I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Author: Sheila Morris

  • She Was Hotter than a Two Dollar Pistol


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    Maggie the Cat in famous lingerie

    The stuff that dreams are made of

    My love affair with Elizabeth Taylor has lasted longer than any of my real-life relationships and all of her eight marriages.  Liz and I go way back.

    We started in 1956 with Giant which I got to see because my mother heard it was a historical movie about West Texas oil.  I was ten years old at the time she took me to see it at the Miller’s Theater in Navasota, and I decided right then and there if this was how history looked, I was all about yesterday.  I fell in love with the heroine who was married to Rock Hudson but wild for James Dean.  She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

    The following year Raintree County was released, and it was then and is today my most favorite silver screen experience with this Golden Age of Hollywood icon.  She was “hotter than a two dollar pistol and the fastest thing around…” as George Jones sang twenty years later.  For two and a half hours, I lusted after Liz who played Susanna the Hottie southern belle who stole Johnny Shawnessy from boring whiny Nell.  I never understood why two women would be in love with Montgomery Clift anyway, but I certainly knew why he was taken with Liz.

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    “Look at the birdie, look at the tree…my gal’s the prettiest in the whole county.”

    from Raintree County

    I’ve seen that movie countless times with its Gone With the Wind wannabes and celebrated flaws, but I truly don’t care.  For some of her fans, Liz will be remembered as Maggie the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the sexy slip or Catherine in the white bathing suit in Suddenly, Last Summer or the scandalous affairs with co-stars Eddie Fisher and Richard Burton on the sets of Butterfield 8 and Cleopatra, respectively.  Others will see her as the child star in National Velvet and the Lassie movies or the deranged middle-aged Martha in 1966 in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  for which she won her second Oscar.

    She will be remembered by many for her notorious marriages and divorces – all eight of them – think Debbie Reynolds, for example.  Then think Richard Burton and Cleopatra.  If you remember the hullabaloo from those torrid days, you must also remember the  Voting Rights Act of 1965…an act that the Supremes struck down this year.  But don’t get me started on that.

    Why Liz?  Why now, you ask?

    I visited a friend this week and saw the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof poster  (a poster he bought from me at one of our downsizing yard sales!) and was reminded of the time fifty years ago when I fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor and wrote her a fan letter and received a glossy 5 x 7 “autographed” photo of her from MGM.  Love, Liz, she signed.

    And I do.

  • Where Do I Put Those Memories?


    Country music legend Charley Pride sang about a lost love many years ago and asked a question that haunts me today as I gaze at the signs of autumn around me:

    Where do I put her memory?

         I can’t chase it, erase it, I just have to face it…It’s gonna be there a long, long time.

    The days grow shorter, the pinestraw falls freely from the ancient tall pines that surround our house in Columbia, the red and gold and brown leaves from the dogwood trees mingle with each other in the straw on the ground in the back yard, the magnificent oak that hovers over the patio pummels the bricks with acorns that make Chelsea sick when she eats them, the temperature drops fifteen degrees from the scorching summer highs and the humidity decreases to a reasonable level.  Football fever takes over the weekends and wins and losses affect moods in our home.

    Autumn has arrived.  There’s no doubt about it.  The days will now be a blur through the end of the year.  Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.  The holidays propel us to another year faster than a speeding bullet.  Hide and watch.

    The losses in this year have been enormous for my family both here and in Texas, and it’s the second year in a row for these life altering events.  So many are gone that I feel like The Rapture occurred and I was left while all the good ones were taken.   I’m looking for a place to put those memories – those reminiscences of  my times with the lost ones.  I’m grateful to have them, but I’d like to have a box to put them in so that I could control when I wanted to release them into my mind.  Today the memories control me instead.

    I can’t chase them, erase them, I just have to face them.  They’re gonna be with me for a long, long time.

  • Shadows of the Evening Steal Across the Sky


    The sun was a gigantic circle of intense bright light as I walked on Old Plantersville Road tonight and the colors in the sky surrounding it took my breath away.  They were all that – and then some.  No camera this evening.  Just me and the sunset.  It’s as close as I come to a spiritual moment and not surprising that the words of a hymn I sang over and over again during my Southern Baptist days played in my head while I walked.

    Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh.

    Shadows of the evening steal across the sky.

    Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose;

    With thy tenderest blessing may mine eyelids close.

    —-Sabine Baring-Gould, published 1865

    A few raindrops fell on me as I turned toward home from the railroad track which is my usual turnaround spot.  I didn’t even care.  The colors changed quickly in the sky as the sun went down behind the trees across the pasture.  I slowed my pace to catch as many of them as I could, and the rain stopped for me so I wouldn’t have to hurry.

    The day was over, and shadows of the evening stole across the sky right in front of me.  Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose.  My Random House Dictionary defines repose as, among other things, a dignified calmness…composure.  Yes, give the weary a sweet repose.  Let all who work hard and all who are tired of fighting the same battles or any whose pain leaves them exhausted – give them a sweet repose at the end of this day.

    And may our eyelids close.

  • In Search of Stubblefield Lake


    As most of you know, I’ve had the unique opportunity of living off and on for the past three and a half years in the little town of Montgomery, Texas which is eighteen miles from Richards, the town where I was raised until I was thirteen years old.  I came back to take care of my mother who had Alzheimer’s and I had a chance to connect to her in a way that was at once incredibly sad and unbelievably healing for me.  I had similar, but not so intense, experiences with my second mother Willie and my favorite aunt Lucille who was my father’s sister.  I’ve lost all three of these women in the last eighteen months.  They were, along with my grandmothers, pillars of strength for me in my life in different ways.  I can only marvel at the examples they’ve been when I consider the times they were given for their journeys.  Remarkable.  Truly remarkable.

    During this time I’ve roamed the back roads of Grimes, Montgomery and Walker counties in my old Dodge Dakota pickup – sometimes in the company of my dogs – sometimes in my own company.  I’ve re-visited the house where I grew up and friends and cousins that I barely knew since I’ve been away for more than forty years.  I could still recognize the house and remember the love that filled it.  My cousins and friends welcomed me home as if I’d just left yesterday.

    My partner Teresa and I bought a house on Worsham Street in Montgomery, and neither of us expected the joys this neighborhood has given to us.  Sometimes I have to pinch myself when I rock on the front porch as I look up and down the little street.  Instead of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, I have the irrepressible Huss Brothers.   The Little Women of Worsham Street are friends that would make Louisa May Alcott proud.  Houses in the ‘Hood at Christmas have so many lights and decorations they put Disneyland to shame.  If Andy Griffith hadn’t lived in Mayberry, he might have been happy in Montgomery.

    Today I set off on a road trip with my dogs Red and Spike to find Stubblefield Lake, the one spot I never was allowed to go fishing with my daddy.  it’s been sixty years since our fishing trips, but I can still remember my disappointment  when he would announce he was going to Stubblefield Lake with my mother or one of my uncles and shake his head  when I asked to go.  I tagged along to every other fishing hole he knew – but never to that lake which then assumed magical proportions to me.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about the lake and wondering where in the world it was.

    Thanks to the omniscient internet, I located this lake that was made during the Roosevelt administration by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1937.  Guess where it is?  Eleven miles north and seven miles east of Montgomery  in the deep piney woods of the Sam Houston National Forest.   And I do mean deep and remote, but less than a thirty minute drive from Worsham Street.  If I’d started from Richards like my daddy would have, it would be eight miles south and seven miles east for him.  I had imagined it was an exotic distance from Grimes County and accessible only to a chosen few.

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    Eureka!

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    Peaceful

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    Steps to a fishing spot?

    I think I heard my daddy say, Well, you finally made it to Stubblefield Lake.  Yes, I did.  I didn’t have his company or a fishing pole in my hand.  Instead, I had a camera to take pictures of a place that I don’t want to forget.

  • Why Can’t I Write Something Quotable?


    Courage does not always roar.

    Sometimes courage is the quiet voice

    at the end of the day saying,

    “I will try again tomorrow.”

    Curse you Mary Anne Radmacher for coming up with words so memorable they are reproduced on a Quotable Magnet stuck on the side of my refrigerator.   Yes, a Quotable Magnet from Quotable Cards keeps company on my refrigerator with an array of other magnets with quotes from Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, J.R.R. Tolkien, Margaret Mead, Mae West and Davy Crockett.  Plus, there’s a picture magnet of me and Teresa at Graceland.  No words on that one – just musical notes in the background.  Thank you, Elvis.

    I love quotes.  I collect quotes like some people collect stamps.  I have a folder filled with hundreds of quotes I’ve saved through the years.  Some of them are attributed to Anonymous sources, but most of them have the names of the people who wrote them or spoke them.

    Would somebody please quote me?  I don’t have to be immortalized on a refrigerator magnet or greeting card, but I wish I could write something quotable.

    And for those of you who wondered what the Davy Crockett quote is, here goes:

    You may all go to hell,

    and I will go to Texas.

    Good night, and good luck.