I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: death

  • then sings my soul – the end (from Not Quite the Same)

    then sings my soul – the end (from Not Quite the Same)


    Two roads diverged in a tumultuous roller coastal relationship between Janie and me for seven years from 1969 – 1976, from singing in the choirs of a Southern Baptist seminary in Fort Worth, Texas to singing duets in the Pacific Northwest to the music we made together working in our leadership roles in Columbia, South Carolina where Janie worked for the Women’s Missionary Union of the South Carolina Baptist Convention and sang in choirs I directed in two different Southern Baptist Churches in the area for four years. From the west coast to the east coast and Texas in between, we tried to find a place where our guilt over our sins of “unnatural affection” could be absolved. No matter where we rode to, we always found ourselves there; and Janie didn’t like what she found. She needed to find a place of forgiveness for the life we shared, redemption from the guilty feelings that plagued her. We lived, sang, laughed, cried, and loved not only each other but also our families. But after seven years of agony and ecstasy, we each took a different road.

    As I approached thirty years of age, I began to look outside our relationship again for comfort and acceptance. I knew I was on a mission to preserve who I was, the same mission I had been on since my college days at The University of Texas in Austin. My days of searching for absolution, for forgiveness for being who I was, who I had always been, had to be over or I would be lost to a place where the flames of hell licking around me might never be extinguished. I resigned as the music and youth director of the State Street Baptist Church in Cayce in the Bicentennial Year of 1976, the year my fifty-one-year-old father died from cancer.

    My life with Janie ended messily, and I will regret forever my role in that painful separation for which there were no excuses to be made, no pardon to be found. To quote a country and western song, Hey, won’t you play another somebody done somebody wrong song? I did her wrong, much more than just lyrics to a song. Janie went back to seminary when our relationship finally shattered, this time in Louisville, Kentucky to another Southern Baptist institution where she graduated with a master’s degree in religious education and church music.

    We maintained our friendship over time and distance through infrequent phone calls, rare letters, brief visits when she came back to see friends here in South Carolina. In 1982, Janie realized a lifelong dream of serving God as a foreign missionary and was appointed by the Southern Baptist Mission Board to Zambia in Africa. She would go to the ends of the earth to find that place where her faith became visible to herself. On December 3rd, 1982, Janie wrote me a letter that gave insight to her life there. In her typically forthright manner, she described the struggles and contradictions that plagued her in those early months, the same ones that continued to haunt her for the next twenty years. She carried her songs and her faith across continents and over time to find her way home. Africa is my home, she once told me. My heart and soul are with the people there.

         “I’m so thankful for such a clear sense of calling. It’s all that has kept me here, at first. I really love Lusaka (Zambia), and I’m feeling very at home, most of the time. I’ve been homesick some, and I’ve been afraid. Armed robbery is a real problem. I have bars on my windows and doors, a dog, a night guard, and a wall around my house! At first, all those things just scared me more! But I’m feeling comfortable now…

    The music here is wonderful, Sheila. They sing 3-part harmony, with drums and shakers as their only accompaniment. No music – they couldn’t read it if they had it. You’ll love it when you hear it. I’ll send you a tape sometime...”

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

    Janie’s birthday was June 4th., a day I remember every year to celebrate a remarkable woman whose music was the cornerstone of her faith in herself and all those she loved. I owe Janie for many good musical memories, but the greatest gift she gave me was bringing me to Columbia where I have remained for fifty years. I hope somewhere she’s singing in a touring choir with someone she loves.

     album we made when we came to Columbia – probably 1974 

    (I was 28, Janie was 27) 

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    Thank you to those who have followed this series. Please stay tuned.

        

        

       

  • Epilogue For Deep in the Heart Revisited

    Epilogue For Deep in the Heart Revisited


    I find it almost as difficult to leave Richards at age sixty as I did when I was thirteen. The family and friends of that small town live in vivid memories that come easier to me than what I had for lunch yesterday. Alas, I realized in writing these stories that I am now the age my grandparents were when I left Richards. And I know, for sure, that they were old. I never returned to live in Richards, but my dad was true to his word, and we visited there frequently after we moved away. When I got my first car in college, Richards was my number-one destination. And so, it has remained for the rest of my life. Now though, when I visit, my first stop is Fairview Cemetery, the beautiful resting place for almost all the family and friends in this book. The setting is a hill overlooking rolling pastures, with cattle grazing nearby. Each time I visit I hear the voices of my childhood and am grateful for that time and place and those loved ones. And often I hear, echoed across the years: “Sheila Rae, it’s getting late. You better come in before it gets too dark.”

     For my birthday in April this year, my friend Meghan gave me a reading with an oracle who felt I needed to return to my earlier writings, read them again, and try to determine whether they still say what I want to say. Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing was published in 2007 when I was sixty-one years old. Much has changed in the past sixteen years.

    The book is a collection of stories about coming of age during the mid twentieth century in a small town called Richards located in rural Grimes county in southeast Texas – the stories of a young girl who could identify her feelings of being different without being able to name them, a little girl who loved her dysfunctional family that treasured its Texas heritage. My dad whom I adored was famous for declaring you can take the girl out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the girl when I moved three thousand miles away to Seattle as a young adult. A subsequent move to South Carolina several years later brought me closer to Texas but still a thousand miles from home.

    While I have made my home in South Carolina for the past fifty years, I continued to cling to my Texas roots with a brief actual reconnection to them from 2010 – 2014 when my wife Teresa and I bought a home in Montgomery to help with my mother’s care. My mother had severe dementia, a condition that required placing her in a Memory Care Unit of an assisted living facility in Houston. Montgomery was eighteen miles south of Richards so in a very real sense I finally did go home again.

    During that four-year sabbatical we purchased our own headstone in the Fairview Cemetery I mentioned in my Epilogue; I had it placed below my mother and father’s stone in our section of the cemetery that holds the dust and ashes of family and friends. I refused to leave deep in the heart of Texas with Fairview’s overlook of rolling pastures and cattle grazing nearby.

    Sadly, Texas in 2023 is now the single villain capable of taking Texas out of me. The culture of gun violence within the state that provides opportunities for daily shootings, mass murders, bluebonnets replaced by the red blood flowing in the killing fields across the state, politicians who are dependent on revenues from gun shows, the unhumanitarian crisis at the border with Mexico as immigrants from around the globe seek asylum in America – all conspire to drown out the voices of my childhood described in this first memoir.  It’s getting later, and I’m afraid of the call to come in from the dark that once was a sweet melody but now has an ominous refrain.

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

    For the children.

  • if not us, who? if not now, when?

    if not us, who? if not now, when?


    Look, Joe and other folks, number one is that you people are not listening to 61% of American citizens who want a ban on these assault rifles according to a Fox News Poll in April, 2023.

    Thoughts and prayers are not enough. Ban the damn assault weapons, ban them all.

    If not us, who? If not now, when?

  • guns over children? american carnage

    guns over children? american carnage


    Civil war has been declared on American citizens going about their activities of daily life by other American citizens using AR-15s, the chosen weapon of this war.

    Is anybody listening?

    Ban the damn things. Ban them all.