I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Author: Sheila Morris

  • A Tale of Two Cities: Dickens It Is Not


    Winter Park, Florida is an Orange County suburb of Orlando  and the best word I can think of to describe it is ritzy.  The main street is Park Avenue which lives up to my Monopoly board imagination of how a Park Avenue should look.  Swanky retail shops line both sides of the street and the entire town of approximately 30,000 people has a neatly planned appearance that made me feel glad to be driving a late-model rental car instead of our usual transportation in a 2004 Dodge Dakota pickup with Texas license plates.  This is definitely not a Yee Haw kind of town.

    Winter Park was founded in 1882 by a group of northern business moguls who were undoubtedly looking for their place in the sun – a place where snow was best confined to a plastic toy scene that had flakes when shaken but never required being shoveled off a sidewalk.

    The original residents of the area were the Seminoles who were Native Americans with no art galleries and no direct connection to their Florida State namesakes in Tallahassee that are playing for the National BCS Championship in the Rose Bowl on January 6th .Winter Park is a college town, however, with a small liberal arts school called Rollins College which apparently has no football team but has access to a country club golf course nearby.

    The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art is located on North Park Avenue and is a museum that houses “the most comprehensive and the most interesting collection of Tiffany (Louis Comfort Tiffany) anywhere.”  Since I’ve never seen other Tiffany collections, I will take their word for it, but I visited the Morse Museum and was really moved by the awesome art collections of stained glass, pottery and paintings on display there.  I could have spent two days wandering through the exhibits trying to absorb the rich American history portrayed by the artists represented there, but alas, we were limited to two hours.

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    The Morse Museum

    Winter Park was the perfect home for the Tiffany collections.

    Eatonville is a small town three miles west of Winter Park in Orange County and the differences between the two are as distinct as black and white.

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    Display in Eatonville Town Hall

    Established five years after Winter Park in 1887, Eatonville is the oldest black incorporated municipality in America.  Wow.  Thank goodness Teresa knew it was also the childhood home of the author Zora Neale Hurston or we wouldn’t have taken Lake Drive out of Winter Park and driven the short distance to Kennedy Boulevard in Eatonville.  This is a stop I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

    The walking tour of the little town of Eatonville includes the current Town Hall which is a repository of memorabilia including newspaper clippings describing the town’s creation that was a result of the vision of a few African-Americans who wanted to have their own community.  After much effort, the land was bought from a group of white landowners that included a man named Eaton.  The rest, as they say, is history.

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    Zora Neale Hurston spent her childhood in Eatonville in the home of her influential father who was the third mayor as well as the second minister of the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, one of two churches in the small town.  Hurston became one of the most controversial writers of the period in American literature known as the Harlem Renaissance and wrote novels, short stories, essays and plays during her lengthy literary career.  Much of her work includes fictional accounts of the town and people of Eatonville.   A museum celebrating her contribution to the arts is also on the walking tour of the town.

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    Winter Park.  Eatonville.  Same county.  Same state.  Three miles and light years apart.  But what strikes me is the similarity of the American spirit that both towns reflect.  The dreamers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were very much alike in their fierce determination to build homes and businesses and communities that offered opportunities to pursue their ideas of happines for themselves and their children.

    What a country.

  • The Horse You Draw is the One You’ll Ride


    Through the good and lean years and through all the in-between years…is a line from Frank Sinatra’s hit tune All the Way.  I looked through the archives of my posts and saw that my final post of 2012 was a blow-by-blow recap of that year in review for my life.  Not a bad post for one titled The In-Between Years but it seems like such a long time ago in a land far away from where I am today.  A year can fly past in a hurry and yet, the passage of time, regardless of our perception of its speed, never leaves us unchanged.

    I rarely “mix” blogs, but I want to quote The Red Man’s opinion of 2013 in his final December, 2012 post.  He has such a way with words.

    I’m not sure what my plans are for the New Year, but I don’t like the sound of 2013.   It’s an odd-numbered year, and I don’t accept odd-numbered years as authentic.  I would prefer to have all even-numbered years.  So we’d skip 2013 and go right on to 2014 and then 2016 and so on.   You get the picture.

    Yes, Red Man, I do get the picture and you are a prophet in your own ‘Hood.  2013 was one of those lean years Frank Sinatra sang about.  To tell the truth, the bad so outweighed the good I won’t bother to review it.  The better news is it’s finally coming to a close and 2014 is just around the next Bowl Game.

    I was talking to a cousin who called me on Christmas Day to wish me a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  I appreciated the call and the visit we had.  The thousand miles that separated us couldn’t break the ties that bind us.

    We were talking about the vicissitudes of life, as my daddy used to call them, and Gaylen who has spent over forty years hanging out with cowboys at rodeos told me one of their favorite quotes:  The horse you draw is the one you’ll ride. 

    I like it.  No apologies.  No excuses.  No whining about why did I get this horse.  No wondering about whether this rodeo was one I should’ve signed up for.  No mulling over how I ever got to be a cowboy in the first place.  It’s now or it’s never – so you ride.

    I have hope for 2014 along with The Red Man who loves even-numbered years and am optimistic that I will be a better person in the New Year.  I can’t control the rodeos around me, but I have been reminded I can still ride.

    I hope the horses you draw in 2014 will be ones you’ll want to ride.

    Teresa and I wish you all a Happy New Year from our family to yours!

  • No One is Born Hating


    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 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 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 and dishonesty and outright evil.

    My cowboys have been replaced by men and women who choose to settle their differences with words that effect change as powerfully as 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 hearts of his own nation and inspired dreams for peace and fairness around the world.

    “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.”

    Twenty-seven years of his life unfairly imprisoned, and this man speaks of love.  Twenty-seven years of a life without personal freedom, and this man becomes a symbol of freedom for his nation and the rest of the world. Twenty-seven years of his life taken away, and this man gives…and gives…and gives until he dies.

    For me, Nelson Mandela was as brave as any cowboy I watched in the Saturday morning westerns of my childhood.  He didn’t have to ride a horse or shoot a gun to save a damsel in distress. Rather, he showed me the power of peace in the midst of turmoil and hope for  unity in a world divided artificially by the hate we’ve learned to love.

    I will miss knowing he is here.

  • The Words She Didn’t Say


    She wanted to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.

    They stuck in her mind like pavement to gum.

    Release me, release me the words cried today.

    I’m afraid, she said, as she held them at bay.

    We will be heard, they told her with force.

    She shook her head to quiet their source.

    They rattled around in the core of her brain,

    But got up again and began to raise Cain.

    Leave me alone, she shouted out loud.

    They mocked her and told her they came in a crowd.

    So even if caught and turned  out to sea,

    Others would come and one day be free.

    It must be the holidays because I’ve just written a poem with the same meter as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Good Lord.

    My usually introspective self typically becomes more reflective during the holiday season, and I believe this poem officially crosses the line to brooding.  However, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year, and Teresa and I once again look forward to making the trip to the Upstate to spend an evening with her family in the recreation hall of the First Baptist Church of Fingerville, South Carolina.  Even if I didn’t love her family, I’d go to a Baptist Church with that name.

    To everything there is a season, and this is the season for being thankful before the madness that is Christmas and New Year’s Day overwhelms us.  My wish for each of you is the familiar admonition to count your blessings and name them one by one. And if there are words you want or need to say to someone, set them free.

    From our family to yours – have a safe and Happy Thanksgiving!

  • My New BFF Ellen


    I have a new relationship with a younger lesbian who shares my core values and is wicked smart and witty, too – a huge plus in my list of desirable qualities for long-term hooking up.  We get together every afternoon at 3 o’clock and laugh at silly jokes she makes and dance to the music played by her favorite DJ for the day.  This girl puts me to shame on the dance floor, but she never makes fun of my moves.

    We only meet for an hour, but that hour is jam-packed with top entertainers from all over the world who are thrilled to visit with my BFF.  Of course, you know who my new girlfriend is because she’s probably one of your BFFs too.  Ellen.  As in De Generes.

    Oh yeah.  Ellen and I go WAY back, but we’ve had a kind of off-again / on again relationship since we first discovered each other in the mid 1990s.  I let her do her TV shows and helped her find Nemo back in the day and we saw each other briefly backstage at the Oscars and Emmys she hosted.  But I have to admit I put her on the back burner when she started her own talk show eleven seasons ago.

    I mean I didn’t TOTALLY forget her, but I was in a relatively new relationship with another woman who required my full attention and also involved in one of those high-pressure careers that kept me in an office during my usual Ellen liaisons.  So we languished…

    Until this year.  The unlikely year of 2013.  Why unlikely, you ask?  Well first of all, it’s an odd-numbered year and if you’ve been with me for a long time, you know I never think anything good takes place in an odd-numbered year.  Unless there’s an exceptional turn around in the last two months, I have to say my instincts of foreboding have been spot on.

    That’s what I love about my getting back together again with Ellen.  I swear the girl lifts me up.  As Reba McEntire would sing,

         You lift me up, up, up, up to heaven…

              Yes, you make my world go round.

    Ellen is a rare commodity in the world these days.  She’s an optimist who wants to spread the spirit of love and hope to a people who need to look at life with renewed faith in the kindness of each other.  Her generosity touches the hearts of the hardened and encourages them to try again.  Give each other a chance.

    So for the naysayers who shake their heads and mutter Oh well, anybody can be nice for an hour, I say shame on you.  My BFF Ellen rocks and you’ll agree if you take the time to get to know her – which is kind of like what we should be doing with everybody else we meet.  For an hour or even longer.