Author: Sheila Morris

Ok, so I promised to include new material not in I’ll Call It Like I See It – yet!   Here’s a fresh story hot off the presses…hope you enjoy.

SALLY AND CHANCE – AN UNUSUAL LOVE STORY

            If you spend time in a small town in Texas, you can be pretty sure you’ll meet a storyteller or two and be thoroughly entertained with gossipy tales about town politics and politicians or a hurricane that blew through a few years ago or the high school football team that won state or the best game the Aggies and Longhorns ever played or whatever happened to the Cowboys anyway when an Arkansas boy named Jerry Jones bought them or why did the Houston Oilers have to move to Tennessee?   Most likely you’ll find out who has the best chicken fried steak and hamburgers in town and the name of the newest Mexican food restaurant that’s run by authentic Hispanics and not one of those dagnabit chains.   The number one topic in every small town in southeast Texas in the summer of 2011 for sure, however, has been the drought, as in no rain.   Not a drop for weeks.   Record triple-digit temperatures for days and no rain to cool off anything or anybody.   And so on.  My listening ear was almost on autopilot and I could nod my head at appropriate intervals and tsk! tsk! about the weather with the best of them.

            And then I met Sally, and no my name isn’t Harry, but Sally woke me up with a real Texas love story.   Good storytellers can appear in the strangest places and most unexpected times, and this one was no exception.  

            My friend Carol and I drove over to Tomball, a small town between our home town of Montgomery and Houston, the giant behemoth of a city forty miles southeast of us.   We both took items to be framed because Carol said she knew the best frame shop in the county and it was in Tomball.   She knew the woman and her husband who ran the shop and vowed they were the best framers in the business.   Well, that was good enough for me.   Carol was a reliable resource for all things artsy craftsy antiquey and anything in between.

            When we entered the little shop, I saw it was an art gallery as well as a frame shop but wasn’t surprised because many retail stores combine the two, particularly in a town the size of Tomball with its population of 9,089.   I could also see right away I would love the unpretentious shop because much of the art displayed on the walls and scattered about on easels was Texana.   You know what I mean.  Cowboys and cows, boots and spurs, horses, Indian chiefs – all the nostalgic western images that made Texans, both native and transplanted, believe they remembered who they were.   You either got it and liked it or didn’t get it and made fun of it.   I got it.

            The shop was empty except for Sally and her husband Bill.   The first thing I noticed about this woman was her hair.   She had big hair, as we used to say when we described my Aunt Thelma’s signature beehive hairdo or the coiffures of the women who attended the Pentecostal Holiness Church.   Sally’s suspiciously colored reddish blonde white hair was swept up and back and appeared to be longer than it probably was.   Regardless, it was big and suited the woman who greeted us with a smile the same size as her hair.   She exchanged pleasantries with Carol who introduced me to Sally and Bill and explained our mission.   We had brought our assortment of pictures and posters and prints in with us and Sally escorted us to the back of the shop where we could lay them out to be measured and matched with mats and frames.   Bill disappeared into his work room.

            Carol told me to go first with my things and I began to put a few pictures on the counter top in front of Sally who sat down and reached for her measuring tape.   But then, she seemed to lose interest in the job ahead of her and launched into a monologue about the heat this summer.   And could we believe it?   Lightning struck her air conditioning unit at her house earlier this week and she and Bill had been without cool air for two days and nights.   The first night they turned on all the fans they could find and toughed it out but last night she had looked at Bill around 8:30 and told him they had to go spend the night in a motel because she couldn’t stand the heat.   Now Sally wasn’t a small woman and I could empathize with her need for cool air and found myself caught up in the drama of spending the night in the Comfort Inn to flee the hot humid natural air of a house struck by lightning.  

            Sally embellished the story with disclosures of her being a member of the Tomball Volunteer Fire Department and some ancillary marshall’s role with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department that allowed her and Bill to drive a county vehicle.   I settled in for the long haul when I recognized Sally was the genuine article: a good ol’ gal Texas storyteller.   I noticed Carol slipped away to browse through the shop.   She evidently had heard some of these stories before.

            Sally interspersed her stories with getting down to the framing business at hand and periodically produced a frame for me to consider along with mats of various colors and textures.   I remarked that I thought the pictures in her shop were great and that I loved Texana.   She stopped measuring and her eyes lit up with the excitement of discovering a kindred spirit.   She asked me if I had noticed the pictures at the front near the cash register.   I hadn’t.

            “Well, I want you to go take a look at them right now,” Sally said.   “They’re pictures of me and Chance, the love of my life.   Go on.   Have a look.”

            I obediently followed her instructions and walked over to see the two 8 x 10 glossy photos hanging on the wall next to the check-out counter.   One was a black-and-white photo of a younger Sally in a western outfit with three not unattractive cowboys posing with her.   They stood next to a large Brahman bull.   I tried to pick out the one who was Chance.   The other photo was in color.   Again, it was a younger version of Sally in a rodeo outfit with her arm around the same bull.   I walked back to Sally and told her I thought the pictures were great and wondered which one was Chance.

            “Chance is the Brahman bull,” she said and pronounced it bray-man.   I had always called it brah-man.   “Wasn’t he beautiful?”  Sally asked in a reverent tone.   I’m sure I looked surprised and she chuckled as if she and I now shared a wonderful secret.   Chance the Bull was the love of her life.  I waited for the whole story. 

            “I got him at an auction when he was ten years old,” she said.   “My husband at the time, not Bill, said I ought not to take a chance on him but I looked right into that bull’s eyes and we had a connection.   A real connection.   It was love at first sight.   So we got him, and I named him Chance.   I had him for more than eleven years and that bull was the sweetest and gentlest animal I ever knew.   I’ve had dogs meaner than him.   I used to ride him in rodeos and the parades for the rodeos and he never minded the noise and fuss people made over him as long as I was with him.   He was oblivious to everyone but me.   It was love at first sight all right, and he loved me as much as I loved him for as long as he lived.   I’ve never felt the pure love I felt from that bull from any person in my life including my husbands and children and grandchildren.”

            She took a breath and continued.   I didn’t dare interrupt her.

            “He got to be so popular in Texas that Letterman’s people called and asked us to come to New York to be on The Late Night Show.   So we put Chance in his trailer and off we went to New York City to be on tv.   The deal was supposed to be David Letterman was going to climb up and sit on Chance in front of his live audience and of course I would be standing right there with him.   Well, honey, you should’ve seen those New York City folks’ faces when I walked Chance through the tv studio and I was never prouder of my big guy.   He didn’t pay them any mind at all.”

            “Really?” I exclaimed.   “Did David Letterman climb up on your bull?”

            “I’m just getting to that,” Sally replied as she warmed to the storytelling.   “I was waiting in the little room before we were to go on and watching the commercials at the break when I felt someone standing behind me.   You know how you can tell when somebody’s behind you.”

            I nodded, and she pressed on.

            “Well, it was David Letterman in the flesh,” Sally said.   “I must have looked kinda funny at him because he said, ‘Listen, lady, are you going to make sure nothing happens to me with that bull of yours?’  So I said, ‘Mr. Letterman, as long as I’m with Chance, you’re as safe as if you were in your own mother’s arms.’   He smiled and said that was good enough for him.   But the funniest thing was when we went on the air, he chickened out at the last minute and wouldn’t get close to Chance.   But, then, the audience took over and made such a production that he ended up getting on him for about a second.   He couldn’t believe how gentle my Chance was but he wasn’t interested in pushing his luck, let me tell you.”   Sally laughed and stopped talking.   She began to fidget with the mats for my pictures.

            “Wow,” I said.   “That was some story.   You and Chance were tv stars.   Amazing.   Whatever happened to him?”

            “Oh, he died an old man’s death,” Sally said.   “Peaceful as he could be, but it nearly broke my heart.   I cried for days when I lost that bull.   But, I’ll tell you something about Chance.   Some of those professors at A & M (Texas A & M University) took skin cells from my big fellow and they cloned him.   Yessiree, and they cloned him and called him Chance II.   First successful cloning of a Brahman anywhere.”

            “You’re kidding,” I exclaimed.   “Did you ever go see him?   Was he just like your Chance?”

            “I didn’t go for a long time,” Sally said.   “But my husband  finally convinced me to go  and yes, he looked exactly like my beloved Chance.   Exactly like him.   But you know what was different?   The eyes.   They were the same color as my Chance’s eyes but we had no bond.   No connection.   He let me pet him but I wouldn’t trust much more than that.   He didn’t have Chance’s soul.”   She took off her glasses and wiped a few tears from her eyes.   I was mesmerized by the story and pictured her trying in vain to recapture her lost love in an experimental lab at A & M.   So close – and yet so far away.

            Sally told me other stories that afternoon while I made my selections for frames and mats from her suggestions.   She had started riding wild bulls in rodeos when she was forty-one years old and had ridden for a year but retired when the broken bones and bruises became too much for her battered body.   I tried to figure out how old Sally was and guessed she was in her early seventies and wondered how many stories she could tell to her customers who were good listeners.   She finished with my items and gave me a total that was reasonable for the work she and Bill were going to do. And a bargain when you consider the storytelling was free.  I looked at the clock and realized we’d fiddled with my pictures for forty-five minutes.   Carol must be ready to kill me, I thought.

            Luckily, she wasn’t and I waited for her to pick out her mats and frames.   Sally stuck to her business, and Carol and I left a little while later.    On the way home I asked Carol if she’d heard Sally’s stories about Chance and she said she’d heard them before today but they were good ones so you didn’t mind overhearing them again.   I smiled and said I was already looking forward to my next trip to Tomball.   I was a sucker for a good love story and Sallie knew how to tell one.

               “Are you looking for Selma?” someone asked.

            I turned around to see an attractive, young Latino woman with a name tag indicating she worked in the assisted-living facility where my mother lived.  She smiled at me.

            “Yes,” I said.  “I am.”

            “She’s in our church service that’s just getting started.  I’ll take you to her.”

            I followed her down the hall past the main dining room.  I recognized several of the women who were preparing the tables for the Sunday noon meal.  It was Easter Sunday, and the tables looked lovely with centerpieces of fresh colorful flowers.  The main dining room was a very large, bright room with a row of windows in the rear that offered good views of the manicured back yard.  The round tables seated eight people.  The napkins and table cloths were white linen.  It was like a dining room in a resort hotel, or on the Titanic, I thought as I walked past it.

            “Here we are,” Rosa said.  She pointed to a room on our right.  I stepped into the space as she opened the door for me.

            The small, white, windowless room looked more suitable for a clandestine rendezvous than a worship service.  But the cluster of seated parishioners waited expectantly as an older man in a dark suit and tie supervised a younger man and woman as they prepared to lead the faithful on this holiest of days.  I searched the group for my mother but didn’t find her.

            “Sheila, is that you?  Well, darling, you didn’t call me.  I can’t believe it!”  I heard my mother’s voice and searched for the source.  And there she was, sitting in a wheel chair in the front row that consisted of six women in wheel chairs.  That’s why I hadn’t found her.  I wasn’t looking at the row of wheel chairs because I had never seen my mother in one before.  I was stunned and heart-broken.  Since my last visit a month ago, she wasn’t able to move on her own.  I walked to her and gave her a big hug and kissed her cheek.

            “I know I didn’t call.  I wanted to surprise you,” I said to her.  “I hope you’re glad I came?”

            She nodded, and her face lit up with genuine joy.  “Oh, yes.”

            Rosa brought a chair for me and set it next to my mother.  She introduced me to the volunteer priest and his assistants—a young married couple who were helping for the special service.

            “This is my daughter, Sheila,” my mother said to them.  “She’s come all the way from South Carolina.  It’s a thousand miles to South Carolina.” 

            They murmured their appreciation for my journey.  Then, they returned to their preparations as they lit votive candles placed on an old, tiny, wooden table next to the brown lectern a few feet away from us.  The trio appeared to be a bit disorganized as they attempted to separate well-worn prayer booklets from newer handouts made especially for Easter.  We were close enough to hear them discussing their roles for the service while they distributed the materials to the residents.

            “These people are Catholics, so we read a lot from books they bring,” my mother confided to me in a tone that was not her quiet voice.  “The songs are awful.  Nobody plays any music.”

            Indeed, Mom was right.  We read from the booklets whenever we all found the same page.  Our liturgies were frequently interrupted by arguments among the women in the front row involving page numbers and the bold lettering of responses.  The priest and young couple appeared unfazed and totally at ease with these outbursts regarding the order of worship and general confusion.  They stopped, turned pages for the women, and moved bravely forward with the readings of the day.  Thanks be to God.

            Mom was also right about the music.  It was terrible.  I felt sorry for the poor priest who tried to inspire us to sing.  Evidently, very few members of the makeshift congregation were practicing Catholics.  Those who were had forgotten the un-melodic songs.  Everyone attempted to make a joyful noise, but, in the end, the tunes lacked eighteenth-century chord structure, and the priest eventually gave up on us.  The room breathed a collective sigh of relief.

            The service culminated with the Eucharist, or Holy Communion.  One slight problem was that no one remembered to bring the wine representing the blood of Christ.  No matter.  The younger couple had brought the wafers purporting to be the body of Christ, and they moved through the room offering the bread to each member of the congregation.  Wine wasn’t mandatory for real communion, as their sweet smiles surely fed the souls gathered in that room.  Amen.

           When the service was over, Rosa came to collect her group that needed an escort to their area.  I told her I would take Mom, and I pushed my mother down the hall past the main dining room to the Memory Care Unit.  It was a short distance in literal measurements, but the length of the hallway spanned two different worlds.  I reached the locked door to the Unit and discovered the security code had changed since my previous visit.  I left Mom at the door and went to get the new code from an attendant.  By the time I returned, another woman stood behind Mom’s wheel chair.   She had decided to push the chair for some reason known only to her.   I held the door for them, and she rolled Mom into the secured section.

            She continued to push the chair slowly through the community room and down a smaller hallway to Mom’s room.  As I opened the door, she wheeled my mother into her room and stood silently behind her.  Mom seemed to notice her for the first time.

            “What are you doing here?” she asked sharply.  “You don’t belong in my room.”

            “They told me to come in here,” the woman replied defensively.  “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

            “Yes, you do,” my mother said with a degree of exasperation.  “And, I want you to go this minute.”

            “Mom, I’ll take her to her room,” I said.  “Give me a second, and I’ll be right back.”

            The elderly woman was attractive, but she had a vacant look in her eyes that appealed to me for direction.  I took her hand and led her out of Mom’s room and down the hall to the left.

            “Do you know which room is yours?” I asked her.  She shook her head.

            We stopped at each of the five apartment doors on Mom’s hall.  It was like a college dormitory, I thought.  Each door had the occupant’s name on a small brass plate.  We stopped in front of every one of them.

            “Are you Alice?” I asked.  She considered that name thoughtfully, and then shook her head.

            “Are you Mary?” I asked at the next door.  Without hesitation, she shook her head vigorously.  Definitely not Mary.

            “Well, I know you aren’t Ben,” I said, as we moved along.  Apparently, she wasn’t so sure.  She stared at Ben’s door.

            I felt someone behind me and turned to see Rosa walking quickly toward us.

            “Willa.  Here you are,” Rosa said.  “We’ve been looking everywhere for you.  We were worried.”

            The woman whose name was Willa dropped my hand and reached for Rosa’s.  She smiled and relaxed.  Someone knew who she was.

            “I was running out of doors,” I said.  “I’m glad you found us.  Willa was fine, but I think she was worried, too.”

            Rosa led Willa away, and I watched the two of them.  Willa was like a lost gentle lamb that had been rescued by a familiar shepherd.

            “It’s time for lunch,” Rosa said.  “Do you need help with Selma?”

            “No, I’ll bring her now.”

            I dreaded lunch in the Memory Care Unit.  We ate in a modest room around the corner from the common living area.  The tables had the same white linen napkins and table cloths like the ones in the main dining room and a reasonable attempt for floral centerpieces, but it was decidedly different.  The first thing I noticed on this Easter Sunday was there were fewer people in the group.  The tables were arranged to seat two or three now instead of the longer ones that had accommodated six and eight.  Many of the usual faces were gone, and I wondered if death had taken them, or if the economy forced their caregivers to move them.  I counted twelve, and I remembered the number had been twenty-two when Mom joined the Unit two and a half years ago.  Six of the twelve had been with her from the beginning.

            I knew the staff, and they made a place for Mom and me at a table for two.  This involved changing the routine seating arrangements and wasn’t easy.  Willa was sitting alone and happily exchanged her chair to sit in Mom’s regular place next to Jean, who showed her displeasure by slapping Mom’s hand when she moved.  Mom quickly notified everyone in the room, and Jean was properly admonished by the staff for her inappropriate behavior.  Jean and Mom had a shaky relationship at best, and I had a feeling this conflict wasn’t unusual.  Jean didn’t display a shred of contrition, and Mom forgot it ten seconds later when her fried chicken arrived.

            The food was delicious, and Mom and I both enjoyed the meal and being together.  She told me to be sure and save room for dessert because on Sunday, we got ice cream sundaes.  We did get them, and they were as good as she promised.  Our conversation was the only one in the room, however.  The others were quiet as the three women who served us moved among the residents to encourage them to eat.  Jean continued to pout and complained periodically that Mom was too loud and that the woman who was sitting with Mom wasn’t supposed to be there.  Communion with attitude.  Amen?

            The traditional Easter egg hunt came to us mid-afternoon through the children of the staff members.  The day was beautiful, and the fenced courtyard area was the perfect setting for a party.   Those in our lunch group pushed their walkers or were wheeled outside into the bright sunlight, and those who could sat in the Adirondack chairs under the portico.  I met three other daughters who were visiting their mothers today and was glad I was there with my mother.

          Willa was one of several women who made their own Easter bonnets in a pre-party craft activity.  She was quite pleased with it and carefully held it in place on her head the entire afternoon.  Mom missed the bonnet fun, but she loved watching the children find the eggs with the candy in them.

            The Latino women who took care of my mother and the others brought their children to enjoy the search for the pastel-colored plastic eggs filled with candy in the tranquil setting of the facility’s outdoors.  Eggs were hidden everywhere, including on and around the residents.  Jim, a tall, sad, unshaven man who never spoke and who struggled to move opened the egg Rosa placed in his shirt pocket and ate the candy before the kids arrived.  He wasn’t waiting.

            The small group of children burst into the courtyard with an exuberance all youngsters bring to filling an Easter basket.  Ages ranged from four to twelve, with one six-month-old baby girl held by her mother.  They were dressed in their Sunday best.  Little boys had ties and jackets, and little girls were in pretty dresses.  It could’ve been a movie set, I thought, because they were strikingly good-looking.  They flew around grabbing eggs with gusto, and their baskets filled quickly.  They were noisy, laughing, talking, and incredibly alive.

            It was the Resurrection.  For a few brief minutes, the stones were rolled away from the minds buried deep in the tombs of the bodies that kept them hidden.  The children raced around the residents searching for treasures and exclaiming with delight when one was discovered.  One little boy overlooked a blue egg under a wheel chair, and Jean tapped his shoulder and pointed it out to him.  He was elated, and flashed a brilliant smile at her.  She responded with a look of pure delight.  The smiles and murmurings of the elderly were clear signs of their obvious joy and happiness that proclaimed the reality of Easter.  Hallelujah. We were all risen.

            Memories were made and lost that afternoon.  The children who came to the place where their mothers worked to find eggs among the old people were unlikely to forget this day.  Years from now some will tell the stories of the Easter Egg Hunt with the Ancient Ones.  The stories will be as different as their own journeys will take them.  For my mother and her friends, no stories will be told because they won’t remember.  My mother doesn’t know I was there for her on Easter this year, and that’s to be expected.  But, I remember I was, and it’s enough for now.

            I was born on Easter Sunday morning in April 1946, and that makes this year my sixty-fourth Easter.  I recollect a few of the earliest ones from my childhood, and they are good memories because they are about the love and warmth of my family.  I also remember having a hard time finding eggs in the church hunts.  But, to be honest, in recent years, Easter Sundays have been difficult to distinguish from any other day of the week.  When I moved away from my family in Texas as a young adult to explore my identity and resolve my conflicts within myself, I didn’t know I’d be gone for forty years.  I also had no way of knowing one of the costs of my freedom from family togetherness was my absence from family rituals.  Distance, travel time, money, job obligations, girlfriends—these were the obstacles I had to overcome for visits home.  Or, maybe they were just excuses.  I usually made the trip at Christmas, and less frequently, one more time in the summer.  But never for Easter.

            This Easter was special for me because it was a day with no excuses necessary.  I shared a Sunday sundae with my mother today at a table neither of us could have envisioned a few years before.  It was just the two of us, and, if there were barriers between us that once seemed too impenetrable, they were now lost in the cobwebs of time. 

            We are all risen, indeed.