I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Author: Sheila Morris

  • Pretty scolds me

    Pretty scolds me


    As we turned into the driveway this morning from running errands that included taking Carl to the vet over the river and to the city for evaluation and annual shots by 9 a.m., then driving completely in the opposite direction from the vet to my eye doctor to pick up a pair of eyeglasses being repaired but breaking the heavy traffic with a quick stop at the Rush’s drive thru for our daily fix of iced tea. When I saw the large Ukrainian flag we fly at the edge of our carport, I said oh my goodness. Those poor Ukrainian people are having such a horrible life; I see the images every day of their losses. I continuously worry so much about the children.

    When Pretty came to a stop at the carport, she turned to me and said you are so negative. You always see the worst in everything anymore.

    To which I replied, maybe because I am getting old.

    May Sarton (1912 – 1995) was a Belgian-American novelist, poet, and memoirist who wrote in her journal At Seventy published in 1984: “What I want to convey is that, in spite of the baffling state of the world around us – war in the Falklands and in the Middle East, poverty, recession, racism at home – it is still possible for one human being, with imagination and will, to move mountains. The danger is that we become so overwhelmed by the negative that we cannot act.”

    What I want to convey to Pretty is that, in spite of the baffling state of the world around us – war in Ukraine and in the Middle East, poverty, inflation, racism at home, a former president of the United States surrendering today for defying the laws set forth by our founders in the Constitution – it is still possible for one human being, with imagination and will, to move mountains. The danger is that we become so overwhelmed by the negative that we cannot act.

    I believe that in the past six years I have become more overwhelmed by the negative than I realized so from this day forward I promise to project positivity for the sake of my family, friends, and followers.

    Hm. I hope I haven’t chosen a bad day to make that pledge. TV news off.

    ***********

    P.S. The eyeglasses weren’t ready – the woman told me she had been on vacation so the lens had arrived but they hadn’t been placed in a frame. They will call me. But not to end on a negative note, the woman at the Rush’s drive-thru was the friendliest person ever. Seriously, the…friendliest…person…ever.

  • longing for Happily Ever After

    longing for Happily Ever After


    A benefit of having written 869 posts over the past fourteen years is the luxury of searching for subjects I’m certain I must have written about at some point in time. As I prepared for the onslaught of news surrounding the surrender of a former president of the United States to the state of Georgia tomorrow for issues concerning the election of 2020, an ex-president who was well acquainted with the concept of human frailty, in addition to the circus atmosphere already evident in preparation for the first debate in the 2024 presidential election by the Republican candidates tonight, I searched for a piece I wrote in 2016. Sure enough, as my mother would say, I found my opinions on human frailty haven’t changed.

    Full disclosure to avoid any semblance of plagiarism – I stole this idea from my current favorite BBC series Lark Rise to Candleford. (Current to me but originally aired in 2008 – 2011.) Dorcas Lane was the postmistress caught in a wave of changes to her small town of Candleford in Oxfordshire at the end of the 19th. century. Her notoriety extended beyond the walls of the post office due to her persistent meddling in everyone’s affairs.

    Her maid Minnie was a wonderful addition to the cast in the second season with her penchant for asking questions that were “extraordinary.” In the episode I watched today, Minnie was a-twitter with questions about just what does Happily Ever After really mean in affairs of the heart. Dorcas was prepared to answer with wisdom to share and spare.

    “We all want life to be simple and our relationships to be enchanted, and then along comes human frailty. Before we know it, all will be lost.”

    Human frailty. I have seen a ton of that going around in the world lately. So much so that it seems like an epidemic. Waves of it. Oceans of it. Human frailty runs rampant from Orlando to Dallas to Minnesota to Baton Rouge. It zigzags through a packed crowd in a huge commercial truck in Nice, France before striking again in a failed military coup in Turkey. It shouts angry hate-filled  rhetoric in a large convention hall in Cleveland, Ohio before skipping across the Atlantic again  with gunfire in a shopping mall in Munich. Behind every evil stands the specter of human frailty.

    Thank goodness for the relief of Lark Rise, a break from the onslaught of bad news on my favorite 24-hour news channels with their 24-hour news cycles. Yes, give me a good conversation with Twister Terrell, another of my favorite friends from Lark Rise, who sums up what happens when human frailty runs rampant.

    “Some folks got neither logic nor reason nor sense nor sanity.”

    Here’s hoping somewhere… sometime… somebody unravels the key to human kindness and compassion for each other that will not only change the news cycles but enable us to rediscover the logic, reason, sense and sanity that our human frailty disguises.

    Like Minnie, I long for Happily Ever After.

    *************

    Slava Ukraini. For the children.

  • say her name Laura Ann “Lauri” Carleton

    say her name Laura Ann “Lauri” Carleton


    Laura Ann “Lauri” Carleton

    Hate had no place in her heart or in her store when sixty-six- year-old Lauri Carleton was shot and killed at her place of business on Friday, August 18th., 2023 for her refusal to take down a gay Pride flag she flew outside her store in Lake Arrowhead, California every day. She will be celebrated by her family and friends as a brave ally of the LGBTQ+ community who gave her life in the outrageous act of believing love is love.

    Rest in peace, Lauri, but know that the community you died for will never rest in peace as long as forces rage against equal justice for all.

    Say her name: Laura Ann “Lauri” Carleton.

  • the power of the written word

    the power of the written word


    I never fully understood the power of writing until I heard other people read what I wrote.  My stories were safe.  They would be remembered and told by these women and others like them.  Although I thought the night revolved around me, I was wrong.  They inspired me. These women treasured words and ideas that created bonds among them.  My words were now a little part of their wealth of knowledge that lived beyond the pages. I was elated and honored to be the first author invited to attend their book club meeting, the eleventh anniversary of the diverse group of ten members. The club had chosen my second book Not Quite the Same as their book of the month in August, 2011. The night was not only great fun but also inspirational.

    Dame Daphne du Maurier, the English author and playwright, decries our infatuation with literary public readings by writers, noting that “writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.” She makes a good point, although I have to admit I love to read my own words aloud.  Maybe it’s because I often read audibly as I write. Therefore it makes sense I like to read to other people. I was so taken with the sound of my own voice I made an audio version of my first book, Deep in the Heart:A Memoir of Love and Longing. My thanks to the three people who actually bought that CD, wherever you are. 

    I believe all of us have stories to tell, that storytelling is a primal need. I’ve seen stones in New Mexico that are hundreds of thousands of years old, and you know what’s on them?  Narratives of tales someone wanted to tell. They’re told in drawings on the rock faces, but they were someone’s disciplined efforts to communicate, and I felt I was there with the storyteller when I stood next to their work. I never sat down to write a book. I wanted to save my stories of the people and places in them. They became a book because I couldn’t quit writing.  Now, it’s like not being able to turn off a faucet.

    *********************** 

    Flannery O’Connor, the noted Southern Gothic writer, answered the question for me of why I write: I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I write.

    Tell it, Sister Girl.

           

               

  • yesterday when I was young

    yesterday when I was young


    This morning I woke with Roy Clark’s version of “Yesterday When I Was Young” playing in a loop in my head, I think possibly because Pretty and I volunteered to help at a memorial tennis tournament yesterday for a good friend’s daughter whose song would be Today When I Was Young, when I was brave, when I was fierce, I died too soon in 2022 at the age of 36. As the song played over and over in my head, I began to wonder about the singer and songwriter.

    Roy Clark, the singer whose version I remember best, was born in 1933 in Meherrin, Virginia and died on November 15, 2018 in Tulsa, Oklahoma six weeks following the songwriter Charles Aznavour’s death in the south of France. Clark was the son of a laborer on the railroad and in the sawmills of Virginia while Aznavour was born in Paris in 1924 to parents who had escaped the Armenian genocide. I was struck by the random coincidence of their deaths, the musical connection between two giants in their respective professions.

    Two men from widely disparate origins and musical backgrounds, yet their music met in 1969 when Clark recorded “Yesterday When I Was Young” that was written and sung by Aznavour as “Hier Encore” (yesterday again) in 1964. Doreen St. Felix wrote a tribute to Aznavour in The New Yorker on October 23, 2018 while the Ken Burns Country Music Documentary that premiered in 2019 on PBS included excerpts from Clark’s biography.

    “On October 1st, Charles Aznavour, the world’s last and greatest troubadour, was found dead in the bath at his home in the small village of Mouriès, in southern France. He was ninety-four. Aznavour’s career spanned nearly eighty years, at least a thousand songs, three hundred albums, dozens of tours, and many, many films. His music, animated by an earthy interest in what addles and excites the common man, had a revolutionizing impact on French pop, extending its lifetime well past its mid-century golden age, and its influence well beyond the borders of Aznavour’s nation. Logically, his death should not have been a shock. Age must do its ravishing, even to those who have acquired the sheen of the immortal.” (Doreen St. Felix)

    “…The following year [1963], Roy Clark had his first hit – Bill Anderson’s “The Tips of My Fingers” – and in 1969, his song “Yesterday When I Was Young” became a hit on both the pop and country music charts. In the decades that followed, he would place more than 50 songs on the country charts, including nine Top 10s. It was also in 1969 that Roy received a call from Jim Halsey about hosting a new television show, based loosely on the hit variety show Laugh In, but swapping out youth culture for country music, rural one-liners, and blackout comedy. At its peak, Hee Haw reached 30 million viewers weekly and Clark became an ambassador for country music…” (Ken Burns)

    Yesterday, when I was young the taste of life was sweet like rain upon my tongue. I teased at life as if it were a foolish game the way an evening breeze would tease a candle flame. The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned, I always built to last on weak and shifting sand. I lived by night and shunned the naked light of day and only now I see how the years have run away. Yesterday, when I was young there were so many songs that waited to be sung. So many wild pleasures that lay in store for me and so much pain my dazzled eyes refused to see. I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out. I never stopped to think what life was all about and every conversation that I can recall concerns itself with me and nothing else at all.

    Unlike the lyrics in this song, I do stop to think what life was all about, a personal luxury at the statistical life expectancy age for women in the United States of 77.28 years which is my age today. I can identify with these lyrics, with its universal themes of how the years run away, the wild pleasures mixed in with the dazzling pain, teasing at life, dreams that won’t ever be realized – all compressed into memory makers. But I had a reminder yesterday that my age is a gift, unmerited favor, grace that should be celebrated every day.

    *************

    Each of you is a part of my gift of life – I am thankful for you. Rest in peace, KK.