I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: family life

  • my maternal grandmother’s legacy was love

    my maternal grandmother’s legacy was love


    my Dude’s birthday is today October 20, 1898

    (d. April 19, 1972)

    This picture of my grandmother greets me every time I sit down at my desk – Lots of love, Mother is the inscription on this old photograph we found in my mother’s random pictures when Pretty and I were cleaning out her home for the last time in 2007. The picture is framed just as it was when we found it; I wonder how old my grandmother was when this picture was taken. She looks so very young to me, but then I was born when she was a 48 year old widow struggling to make ends meet – already much older than her years.

    When I was a toddler my parents and I moved in with my grandmother who became my closest friend and center of warmth in my family until I became a teenager. Bernice Louise Schlinke Boring was the daughter of Bertha Emeline Selma Buls Schlinke who was the daughter of Sophie Bartels Schawe Buls, a German immigrant from Brandenburg who as a widow married Joachim Buls in Texas in 1869. I am the daughter of Selma Louise Boring Morris Meadows who was the daughter of the woman in the picture above.

    I honor the memory of my grandmother today which would have been her 123rd birthday. One day women may live to celebrate more than a century of life, but for today I remember Dude who loved me without reservation, who always had my back, who enjoyed watching I Love Lucy, Groucho Marx and Lawrence Welk on tv with me, who shared my secret of staying up to watch our favorite shows while pretending to be asleep when Mama and Daddy got home from Wednesday night prayer meeting, who baked the best cherry pies on Sunday morning and the best kolaches on Sunday afternoon, who sent me package after package of her homemade red velvet and peach cakes when I was in college, who wrote letters in bizarre handwriting she picked up from her few grades of grammar school…

    I wish I had known then what I know now.

    You were simply the best.

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

    Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.

  • an unexpected nugget from Pretty

    an unexpected nugget from Pretty


    Yesterday I was in the unfortunate position of needing postage to mail my cousin Melissa’s birthday card – the card I already know will be late – when, alas, the postage stamps I’d ordered from the usps hadn’t arrived in the mail. At various times during the past 20 years Pretty has offered her stamps in the unlikely event I should ever run out. I routinely rejected her offer but I was in a bind yesterday and had forgotten why I refused her generosity in the past so last night Pretty found her stamp collection in a small retail shop bag she had carefully kept in the bowels of her office.

    I rummaged through the bag and a flashback hit me. Pretty doesn’t buy forever stamps because that would be too easy. Instead I found an assortment of stamps ranging from 2 cents to 33 cents. Seriously, Pretty? I couldn’t call this a stamp “collection” but it was a collection of stamps. I managed to come up with enough postage to mail Melissa’s card; usps now says a card from South Carolina to Texas could take until her next birthday to get there. Regardless, thanks to Pretty for saving the day.

    But greater thanks to her for this nugget of writing that was copied on a sheet of regular 8 x 11 white paper, folded in half and oddly mixed in with the stamps. I felt these words about racism from the American author and poet Scott Woods speaking directly to me – I wish I had written them.

    “The problem is that white people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that. Racism is a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at other people’s expense, whether whites know /like it or not. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn’t care if you are a white person who likes Black people; it’s still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you. Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another. And so on. So while I agree with people who say no one is born racist, it remains a powerful system that we’re immediately born into. It’s like being born into air: you take it in as soon as you breathe. It’s not a cold that you can get over. There is no anti-racist certification class. It’s a set of socioeconomic traps and cultural values that are fired up every time we interact with the world. It is a thing you have to keep scooping out of the boat of your life to keep from drowning in it. I know it’s hard work, but it’s the price you pay for owning everything.”

    Sometimes I’m a storyteller. Sometimes I’m a word collector much like Pretty’s stamp “collection” which saved those words for me, for all of us.

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

    Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.

  • close encounter of the cat kind

    close encounter of the cat kind


    stray cat adopted by Pretty who named her Lilibet

    (I call her Pussy)

    Naturally Pretty would settle on the nickname of Queen Elizabeth II for the recent interloper who crashed our carport four weeks ago, who now sits at the top of the steps of our kitchen door with the expectation of Fancy Feast meals twice daily, but refuses human touch. Her Royal Highness.

    I have solid reasons for resisting Pretty’s cat rescue attempts over the past 20 years: my cat allergies, our dogs’ instinctual desire to murder cats, additional vet bills…I could go on.

    Why give up the fight over the cat with Pretty now, the reasonable reader asks, to which I reply I got nothing on that. The cat showed up. Pretty started with giving her water. The next thing I knew I was ordering Fancy Feast from the grocery store. End of story.

    My friend Ellen Hawley (notesfromtheuk.com) has a cat named Fast Eddie and asked for a photo plus name of our Stray Cat so here you go, Ellen.

    I also would like to dedicate this post to the memory of my friend Luanne Castle’s cats (writersite.org/2021/10/06/making-after-loss/) Pear, Felix, Mac and Izzie. No one could love a cat more than Luanne and her husband the gardener although Pretty will surely try her best.

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    Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.

  • boo at the zoo, are we there yet? not yet

    boo at the zoo, are we there yet? not yet


    My friend Dick Hubbard who has been my most faithful reader since the days of the OG Red Man (the rescued Welsh terrier that became my alter ego in Red’s Rants and Raves) called me after my last post to say that my “grandmother inspired” posts were excessive. Now Dick is the only person who consistently rates my blogs as 5 star excellent so I want to apologize in advance to him for yet another Ella inspired post.

    Yesterday Pretty and I planned an adventurous outing at Riverbanks Zoo for the annual Boo at the Zoo experience in October. Please ask me if we have ever gone to this annual Halloween celebration. The answer is No, negatory, nunca in our 20 years together, but I ordered our tickets to take Ella and her mother Pretty Too later this month. The tickets come with complete instructions for costumes, trick or treat buckets, masks for adults, etc. I didn’t expect Boo to be so complicated.

    I hope Boo at the Zoo will be as fun as our first visit with Ella to one of Pretty’s favorite haunts: Barnes and Noble.

    Naynay, please?

    Pretty and I seem to struggle with setting boundaries.

    ***********

    Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and please stay tuned.

  • international day of the girl (or two girls!)

    international day of the girl (or two girls!)


    Pretty and I are fortunate to celebrate international day of the girl every week when we care for our granddaughter Ella who turned 2 years old on October 1st., but we were thrilled to find out earlier this year Pretty Too and Number One Son are expecting another little girl in January! Ella announced the news to everyone last week…

    May be an image of baby, sitting and indoor

    Pretty Too shared this picture of our quite grown up two year old who is more than poetry in motion – she is a force of nature – and language. Movement, words. Every new experience requires exploration and discovery. Frankly, my dears, her energy exhausts this grandmother who was 73 years old when she was born and two years older today, but Ella insists I keep up with each game we play in her imagination informed by the adventures of Deema and Sally on YouTube videos.

    The world Ella and her little sister Molly will inherit from Pretty and me will afford them opportunities to learn in an environment richer in technology with access to a wealth of answers to questions we didn’t know how to ask, but how will historians frame those answers. Who will narrate the journey of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Equal Rights Amendment failure in the 1970s and beyond, the Gay Nineties, Black Lives Matter, Love is Love, Time’s Up, a woman’s right to choose…will these historians represent the truth and consequences of denying climate change, the power of divisiveness and income inequality, the reality of hunger for the poor children not just in America but also around the world, the election of Joe Biden in 2020, the insurrection in the Capitol building on January 06, 2021. We must safeguard these truths and pass them on to our granddaughters.

    The message will be clear from us. Love who you are, love others as you do yourself. Learn to identify the difference between what is right and what is wrong. When you see something that is wrong, work to change it.

    When Ella began to love the music Pretty played for her on her cell phone, one of the first videos she saw was March, March from The Chicks. This is my message for the village that is entrusted with the care of all little girls everywhere.

    ********

    Stay safe, stay sane, get vaccinated and stay tuned.