I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: family life

  • going for gold in an inferno of sand in Tokyo while America burns and Europe floods


    Pretty follows the Olympics as faithfully as I do the tennis majors; therefore, I also follow the Olympics which apparently are being carried on at least a gazillion channels in U-verse land without an adequate GPS to locate your destination. Thank goodness we finished our Downton Abbey re-runs just in the nick of time before the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Torch was lit or we might be waiting breathlessly to meet Lady Mary’s final husband.

    And yet, here we are in 2021 with our 2020 Olympics. Nothing’s perfect.

    Unfortunately, the first event I watched was women’s beach volleyball. Word to the designer of “uniforms” in this event: shame on you. Good grief. These athletes wore bikinis which left nothing to the imagination while they (barefooted) served, set and spiked a multicolored ball on a court made of sand with temperatures of up to 113 degrees, according to the commentator during the game. Now I’m thinking that’s wrong on so many levels. But let’s start with if female athletes must wear outfits reminiscent of the Emperor Who Wears No Clothes to attract fans while they run around on sand that burns their feet, then maybe it’s time to re-think beach volleyball as an Olympic sport.

    Speaking of burning sand, the Tokyo heat is mild compared to the fires in the western states of the USA on the North American continent. Nero was spotted tuning his fiddle as firefighters waged their war against the Bootleg fire in Oregon – the largest of 88 large wildfires currently burning in the U.S. – CBS News reported today. Nearly 1.5 million acres have been scorched during this season. New fires ignite due to the drought conditions and heat waves brought about by guess what? Bazinga if you said climate change.

    As drought and unprecedented heat waves spark the loss of lives, homes and complacency in the American west, the floods across the proverbial pond on the European continent cause equal devastation of losses never to be recovered in central European countries like Germany and Belgium. The culprit: evil dastardly climate change which seems much more than imaginary to the families who have lost loved ones in addition to their hopes for the future.

    Lordy, Lordy – there’s tropical storms (think big wind and lots of rain) swirling near Japan with a Covid pandemic swirling inside the Olympic Village. So far 14 athletes have tested positive according to the official games stats released yesterday.

    Somebody STOP me – the weight of disasters is heavier than my weighted blanket which I still use in the summer time when the living is clearly not easy. We send our love to all our followers in cyberspace who are struggling for whatever personal disaster has struck. From our family to yours, we are with you. We wish we could lessen your burdens…until then…

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

  • unfinished business: a man of letters

    unfinished business: a man of letters


    In the summer of 2018 I published eleven stories focused on letters written during WWII by my father to my mother, his mother and others. I ended the series with the assurance that I had other letters written by my dad – letters to me when I was in college and beyond, more letters to his mother and father. However, I was all “lettered out” at that time and couldn’t continue.

    Today is another day, another year…summer heat continues with a vengeance. The earth is burning, scorching our world, searing our souls. Losing those we love has been too frequent in the past two years because of Covid and now its variants. Last week an entire condominium community in Miami, Florida was destroyed with more loss of lives. Gun violence rises daily in America as surely as the temperatures increase. I mourn with the families and friends of everyone who must face the reality of death.

    But today is the 45th. anniversary of a death I faced when I was only thirty years old: the loss of the man of letters. Born in 1925 in Huntsville, Texas, my dad survived 32 bombing missions as a navigator in the 8th. Air Force in Europe. He came home in 1945, eloped with his home town girl, had a disastrous honeymoon in Miami but successfully recovered to produce a daughter in 1946. He was unable to survive colon cancer in the summer of 1976.

    My dad and I grew up together. He was twenty-one when I was born. He loved to hunt doves and quail when they were in season but most of all he loved our bird dogs who were too spoiled to be much good to us in the fields, regardless of the season. He caught fish in any tank or stream in Grimes County, read poetry to me from Best Loved Poems of the American People. He taught me how to read The Houston Post – particularly the sports section. He followed the Dallas Cowboys, he coached high school basketball teams, he even coached a baseball team in Richards when he was the school superintendent of those two segregated public schools in the 1950s. He taught me to play golf on a public course in Freeport, Texas when I was a teenager. We cooled down with a root beer from the A&W root beer stand.

    He was always in school himself – the first in his family to get an undergraduate degree followed by a master’s degree that was capped off (literally) by a doctorate in education when I was also in college. He believed in God, the Richards Baptist Church, the First Baptist Church of Brazoria and finally the First Baptist Church of Richmond where his membership days were done. He also believed in writing letters.

    This letter was to his mother in lieu of a birthday card. It’s legible, reads like he talked, and so I am reminded of this time when he was nearly forty years old and finally able to buy his first home. Imagine his excitement.

    “I believe one of the ways that you have been most helpful to me is expecting good things of me. You know when you have people who believe in you, you don’t want to let them down.”

    I’ll close with a portion of a letter he wrote to me in 1970 when I was a student in Southwestern Baptist Seminary. He and I had an ongoing joke about my mother’s obsession with her camellias – hence his acknowledgment he was learning the names. Good one. Then he closed with a blessing from a Native American proverb. When I was a child, he regaled me with fictional stories about his rides with the Pony Express. I think this is a beautiful ending message so I wanted to share this with my followers in cyberspace who may appreciate the comfort he captured. My dad may have truly loved those bird dogs, but I know he also loved me.

    “May you keep your heart like the morning and may you come slowly to the four corners where men say goodnight.”

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

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

  • remembering Harvey Milk with Pride

    remembering Harvey Milk with Pride


    June is our official LGBTQ Pride Month, and I’m resurrecting this post from May, 2014 to honor a man whose life – and death –  continues to speak to us through his celebrated legacy. Lest we forget…

    Today, May 22, 2014 would have been Harvey Milk’s 84th. birthday.  Instead, his life was tragically shortened by five bullets to his head in his office at San Francisco’s City Hall in 1978 at the age of 48.  Harvey was one of the first openly gay elected LGBTQ officials in the entire USA when, on his third try, he was elected to the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco in 1977.  Eleven months later he was murdered by a former board colleague who believed the growing gay movement threatened traditional values.

    His life and death have served as an ongoing inspiration to the LGBTQ community in America and around the world.

    017

    Harvey Milk Postage Stamp Issue

    You’ve got to give them hope.  If a bullet should enter my brain,

    let that bullet destroy every closet door.

    On this day in 2014 Harvey Milk was honored by his country with the issuance of a forever postage stamp bearing his image and the colors that symbolize the movement.  Thirty-six years after his death the bullets to his brain destroyed many closet doors.

    When I bought 100 stamps this afternoon at the Post Office, the young woman said to me, You are the first person to buy these Harvey Milk stamps.  And I said, You don’t know how thrilled I am to have them.

    How appropriate on this coming Memorial Day  to remember an American hero who died for his hopes of equality and justice.

    Closet doors have opened at warp speed since Harvey’s time.  He would be amazed, as I am continually, that nineteen states and Washington, D.C. have legalized same-sex marriage.  The number of LGBTQ elected officials has grown exponentially at local, state and federal levels with the support of many organizations including The Victory Fund which has as its mission the appointment and election of members of our own community in order to take a seat at the tables of political power.

    Harvey Milk and others like him made possible an event that kicked closet doors open for hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ persons and underscored the perseverance of a community determined to make its mark on the country.  We would not go away.

    015

    Flag for March on Washington

    with two wrist bands and rings from the March

    (Memorabilia courtesy of Dick Hubbard and the late Freddie Mullis)

    On April 25, 1993 the largest march in the movement’s history was held in Washington, D.C., and the gays and lesbians came running out of their closets to participate.  You simply had to be there to take it all in.  Wow.  We were inspired, empowered.  For many of us the closet doors would never be shut again – except from the outside.

     I have a long list of heroes I will remember this Memorial Day weekend, but today I salute Harvey Milk – an ordinary man who committed outrageous acts of courage in his everyday rebellions.

    I owe you.

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

    On June 26, 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage, legalized it in all fifty states. I believe Harvey Milk would have been very proud – I know Pretty and I were.

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

  • in the event you missed the news today

    in the event you missed the news today


    “An emotional President Joe Biden marked the 100th anniversary of the massacre that destroyed a thriving Black community in Tulsa, declaring Tuesday that he had ‘come to fill the silence’ about one of the nation’s darkest — and long suppressed — moments of racial violence.

    ‘Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try,’ Biden said. ‘Only with truth can come healing.’

    Biden’s commemoration of the deaths of hundreds of Black people killed by a white mob a century ago came amid the current national reckoning on racial justice.” —— Jonathan Lemire and Darlene Superville in the AP

    Neither my American history class in West Columbia, Texas in 1963 nor my American history lectures at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966 mentioned the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. “Just because history is silent, ” President Biden said today, “does not mean that it did not take place.”

    Today we as a nation have an opportunity to acknowledge an oppressive silence about an unspeakable horror that created a generational deprivation of justice and equality which should be the rights of every American. We must not only admit the betrayal but also support actions to make amends to those survivors of the Massacre, their descendants, their home town.

    I believe as individuals we also have an opportunity, an obligation, to speak truth to our families, friends and elected officials at all levels of government about the importance of equal treatment for everyone regardless of our differences. Nelson Mandela said:

    “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

    May that be our truth.

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

  • leaving on a jet plane – returning with a rough landing

    leaving on a jet plane – returning with a rough landing


    Ok – who put that bird on my head?

    Our good friends Nekki (with monkey on shoulder) and Francie contacted Randy at Travel Unlimited who made the arrangements for Pretty and me to celebrate not only our birthdays but also our vaccinated selves with a little rest and relaxation in the Dominican Republic which is adjacent to Haiti on the island of Hispaniola – in case anyone is interested in geography.

    In July, 2014 Pretty and I flew from South Carolina to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. The trip was a mixed bag of fun and frustration for me for several reasons: tropical heat with few air conditioners for very spoiled gringos, hills within the city that seemed higher to climb every day, the realization that my knees were beginning to rebel as I tried to keep up with Pretty who is one of the world’s foremost explorers in foreign lands – and is fourteen years younger than I am. We met wonderful people, though, and brought home a new game for us called Mexican Train that we both loved. Thankfully, it’s played with dominoes and can be played while seated.

    What neither Pretty nor I realized at the time was we wouldn’t be taking another trip that required jet planes until May, 2021. This past week we visited Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, yet another tropical climate more than 1,300 miles from our home in South Carolina, a place where the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea meet. My laptop didn’t make the trip with me, the weather was perfect and, although I didn’t try parasailing, I was entertained by those who did.

    breakfast, beach, discussing lunch, margaritas, lunch,

    pool, discussing dinner, Presidente cerveza and margaritas,

    dinner, wine, sequence, spades —- repeat the next day

    Pretty made friends with margaritas again –

    as Nekki supervised pool recreation

    I was amazed at the warmth, the genuine friendliness, the kindness of the people we met at the all-inclusive resort. I, too, was cynical and skeptical of their care for us at first as being more concerned with our American dollars than for our having a memorable visit to their country. I know that tourism is very important to the Dominican economy. Yet, I felt the culture’s respect for their elders – my white hair was treated with a dignity I don’t receive here at home where senior citizens may be ignored or considered a liability while youth is celebrated with a fervent passion.

    When we came home to South Carolina this week, the news stories were very much as we left them with the exception of the Republican Party’s removal of a woman who had served as Chair of the House Republican Conference in the 116th. Congress.  Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) was removed for her unwillingness to participate in the “war against the Constitution…and the unraveling of democracy” which took place when the Party refused to accept the 2020 election results.  I have never been a fan of anyone whose last name is Cheney, but I admire her for her truth telling which has come with a remarkably high price.

    As one of the vicissitudes of life that my daddy claimed would intervene in the best laid plans of mice and men, I had traveled in a jet plane without incident to another country only to have a rough landing on the asphalt of a road near our home as I walked my dog Charly on Friday, the 14th.  Not even the 13th.

    As I bent to be a good neighbor to retrieve Charly’s deposit onto the grass of a very pristine yard we walked pass every day, Charly noticed a car passing by and jerked the leash from my hands which, in turn, jerked me to the pavement. High drama ensued, but two Good Samaritan women in separate cars stopped to rescue me. They called 911, an EMS vehicle picked me up and took me to the ER of our Lexington County Hospital. One of the women took Charly, who was horrified by my inability to get up and continue our walk, home. The other woman sat down next to me on the grass of the pristine yard. We had a lovely chat.

    All’s well that ends well, right? The cat scan in the hospital revealed no fractures or bleeding, released me on my own recognizance with a list of instructions for the elderly in how to prevent falls. I have now read the instructions and find no mention of being careful when retrieving dog poop. 

    My face resembles Rocky’s face after a boxing match, my bionic knees are now blue with a tinge of black, but my good spirits refreshed by my vacation remain. And the concern of my granddaughter for my “boo-boo?” moved me to tears. I am the luckiest Nana today.

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

    P.S. One of the women who rescued me stopped by our home that night of my accident and brought us a lovely plant in a gorgeous pot. I was touched twice by her kindness that day.