I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Humor

  • Where Am I Now That I Need Me?


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    I think I see me at the Peachtree Rock Preserve

    We each have our own places that remind us of who we are – or who we would like to be.  Water does it for some people.  Lakes.  Rivers. Oceans.  We are drawn to waters like these for their uninterrupted flows and timelessness.  We can paddle our own canoes on a river or we can swim in an ocean or we can float behind boats in a lake.  Yes, the water reminds us of ourselves and lets us know we are at home and at peace.

    Since I am a Taurus and have a general water phobia, I wouldn’t head to the beach to look for myself if I were lost.  No, I’d go for a walk – not actually a hike these days – but a nice walk.  If I were in Texas, I’d look for me in an old Dodge Dakota pickup truck.  I’d be going for a ride in Grimes County to see the rolling hills and pastures filled with cows and horses and the bluebonnets in the spring or the splashes of bright red and yellow leaves on the hardwood trees in the fall and to enjoy the absence of traffic on the back country roads.  Usually I’d stop for my walk at the Fairview Cemetery to say hello to my family and friends who rest there now, but the recent losses make this stop too painful so I doubt that’s where I’d find myself today.

    No, I think I’d go to South Carolina to the Peachtree Rock Preserve.  I’d park in the little area reserved for visitors and I’d walk the mile on the narrow trail into the thick forest and lo and behold, I’d come to a clearing about halfway down the trail where the Peachtree Rock would sit as it has sat for millions of years.    It is as timeless for me as the ocean and my sense of awe and wonder when I saw it was as deep as the deep blue sea.  I’ve only been there once, but the feelings of strength and serenity and sheer joy I felt when I was there make it the perfect place to look for me today.

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    It was okay for me to bring a friend.

    Good.  I just found me at Peachtree Rock tonight.  Whew!  That’s a relief.  I thought I’d lost me.

  • The Fifth Set – Match Point


    Whether the surface is a hard one or made of red clay or manicured green grass, the goal is the same: to win.  To beat someone.  To play better, smarter and mentally tougher than the opponent.  To be more physical and aggressive.  To charge the net when an opening appears.  To cover the baseline when the shots go deep against you.  The court is a battlefield and the scales of justice are often tipped by net cords and fractions of inches along white lines.  The game is tennis.

    For men who play singles, the winner is usually required to win two of three sets.  In Grand Slam events, however, the rules change to three of five sets to determine the champion.  If each man wins two sets, a fifth set is played.  The fifth set is often the scene of one man’s surrender and loss to another man’s courage and inner strength.  The first four sets are evenly played, but the last one is too much for the body or mind or will or all of the above for one of the guys and the desire to win or to not lose drives his opponent to victory.

    I love fifth sets.  I particularly like them when they are close and long, and I’m not even paying for my seat in front of the television set.  Nope, I’m watching for free, but I have the Deluxe Box seats and have seen my share of Grand Slams in Melbourne, Paris, London and New York City.  From my ABCs of Agassi to Becker to Connors to my current personal favorites of Federer and Nadal I admire the passion and persistence of the five-set winners.

    There is a moment of high drama called Match Point when the difference between winning and losing in the fifth set can be measured in split-second choices and breaks in concentration.  Match points can be saved and the game can go on for hours, but in the end, a Match Point is lost and the winner takes center court with a victorious smile and wave to the crowd.

    As I watched a five-set match today at the US Open, the thought occurred to me that Match Points in tennis have an advantage over those we have in real life.  The quarter finalists I saw today knew the importance of the fifth set and its Match Point, but we may never know when we miss the chance to win –  or lose what we value most.

  • Oh Look – It’s Boo Radley!


    Friday night Teresa and I went to Trustus which is a small local theater known for its emphasis on productions that are entertaining, yet relatively avant- garde.   The play was Collected Stories by Donald Margulies and directed by Milena Herring.  We aren’t reliable patrons for the arts in Columbia, South Carolina, but we both enjoy the Trustus experience with its comfy chairs and intimate surroundings.  Adult beverages are available, and I bought a Corona Light at the bar simply because the woman in line ahead of me bought one.  I’m also an unreliable beer drinker.  When we found our seats, I was delighted to find the free popcorn baskets were still conveniently placed for our happy consumption, and I sat back with popcorn and beer to enjoy the play.

    Not so fast my friend, as Lee Corso of Espn says.  As Teresa and I took turns munching on the popcorn, an attractive woman walked over to us and said, “Oh Look!  It’s Boo Radley!”  I must have looked surprised when she and Teresa laughed together at the remark.  The woman looked familiar, but I didn’t know who she was.

    Teresa spoke up at that moment and said, “This is Melina Herring who’s directing the play tonight.”  I made an appropriate response to that news flash and told her how much we were looking forward to the play.  “Why Boo Radley?”  I asked.

    She was still laughing at her own joke.  “Because whenever we go out with Teresa, she always says she has a partner who’s in Texas on family business.  The invisible partner.  Boo Radley.   As a matter of fact, I think I remember someone asking Teresa if she’d considered the possibility you’d left her?”

    Normally I would be flattered by a comparison to a character in my favorite novel To Kill a Mockingbird, but maybe Boo Radley wouldn’t be my first choice.  I picture myself as a Scout-Atticus combo on my better days and now had to reconsider my self perception versus the perceptions of others regarding self.  I added a twinge of guilt to this observation and felt like I did when I was caught eating Christmas candy before Christmas.  Strangely unsettling.  I’d been too long gone.

    Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln – how was the play?

    I am giving it a two thumbs up.  The dynamics between the two actresses playing the older author and her successful protegé were excellent, writing fabulous, and of course, directed beautifully by the woman who called me Boo Radley.

  • The Name of the Game


    Hello. My name is Sheila and I’m a Name-a-holic.  That’s right.  For years I’ve been convinced the only reason I can’t write fiction is my inability to think of interesting names for my characters.  So I collect names like some people collect stamps or coins or antiques.  If I think about my favorite novels or short stories, I always remember the names of the characters.  For example, my favorite short story of all time, How I Came to Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty, is chock full of great names.  PapaDaddy. Uncle Rondo. Stella Rondo. Mama.  I could’ve written that story if I’d had those names to work with.

    Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.  Harper Lee’s Boo Radley and Scout.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.  Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March.  Laurie the boy next door.  Papa.  Mama.  Or, lest you fear I haven’t read a book in the last twenty years, Amir and his friend Hassan in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.  Then of course, the Texas names Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and Llewellyn Moss and the evil Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy are equally terrific.

    Well, somebody slap me….I see the problem.  In order to think up great character names you have to be an author with a fabulous name yourself.   Eudora Welty.  Mark Twain.  Arthur Conan Doyle.  Louisa May Alcott.  Khaled Hosseini.  Cormac McCarthy.  Harper Lee.  Sheila Rae Morris.  Aha, that explains it!  My name is so blah my imagination follows suit.  My only hope is Margaret Mitchell.

    Oh well.  If I ever do get my fiction in gear, here are a few of the names you can look for in my novel:   Colt Cantrell.  Chance Cantrell.  Charlie Cantrell.  (Three Texas brothers for sure.)

    My Twins Collection so far:  Leon and Lon Lane.  Madell and Adell Tolliver.  Winnie and Minnie McCune.

    If the novel includes horses, the mare’s name will be Nacho and her foals will be Frito and Dorito.

    Possible heroine names: Sequoia Potter.  Ethel Lorraine Wilson.  Maurice Sawyer.  Carolyn Briggs.  Willie Joe Boaz.

    Possible hero names:  Cotton Lyles.  Harvey Wilson.  Forest J. Hutchinson.  Lester “Gene” Archer.  Vannoy Stewart.

    As for plot to go along with this potpourri of  names, I plan to start with the fact that Whitney Houston’s mother Cissy Houston was once one of Elvis Presley’s backup singers.   Now, that’s a story just waiting to be told.

    I’ll get right on it.  I predict Mama will be one of the principal characters.

  • Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares


    In 1991 the great country troubadour Travis Tritt wrote and sang these immortal words about an ex-girlfriend who had apparently had a change of heart and wanted to reconnect with her former sweetheart.  Alas, as the songwriter penned, her man wasn’t buying it.  Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares, he suggested.  In 1991 a quarter was the cost of a local telephone call in those dinosaur-like objects we called pay telephones.   They are as extinct as the Tyrannosaurus Rex is today —  to everyone except my four-year-old friend Oscar who continues to experience their magic every day in his vivid imagination.

    One year later in a totally unrelated incident the government of the United States created Operation Sea Signal to get ready for a huge migration of refugees from Haiti and Cuba.   Two years later in 1994 Operation Sea Signal became Joint Task Force 160 which was responsible for taking care of more than 40,000 migrants who would be either sent back to their countries or paroled to the United States.  Camp X Ray was the name of the facility at the Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay where this operation was located.  In 1996 Operation Sea Signal was over, and our military left Camp X Ray.

    In December of 2001 Joint Task Force 160 was re-activated and Camp X Ray became a temporary home for people who were captured and deemed potential terrorists involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks on our soil or suspected al-Qaeda or Taliban operatives with ties to our relatively new war in Afghanistan.  If you’re still reading and trying to keep a timeline, the first detainees were sent to Camp X Ray in January, 2002.  Surprise!  The very next month Joint Task Force 170 was brought into existence as a new intelligence gathering group of our folks to wheedle secret information out of our population of detainees who had been moved from the old Camp X Ray to the new 410-bed Camp Delta in April.  By November of 2002, everybody decided it was silly to have two joint task forces when one was enough.  So….160 and 170 became Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

    Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares, I might say at this point eleven years later.  I was fifty-six years old when I first heard of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and like most liberal Americans, I dismissed it at the time as something President Bush and Vice-President Cheney had dreamed up to play a part in the Global War on Terror and I confess I’ve tried not to think about its continued existence or the people who’ve lived there all these years. Snippets of news from Guantanamo nagged at me periodically over the years, but I was forced to give it more thought  when presidential candidate Barack Obama campaigned about closing Guantanamo Bay during his 2008 run.  Hooray! I thought.  At last, I can get this little persistent sense of liberal guilt behind me.  President Obama did win that first term and was re-elected in 2012.  But today is just past the middle of the year in 2013, and I know that the prison in Guantanamo houses more horrific acts than ever before.

    To his credit President Obama has issued executive orders to close our base there.  To their shame, the Senate has refused to fund closure.  In the 2010 Omnibus Defense bill we have renamed our detainees alien unprivileged enemy belligerents.  Wow.  Look that up in your Funk & Wagnall.  The political football that is Guantanamo has been kicked around our judicial system for years, too,  with the most recent ruling coming this week from U. S. District Judge Gladys Kessler who said she didn’t have the jurisdiction to respond to the petition of Syrian detainee Jihad Dhiab to stop his forced feeding at the prison.  She tossed it back to President Obama and basically said Shame on all of us if we allow this nightmare to go on.

    I remember the movie Iron-Jawed Angels from 2004 about the determined suffragettes in America and England who used hunger strikes to draw attention to their cause.  They, too, were force-fed at the hands of guards who had little tolerance for their beliefs.  The images were painful to watch on the screen then, as the videos and pictures of the force-feeding at Guantanamo are now.  The prison population at Guantanamo is now 166 and more than a hundred are on a hunger strike to protest the length of their imprisonment without trials. Unbelievable as it seems, 86 of our current alien unprivileged enemy belligerents have been approved for release to other countries, but political interests waylay the process.

    One of my personal heroes is a fellow Texan Molly Ivins, an author and columnist who died in 2007.  She was famous for her essays regarding personal liberty and our values as a nation.  She was also famous for her dislike of the Iraq war.  In her last column, she had this to say:  “We are the people who run this country.  We are the deciders.  And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell.”

    Well Molly, this is my own particular hell-raising day.  Mr. President, get us out of this sorry mess we call Guantanamo Bay.  Senators, act like you got a little bit of sense on this issue and close it down.  Supremes, it’s on your watch, too.  In the end, it’s not about liberal vs. conservative values – it’s about human dignity, respect for each other and fair treatment.

    And Travis Tritt, you can keep your quarter.  You’ve found someone who cares.