I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Author: Sheila Morris

  • 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.

     

     

     

     

  • Between Hell And Hackeydam


    Sheila Morris's avatarI'll Call It Like I See It

    Seems like I’ve been off on some “heavy” topics for a good while, and I needed a breath of fresh air.  I remembered this post I had about Bubba Sage and saw that I wrote it almost exactly two years ago on October 17, 2012.  I loved reading it again and thought you all might, too.  Enjoy.

    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 and 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.  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…

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  • I’ve Been to the Mountaintop


    If you are a cyberspace friend of Red’s Rants and Raves and/or The Old Woman Slow’s Photos, you know South Carolina Pride was this past weekend in the state capitol of Columbia.  I took 163 digital images over the weekend and posted my favorites on the blogs.  I am a believer in the old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and these pictures are images of hope, faith, love and joy – and the occasional unsmiling prophecy pretenders.  I love the pictures, but I can’t resist the thousand words, give or take a few.

    When I look at these images, I hear the voices of America singing.  I hear the cries of Paul Revere on his midnight ride and the loud sounds of argument and heated debate as the Founding Fathers (yes, Virginia – there were no mothers present) drafted the Constitution of the United States with a Bill of Rights guaranteeing individual liberties.

    I hear the sounds of slaves who could not speak to their masters, and I hear the whispers of abolitionists who spirited those slaves away in the darkness.  I hear the cries of the wounded and dying Confederate and Union soldiers as the artillery fired around them on the fields at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, and I hear the cannon fired in Charleston Harbor at Fort Sumter.

    I hear the choruses of the suffragettes who held a convention in Seneca, New York, and marched and dared to dream that women had the right to vote –  which they hoped would lead to greater equality, and I hear the roll call of states that  refused to ratify an Equal Rights Amendment which attempted to level the playing field for “the weaker sex” in the 1970s.

    I hear the singing of the marchers in Selma and Birmingham in the 1960s as they walked to overcome their harsh treatment.  I hear the voices of angry rappers today in Fullerton, Missouri, over the endless struggles for fair treatment in a country where equality is, too often, lip-synced.

    I hear the voices of the drag queens at Stonewall in 1969 as they refuse to be treated inhumanely and stand firm against the oppression of the gay community.  I hear the sounds of pleas by children who are thrown out of their homes and into the streets when their family confronts their sexuality.  I hear the sounds of comfort and support from people who respond with love to these children in distress.

    This is what I hear when I look at the digital images of the Pride March, but what I feel is entirely different. When you grow up feeling you are somehow not right, that there is something wrong with who you are and that you will never be good enough, and when you spend a lifetime being denied basic dignities and respect and are continually marginalized by being a part of a sub culture, and when you march in your hometown for twenty-five years and in those earlier years the prophecy pretenders outnumber the people who march with you, then the South Carolina Pride March this past weekend was like a parade for the astronauts who walked on the moon – minus the confetti and streamers.

    I wish I had the gift of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to describe my feelings as I rode on the Pioneers Float Saturday, but since I don’t, I’ll borrow his words:

    “Well, I don’t know what will happen now.  We’ve got some difficult days ahead.  But it doesn’t matter with me now.  Because I’ve been to the mountaintop.  And I don’t mind.  Like any man I would like to live a long life.  Longevity has its place.  But I’m not concerned about that now…God’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know today that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.  And I’m happy, today,  I’m not worried about anything.  I’m not fearing any man.”

    I’ve been to the mountaintop.