I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Humor

  • the view from behind totally rocks!


    When a birthday begins like this, what can go wrong…

    Spike and Charly were up early with me

    the sun also rises

    I love the early morning outside in the back yard when the sun is coming up through the trees, and all is quiet except the jets on the pool which sound like  mountain waterfalls discovered after a long hike in the hills of the upstate, a hike which I never thought I’d really be able to make because I stopped so many times along the trail to catch my breath and look upward to try to see the end of the trail, hoping to be able to finally hear the majestic roar of the waterfall.

    In reality, when I stopped to rest for a few minutes, what I saw when I looked up was the posterior of Pretty as she forged ahead to scout the next section of the trail to make sure I would have a place to dilly dally along while she continued at her measured pace.  When I stop to think about it, I have spent the last 18 years of my life following Pretty’s posterior. It’s a view I’ve always loved.

    Today my mind meandered to one of my favorite hikes with Pretty. It was six years ago when we followed the trail to Peachtree Rock.

    wherever we hiked, Pretty led the way

     

    Ollie liked to lead, too so he stayed with Pretty

    the waterfall was just enough beautiful

    Pretty and Ollie climbed all the way to the top

    Pretty surveys her spoils as the Victor of that day’s climb

    Peachtree Rock in March, 2012

    (vandals and erosion destroyed the rock in 2013)

    I was lost in my reverie of memories on my birthday in the early a.m. hours when I heard Pretty calling Happy Birthday to me from the hall for the first birthday greetings of the day. By this time I had moved inside to the den, and Pretty sat down next to me as she straggled in sleepily to chat.

    I really can’t believe you are 74 today, she said.

    That’s because I’m 72, I replied and we both laughed out loud.

    Numbers have never been Pretty’s strong suit. She had a convoluted explanation for her gaffe, but in the end was, of course, incorrect. Too funny. If only she’d miscalculated in the opposite direction…

    Birthday # 72 was a rousing success that apparently continues along with anniversary adventures on the horizon. April is a banner month for our family. Number One Son and Pretty Too celebrated their 3rd. Anniversary the day after ours and are thrilled to take their party to an Eric Church concert – whoever he is. I say Party Hearty, kids; these are your good old days.

    I also say stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • I had decided to take a sabbatical from calling it like I see it until…


    …Pretty talked me out of it.

    Yes, Pretty was convinced some of my cyberspace friends would miss me. I told her I thought I might need a break from blogging after almost 9 years so that I could focus on doing some “serious writing.”

    Writing about what? Pretty asked.

    And there she had me.

    I couldn’t think of anything truly earth shattering I had to relate to anyone, nothing pressing that couldn’t wait another year or two, and really nothing I couldn’t say to my friends in cyberspace anyway. Bravo, Pretty. No wonder I married you legally two years ago tomorrow.

    The years have flown by – I never thought I would live to be 30, and certainly never dreamed of 72, but I always dreamed of having a wife from the time I was a very young girl. I just never dreamed one day I would be able to marry another woman legally, and I for sure couldn’t have imagined I would marry a woman as perfect for me as Pretty has been.

    To borrow from The Sound of Music, somewhere in our youths or childhoods, we must have done something good.

    Pretty knows best

    Stay tuned. If you will, I will.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • powerless


    Yesterday we had a fierce storm with tornado like winds, driving downpours of rain and no electricity from about 2:30 p.m. until 9:00 0’clock this morning.

    As darkness fell in our family room last evening, Charly had a mindful moment hiding her face in the absence of the television sights and sounds she was accustomed to seeing and hearing during a lazy Sunday afternoon. Pretty had no Wi-Fi  so no Facebook scrolling.  The winds were howling louder than the beagles behind our house.Was the world coming to an end, Charly wondered as she hid her face behind her favorite pillow in her favorite chair?

    Thank goodness Pretty saved the day, or night, with her lamp she purchased from the Thrift Store on one of her many pilgrimages across the river to her version of paradise. I tend to be less than enthusiastic about her treasures carefully picked among the donated items, but I was thrilled to have this bright light shining through the darkness of powerlessness.

    .

    We exhausted our conversation ideas that included wondering what in the world the people of Puerto Rico were doing without power all this time while I played Scrabble against the computer since I also had no Wi-Fi, and Pretty read a book.

    The lamp was a life-saver.

    We went to bed early.

    Stay tuned.

  • and soon I’m two and seventy


    I had a very sweet Happy Birthday message today on my Columbia High Class of 1964 message board from one of my boyfriends who I noticed had sent me birthday greetings for the past 3 years on this website which I never check. Thanks so much to Tim for remembering me. I immediately went to Facebook and added him as a friend so that I can send him birthday greetings on whatever day his might be. I confess I have been remiss in wishing others a Happy Birthday unless I am prompted to do so by the Big Brother of Facebook who is forever watching over me.

    I am struck by how soon my 72nd. birthday will be…April 21, one week from today. Sweet Lady Gaga, as The Red Man famously said, how did this happen. My first birthday card came from my personal Medicine Man Dr. Martin and his entire staff. These are the people who see me most frequently, and I appreciated the Life is Meant to Live and be Celebrated sentiments. I figure if they’re hopeful for my future, I should be, too.

    I’ve received not one, but two, birthday cards from former President Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center, both of which were quite lovely and one signed by the President himself. Why two, you might ask, as I did. And then, of course, my bank ATM machines have been unusually prompt on good wishes whenever I’ve made withdrawals in April which I assume has something to do with their corporate guilt for the outrageous service charges they favor me with every month.

    The message board for the 1964 Columbia High School graduating class in West Columbia, Texas took me back 54 years to that senior year when I was about to graduate from high school and leave my little town of Brazoria, Texas that was 15 miles from the Gulf Coast for summer school at the University of Texas in Austin 90 miles away. Big changes were on the way for me, but take a look at the images of my senior year when I was voted by my 90+ person class as the Best All Round favorite, or as my dad invariably teased me by saying, she was the best all the way around.

    Return with me to those thrilling days of yesteryear when my mother was always so happy for me to be dating a boy.

    Note particularly the hands and feet

    (Poor photographer – he must have spent hours on that pose)

    (our mascot was the Roughneck)

    I am the one on the far left with fist pumped

    Senior prom

    my mother rolled my hair until I left for college

    Senior Follies – and they were

    I sang an unremarkable rendition of the St. Louis Blues

    my lifelong love of tennis began here…

    …and basketball, too

    and of course, the political

    The photos today are courtesy of me with my cell phone and my yearbook so quality leaves much to be desired, but you get the general idea of this 18-year-old baby dyke trying her best to be straight but  unknowingly about to add complexity to her sexual awareness through life in a women’s dormitory at the state’s largest university where the population of the dorm was greater than the population of the town where she grew up. Talk about trouble.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • hail, hail – the gang’s all here


    Christmas memories seem strange on Good Friday, but then the mind often ignores time or at least is able to reconstruct its meandering corridors to bring buried secrets to the surface of consciousness.

    One of my favorite Christmas gifts when I was a child growing up in Richards, Texas in rural Grimes County was not one that I received but one that I gave to my maternal grandmother Louise whose name I shortened to Dude when I was unable to pronounce Louise. Louise became Dude-ese, then simply Dude.

    I was two years old when my dad and mother and I moved into my grandmother’s small Sears Roebuck designed house in Richards in 1948. We lived in that little house with her for eleven Christmases, and each Christmas she gave me two new pairs of underwear that she bought from the general store where she clerked six days a week from 8 in the morning until 6 in the evening with an hour for lunch. Two new pairs of underwear wrapped in last year’s red paper she carefully saved and used again and again, tied with a gold string and a tiny tag signed in her scrawling handwriting Lots of love, Dude.

    The Christmas before we moved away from Richards I bought Dude a present at Mr. McAfee’s drug store from money I saved from my allowance. I had never bought her a gift before and was so excited about my purchase: a door chime that played Hail, Hail – the Gang’s All Here. I hadn’t told anyone about my gift, so imagine the look on Dude’s face when she opened it. Just what she needed, she said, and had me believing it.

    Dude had been 50 years old when we moved in with her and was 63 when we moved away to a town 70 miles from Richards leaving her with a disabled adult son, no transportation since she never learned to drive, and very little income. My dad and mother and I came back to visit every two weeks, and whenever the front door opened we were welcomed with the chimes playing hail, hail – the gang’s all here. And on those weekends her gang was there.

    I was totally unaware of what loneliness and loss of laughter and love must have been for her the other days and nights of her life at that time because I was, after all, a self-absorbed teenager whose only experience with loneliness was self-imposed and transitory. I was never at a loss for laughter.

    By the time I graduated from high school, my grandmother’s life had the beginnings of her roller coaster battle with depression that would plague her for the rest of her days – a war really – on battlegrounds she fought in doctors’ offices and hospitals,  fought sometimes with medicines, sometimes without medicines, sometimes with electroshock therapy.

    My visits to see her became less frequent when I went away to college, and I remember being surprised on one of those visits to discover the door chimes no longer played when I opened the front door. Surprised, but totally unaware of the significance. Her gang was no longer there.

    This morning I was taking a shower and for some reason the shower song du jour was Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here which brought the Christmas memories of my grandmother’s door chime pouring over me like the hot water that rinsed my hair.

    Dude (1898 -1972)

    In this final post I will make for women’s history month, I honor with love and gratitude one of the most important women in my life, the first woman to love me unconditionally with all her heart.

    And on this good Friday I hope that your gang, however you define it, will be with you this weekend.

    Stay tuned.