an invitation to join her and a couple of her other friends and their dogs to drive to Fort Jackson and hike a portion of the Palmetto Trail for a little while.  The day was perfect  – the weather like it had been ordered for a walk in the outdoors: give me a bright sunshiny day, hold the rain, no mosquitoes, extra colors and a splash of conversation.  Teresa was at work, and I hated it for her, but I was in.

    I took my black lab Chelsea because she is the least likely to create a fuss in a pack and we all set off together in high spirits.  We did set off together, but the dogs ran ahead of us with the small group of three relatively younger adults following at a brisk pace; and then there was the token senior adult, me, bringing up the rear with my camera.  We had random moments together, though, when the others would drop back to make sure I was trudging along with no problems.

    During one of these chats along the way, I mentioned to Meghan that I felt guilty for having such a wonderful walk on such a gorgeous day while Teresa was inside working at the Mast General Store.  We then engaged in a tongue-in-cheek exchange about feelings of guilt, and she jokingly told me the Dalai Lama said guilt shouldn’t   be a word.  According to him, guilt was unproductive in our lives and interfered with our expectations for happiness.

    Now, Meghan is a student in an acupuncture school in North Carolina and also a licensed massage therapist who has tried to help my various aches and pains in the past few years.  She is way more informed about alternative medicines and Eastern beliefs than I am – which made me think if she said the Dalai Lama didn’t believe in guilt, then he clearly did not.    I certainly wouldn’t argue with her.  But, the conversation made me try to think of everything I knew about the Buddhist spiritual leader, and the only image I could recall was Richard Gere dressed in a white robe sitting on a hillside in a faraway place with a little  Asian man who looked like the cat who ate the canary.

    Sunday afternoon I interviewed Michael who is one of the people that will be included in my next book which has a working title of A State of Our Own: Oral Histories of the Queer Movement in South Carolina from 1984 – 2014.    While I’ve known Michael for fifteen years, I didn’t realize the depth of his passion for his spiritual commitments and certainly never knew of his interests in religious experiences outside Christianity.  Although no mention was made of the Dalai Lama, I made a mental note that I found it coincidental to be discussing spiritual topics in a twenty-four hour period.  That’s really strange for me.

    This morning I opened my WordPress Reader to wander through the blog posts of the people I follow, and the very first one was a blogger who went to see and hear His Holiness the 14th. Dalai Lama in Birmingham, Alabama yesterday.  Apparently, it was the conclusion of his three-day visit to Birmingham, and she was effusive in her description of the experience.

    Okay. Knock, knock.  Who’s there?  The Dalai Lama, that’s who.

    And then I went off on a cyberspace search for a man who leads a religion I know very little about and yet, has been the confidante of world leaders and an inspiration for an enormous following of truth seekers including Richard Gere.

    His Holiness has a web site and is connected to Facebook, twitter and a vast array of You Tube Videos that offer a glimpse into the man.  I’m not sure why I was surprised that I could Tweet the Dalai Lama, but I totally was.  I am clearly out of touch with spiritual matters in the 21st. century.

    I read about the history of the Dalai Lamas and found it most interesting.  In a nutshell, this Nobel Prize winning man of peace is a descendant of centuries of violence and political mayhem in Tibet-and lives in exile in India.

    I randomly selected a You Tube Video of his appearance at Macalester College in March of this year.  Macalester is located in St. Paul, Minnesota and is one of the foremost private liberal arts colleges in America.  His Holiness was being honored with a doctorate from the school and looked the way I expected him to look in his robes and eyeglasses as he sat on the stage with the other dignitaries . He was short but not a tiny man.  For a man in his nineties, he looked to be in good shape.

    I was stunned when the Provost gave him a Macalester baseball cap along with his degree – and even more stunned when he wore it during his entire address to the gathering of students and teachers and visitors in the large auditorium at the college.  The audience responded with a cheer when he donned the cap, but it became very quiet when he spoke in English that I could only compare to my spoken Spanish. Not great, but you get your point across.

    Time is always moving, he began, and no force can stop time.  The past is past.  The future belongs to the young people of the 21st century – the people who are inheriting a lot of problems because of our failures in the 20th century: a population of seven billion people separated by a huge gap between the rich and the poor, major disasters that will occur due to global warming, a lack of water, and so on.  But the most important message he drove home was that violence brings more violence, and the 20th. century was one of violence.  His hope for the 21st. century is dialogue.  He urges us to talk and to not draw weapons.  He said the world is one world now because of our communication capabilities; but we have different colors and different religions, different economic resources and we must talk to each other to resolve our differences that lead to conflict.

    I confess I didn’t listen to the entire speech, but I also admit I enjoyed him.  What I liked most was that he laughed a sincere loud laugh when he thought he was being funny.  He had an interpreter who stood at his side while he spoke and occasionally the Dalai Lama looked to him for a word or encouragement.  I noticed the interpreter also made sure to laugh when His Holiness laughed.

    I don’t know if the 14th Dalai Lama is really the incarnation of the 13th or not, and I can’t verify the elimination of the word guilt from his vocabulary.  What I do know is that I admire anyone whose truth resembles my own, and I have a new appreciation for a man who advocates peace and non-violence in a country where our teenagers gun down each other in our public schools on a regular basis. More power to you and your baseball caps – the message is more important than the messenger.

    I may even Tweet you.