I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Life

  • O say can you TELL by the dawn’s early light?


    I find I have been quick to judge our American swimmer Ryan Lochte for his behavior away from the pool in Rio de Janeiro during the Olympic games, and I had a few minutes to sit in my favorite chair this morning to ponder his trials and tribulations while I was waiting for T’s physical therapist to arrive. I love to ponder – particularly when the house is quiet, and today was no exception.

    I read moments ago that Speedo and Ralph Lauren  severed their endorsement relationships with Mr. Lochte which led me down the meandering  pondering  quite smug path of See there, I told you so. When you play, you pay…an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Why didn’t you stick to pool parties…I went on and on with this conversation in my mind because it’s a replay of how I’ve felt since the bizarre incident occurred in Rio. Really, Ryan, how stupid could you be. You’re thirty-two years old, for crying out loud. You’re old enough to know better.

    Whoa, Nellie…hold your horses. Old enough to know better – that stopped me in my instant replay.  Hm.  Now what was I doing when I was thirty-two years old…that would have been 1978. Hm….meander, meander some more… I was living in Columbia by then and had met the person that would become my lifelong friend but was at the time my best drinking buddy Millie Miller who was happy to spend many evenings with me at local bars until they closed in the wee hours of the morning.  We weren’t always in the best shape when they closed, either. Really, then, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones, although admittedly my glass house wasn’t part of an international Olympic Games and I wasn’t representing my country at the time. Not to split hairs, of course. The two similarities of this story were thirty-two years old and intoxicated, as I rambled along in my mind. Don’t try to make more of it than that.

    So it wasn’t the drunken public exhibition by a member of Team USA in a foreign country that continued to nag at me in the Lochte saga although that would have been enough to keep the story churning. I could finagle that around in my mind to somehow relate to his wanting to celebrate with his teammates after the medals were handed out. Something to be ashamed of when he sobered up, but mistakes are surely made by us all – usually not in front of a gazillion people but hey, nobody’s perfect.

    No, that wasn’t the nagging current flowing through my stream of consciousness this morning. It was the lying – an amazingly creative lie to be sure – but a lie nonetheless… followed by his inability to say Hey, I lied about it, and I’m sorry.  Instead, the lie became his “over-exaggeration” of the truth which sounds strangely similar to the acceptable “little white lie.” Ding, ding, ding goes the alarm bell. Don’t tell that to the Brazilians.

    Somewhere in my mind there is a disconnect between what used to be known as the truth and what now has become an inability on a grand scale to define. Lying is a way of life in our family relationships, business dealings, political discourse, religious institutions, collegiate locker rooms, football weights, beauty pageants and just about anything else you can think of. You name it – we can lie about it with gusto and embellishment.

    I am beyond weary of lies and liars.

    But this is clearly not a new problem of the 21st. century.  The major religions of today have all weighed in against lying thousands of years ago via stone tablets and whatever else they could find to write on plus probably on cave walls before that. The universal consensus was that lying is fundamentally wrong but truth is subject to interpretation. My truth might not be your truth, and vice versa.  Clearly Ryan Lochte subscribed to that theory when he invented his own elaborate version of the truth and then tried to redefine it.

    I should never have gotten started on this mind meandering today. I feel like I’m digging myself deeper and deeper into a meaningless hole and I hear the voices of my Texas heroines Molly Ivins and Ann Richards hollering from their graves to admonish me that when I find myself in a hole this big, I need to stop digging.

    And so I shall. Team USA won forty-seven gold medals at the 2016 Olympics in Rio;T and I heard the Star-Spangled Banner played for many of those medal ceremonies from her hospital room following her successful knee replacement surgery last week and from our bedroom where she continues to recover this week.  Each time we heard it was special with the expressions of the champions ranging from smiles of happiness to tears of joy to thoughtful reflections of awe and wonder…they were moments of truth we shared with them. At least, that’s how my mind meanderings like to think about it. Somebody stop me.

  • Human Frailty


    Full disclosure to avoid any semblance of plagiarism – I stole this idea from my current favorite BBC series Lark Rise to Candleford. (Current to me but originally aired in 2008 – 2011.) Dorcas Lane is the postmistress caught in a wave of changes to her small town of Candleford in Oxfordshire at the end of the 19th. century. Her notoriety extends beyond the walls of the post office due to her persistent meddling in everyone’s affairs.

    Her maid Minnie is a wonderful addition to the cast in the second season with her penchant for asking questions that are “extraordinary.” In the episode I watched today, Minnie is a-twitter with questions about just what does Happily Ever After really mean in affairs of the heart. Dorcas is prepared to answer with wisdom to share and spare.

    “We all want life to be simple and our relationships to be enchanted and then along comes human frailty. Before we know it, all will be lost.”

    Human frailty. I have seen a ton of that going around in the world lately. So much so that it seems like an epidemic. Waves of it. Oceans of it. Human frailty runs rampant from Orlando to Dallas to Minnesota to Baton Rouge. It zigzags through a packed crowd in a huge commercial truck in Nice, France before striking again in a failed military coup in Turkey. It shouts angry hate-filled  rhetoric in a large convention hall in Cleveland, Ohio before skipping across the Atlantic again  with gunfire in a shopping mall in Munich. Behind every evil stands the specter of human frailty.

    Thank goodness for the relief of Lark Rise, a break from the onslaught of bad news on my favorite 24-hour news channels with their 24-hour news cycles. Yes, give me a good conversation with Twister Terrell, another of my favorite friends from Lark Rise, who sums up what happens when human frailty runs rampant.

    “Some folks got neither logic nor reason nor sense nor sanity.”

    Here’s hoping somewhere… sometime… somebody unravels the key to human kindness and compassion for each other that will not only change the news cycles but enable us to rediscover the logic, reason, sense and sanity that our human frailty disguises.

    Like Minnie, I long for Happily Ever After.

     

     

     

     

  • Memorial Day Matters


    Last Sunday afternoon Teresa and Spike and I took advantage of the low humidity and spring-like weather that lasts about a minute in Columbia before we hit the days that make you feel like you could melt any second and drove over to St. Peter’s Cemetery downtown just off I-126. Remarkably, this was a cemetery we had overlooked in our graveyard tours in the past because of its proximity to the much larger Elmwood Cemetery which goes on forever.  (No pun intended.)

    What impressed me first was the large number of little American flags standing guard over the graves. It’s a common occurrence for soldiers’ markers to have the small red, white and blue colored flags flying above the veterans’ graves but usually only one or two families bother. Clearly, this was a concerted effort by someone or some group or perhaps St. Peter’s themselves to honor every fallen soldier. Luckily Teresa had her cell phone with her and was able to take pictures.

    Memorial Day Pictures from St. Peter's 7

    I was taken with the names of the veterans and wondered about their stories from the wars.

    Memorial Day Pictures from St. Peter's 9

    What was a World War I army nurse from New Jersey doing in a Columbia, South Carolina cemetery, I wondered.  She was born just ten years after the Civil War and somehow ended up as an Army nurse in World War I.  Now she rests here with an American flag that acknowledges her service to her country and two visitors who would like to know how she came to be in this place.

    Memorial Day Pictures from St. Peter's 3

    James Riley was born in New York  in 1837 and actually served in the Civil War as a Confederate soldier; he died in Columbia in 1924. He is buried here draped with a flag that is the symbol of a country he tried to destroy. Yet, here he is – a survivor of one of the bloodiest wars in American history.

    Then there’s Sergeant Charles Edward Timmons, Jr. who served in World War I and was killed in action. His body is buried in France, but his family has honored him with a beautiful marker and  stone flag that flies every day so boldly it practically reaches out for your attention.

    Memorial Day Pictures from St. Peter's 6

    We also saw one different flag – a German one – lying against a grave in St. Peter’s. Memorial Day Pictures from St. Peter's 8

    Hugo Krause was born in Germany in 1855 and died in 1925 in Eastover, South Carolina, which is a small town south of Columbia. Apparently Mr. Krause was also a soldier but served a different country in World War I. Someone is still proud of his German heritage.

    So the stones tell short stories of a few of the soldiers we honor this Memorial Day which is a day of remembrance for those who cared enough for what they believed in to offer up their lives to preserve those beliefs. I admire and respect these soldiers for their sacrifices.

    My family had members who served in World War I and World War II as well as ancestors who served on both sides of the Civil War and some who date to the Revolutionary War for Independence in 1776. I obviously didn’t know many of them, but I did know my father who was a navigator in the Army Air Corps in 1944-45. He was nineteen years old when he enlisted and sent to officer training school in San Antonio.

    He served with the Eighth Air Force in England and flew thirty-two missions over Germany in the short time he was over the Pond. He was never proud of his assignments – the only thing he ever said to me about it was he felt he did his duty.

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    I am proud of the teenager who left his small rural Grimes County, Texas home town, family and friends to do what he thought was right. His country was proud of his service, too, and awarded him the Medal of Honor when he was discharged. On this Memorial Day I will once again respectfully remember  the young man who became the father I loved and all the daughters and sons, mothers and fathers who served in past years and those who serve today who will not be with their own families because they have a reason that puts them in harm’s way every day.

    Memorial Day matters.

     

  • Running to a Hundred


    When we moved to Casa de Canterbury in the summer of 2009, I was not a happy camper. The house had four gigantic white columns on the front porch that I felt made it look like a Tara wannabe from Gone With the Wind which wasn’t a statement either T or I wanted to make as our first impression with company. But the vicissitudes of life, as my daddy would say, brought us to the intersection of Canterbury Road and Manning Avenue; and we moved our belongings and four dogs to the house we would call home.

    The columns are still there, but their visual impact has been lessened over the past seven years with our attempts to get people to lower their gaze to the steps and porch with flowers, rocking chairs, benches, an old school desk and black bird sculptures on the porch.  I’m not sure if it works for our visitors, but I know it helped me adjust. I have made my peace with the house because Teresa’s touches can make any place homey, and the dogs and I gradually settled in together in harmony with each other and our home.

    One of the unexpected bonuses we’ve found has been our neighbors across the street on Canterbury and behind our house on Manning Avenue.  We have seen Debbie and Mark’s children marry and have grandchildren that they adore. We saw Norma and Alan’s two boys play soccer in their yard when the boys were in middle school and high school. Now we’ve seen them graduate from high school and leave home for college. The cycle of life passes before my window in my office on the second floor, and I like my neighbors on Canterbury Road.

    The neighbors behind us on Manning Avenue are also special.  Monroe and his son Anthony have the most wonderful flowers every year – Monroe, a stately African-American veteran about my age, tries to help me do better with my back yard which is always a disaster. Last year we had a contest to see who could keep their flowers alive and beautiful for the longest time. Monroe won, of course. Not even close. Anthony and I share a passion for sports and politics – topics we love to talk about when we gossip.

    Dorothy lives next door to Monroe and Anthony.  She is an elderly tiny frail African-American woman who always has a smile and a hug for me. She, too, loves to have flowers growing in her yard and makes a point every year to pull any weeds brave enough to grow next to her lilies and daffodils.  I have seen her many times laboring in her yard with her back bent to hoe the weeds she calls her devils. Dorothy still lives alone, but her family takes turns staying with her now. She has a dog she named Sheeva which she claimed she named for me.  Spike loves Sheeva and waits for her to make an escape from Dorothy’s yard to his fence.

    Last week on my birthday I walked over to invite Dorothy to stop by the house for a piece of birthday cake and champagne later that evening. I knocked on her door and waited for her to open it. Sometimes it takes a while because she has days when she moves at a snail’s pace. I have those days, too, so I don’t mind the wait.

    She came out of her door and we visited on her front porch. I told her today is my  70th. birthday and I want you to come over for a piece of cake and champagne around 7 o’clock. Her eyes lit up and she smiled at me while she gave me a big hug and kiss.

    “Happy Birthday,” she said. “And would you believe it? Yesterday was my birthday, too.”

    “You’re kidding me,” I exclaimed. “Well Happy Birthday to you, too! How old were you?”

    “Eighty-seven,” she said. “And I’m running to a hundred.”

    ” What? To a hundred? Really, Dorothy?”

    “Yes,” she nodded emphatically. “And I want you to run with me. I want you to stay right behind me. Don’t you try to get ahead of me. We’re running together.”

    I wish everyone could reach the age of 70 years, but not everyone is so fortunate. My dad wasn’t. Teresa’s mother wasn’t.  They didn’t live long enough to have family and friends say exceedingly kind things about them in person and certainly not long enough to have heart-felt posts in cyberspace about their birthday on social media.  I don’t often use the word “blessed,” but I really can’t think of a word that describes my feelings this week any better. Fortunate. Content. Peaceful. Lucky. Grateful. Blessed.

    Running to a hundred with Dorothy? I doubt it. But I wouldn’t bet against Dorothy, if I were you.

     

     

     

  • Is It Time for a Tune-up?


    My grandfather told me many times that he never understood why my daddy avoided regular maintenance on any of his automobiles.  At least change the oil, I heard him say to my dad a thousand times. Now I’m not sure why my dad who was scrupulous about his shirts and ties that he wore every day to work at the school  and who was fastidious about having not one smear on his eyeglasses in the morning had such a total disregard for getting the oil changed in his car, but I will say I remember we changed Chevrolets more frequently than the oil.

    With that in mind, I try to make sure we maintain our 2006 Toyota 4-Runner we’ve had for eight years and our “new” 2007 Dodge Dakota that replaced the old 2004 Dodge Dakota which finally gave up recently after eight years, umpteen thousand-mile trips back and forth to Texas and almost 200,000 miles. Now, that was a truck I loved…and maintained.

    Next week on the 21st of April I will be 70 years old.  I can’t tell you how old that makes me feel, but I can tell you I never thought I’d live to see 30.  And here I am forty years longer and wondering if I’ve had enough maintenance during the past seven decades from 1946 to 2016 to keep me running for a little while longer. My  Medicine Men (and Women) – the doctors, dentists, dermatologists, psychiatrists and ophthalmologists who faithfully prescribed my Magic Meds for the past forty years and the pharmacists who faithfully dispensed them have certainly done their part.  As my longest-serving doctor Frank Martin, Jr., says, “You are the healthiest person I know considering the terrible shape you’re in.” Now that’s a compliment to be proud of.  Thanks, Frank.

    So at 70 I am very happy to be able to negotiate the activities of daily living, as we say in the jargon of post-retirement life and in the language of the long-term care insurance policies I sold in a time long ago but not so far away. I may congratulate myself and  think  “cleared it” when I step out of the bathtub these days, but at least I have taken one small step for mankind when I don’t have to call T for help to make that step. My attitude toward bathing has undergone a kind of metamorphosis over the past few years from “daily” really means “daily” to “gosh, did I take a shower yesterday?” to “Hey, T, are we seeing anybody today?” I love a shower after I take it, but I consider that time to be one of the most boring activities of daily living ever created.

    I have more fears as I approach 70.  My grandmother suffered from severe depression in her late sixties and early seventies and was supposed to be taking Librium in addition to the electroshock treatments she received at various mental hospitals in the 1960s.  My mother always assumed and accused her of deliberately refusing to take her meds, but now I wonder if she didn’t take them because she couldn’t afford to pay for them. Medicines have always been expensive, and my grandmother lived on a very small Social Security pension since she had been paid a pittance for her years as a clerk in the general store. So did she refuse to take them, or was she unable to pay for them…a mystery I will never solve.

    Fast forward one generation and my mother’s dementia that became the thief who robbed her of her memories and dignity began in her early seventies and finally ended  shortly after her 85th. birthday. Needless to say, heavy, heavy hangs the dread of dementia in this daughter.  I am hoping that somehow in the genetic mishmash that belongs to me the genes of my father will swoop in, take over and beat back  the bad ones of my mother; of course, there’s that little heart problem on his side of the family. Sigh.

    I belong to the Baby Boomer generation, a name derived from the overwhelming population increase in the years immediately following WWII. I have read about our excesses and expectations ad nauseam and can best describe my cohorts and me as a hot mess. Our importance has not necessarily been marked so much by our achievements but by the collective influences of our sheer numbers on society as we blundered along from one century to the next. We trampled all over ourselves and did it right out there in front of God and everybody. We have adapted to and embraced technological changes reluctantly but have commandeered entire communication systems for our personal advancement and entertainment.  Think Facebook. We have preached self-reliance all our lives but now most of us rely on Social Security programs as the main source of our retirement income and medical safety net.

    At 70 I am dealing with feelings of invisibility and incompetence. In a social gathering it’s best for me to be seen and not heard, which is part of my problem. Last night I was at a small get-together at a friend’s house for a birthday party. The group of eight was sitting outdoors on a deck overlooking a beautiful Columbia yard in the springtime at dusk. The weather was perfect – the champagne excellent and the conversation lively.  Two of the women had just gotten back from vacation and were talking about their cruise in the Cayman Islands. There was a lull, and I asked them what a “Dizzy Cruise” was – that was a new one on me. The entire group stopped talking and stared at me. Teresa said “Disney Cruise, Disney Cruise” and I was rescued. But clearly I don’t hear like I used to.

    And in the middle of the health, social and financial issues we Baby Boomers are experiencing as we turn 70, we also have to worry about our legacies. How will we be remembered? Will we be remembered? Why should we be remembered? Yikes. Enough already. If 70 isn’t a year for a tune-up, I’d be shocked with the plugs my daddy never replaced. In fact,  I think I’ll keep a maintenance journal  this year – so stay tuned in for more tune-ups.