I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Life

  • X Marks the Spot


    Last week I found a journal that I wrote in February, 1992, twenty-three years ago next month.  This is how it began:

    I have always wanted to be an artist.  You know, the kind that paints beautiful pictures with oils or pastels or watercolors.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  I totally agree.

    Alas, I have never managed to connect eye to hand to brush properly.  So here we are – with a thousand words.  Give or take a few.

    You see, I wanted to paint a picture of a particular person in a certain place at a given time. I wanted to capture a feeling in an expression or gesture.  I wanted to fix a point and say, here it is.  “X” marks the spot.  However, that is not to be.

    I must do the best I can with what I have.  And words are what I know.  I have written introductions to tons of unfinished books!   This may be, yet, another one.

    Be patient.  Be understanding.  Be kind.  I don’t take criticism well.

    It just occurs to me I spent my formative years in a rather insignificant period of history.  I grew up in the fifties, part of the post-war Baby Boom in this country.  My parents were married in May, 1945.  I was born promptly eleven months later.  Oldest, middle, and baby rolled into only.

    The town where I grew up was a small town in East Texas.  How small is small?  Johnny Carson fans ask.  Population 500 – counting dogs and chickens we would laughingly say.  Or proudly say…depending on who asked.

    Richards, Texas, didn’t rate a dot on most maps of Texas.  I found that out later when I moved away and tried to show my friends where I came from.  We had one general store where my mother’s mother worked as a clerk.  We had two filling stations: Batey’s Phillp 66 and Lenorman’s Mobil.  Each was at one end of Main Street.

    Main Street was our only paved street.  No traffic light, of course.  We had Mr. McAfee’s drug store, my granddad’s barber shop and laundry, and a post office.  The Haynies had a grocery store and feed store.  We had a depot, but no trains stopped there anymore.  One passenger train went by every day – the Zephyr.  Periodically we had a cafe that was owned and operated by various townspeople at various times.  Mr. Bookman had a bank in Richards – briefly.  He died.  The bank folded.  I can’t remember which happened first.

    We had one school down the hill from our house.  Red brick.  Two-story.  Metal fire escapes from the second story, complete with bell.  I loved the bell – reminded me of pictures of the Liberty Bell.  Two grades per room and teacher.  Nine kids in my class.  My dad was school superintendent.  More about that later.

    Of course, there was another school: the “colored” school in the quarters.  I never went there.  

    We had two churches in town, the Baptist Church and the Methodist Church.  My family was Baptist for the most part, although there was little to distinguish the two.  The important thing was that we were not Catholic, as so many of my Polish friends at school were.  They all lived on farms and had to drive ten miles to a neighboring town for church.  As far as I knew, they never missed church.

    And fifteen years later, Deep in the Heart was finished…finally.  I took a few more than a thousand words, but once the dam broke, the words spilled out and over and continue to flow.

    “X” marks the spot.

  • …And Your So-Called Social Security…


    One of my favorite country singers and songwriters, Merle Haggard, wrote one of my favorite songs, Big City with lyrics that are much more meaningful to me in 2015 than they were in 1981 when I first heard them.

              “Gimme all I’ve got coming to me…

    and keep your retirement

    and your so-called Social Security.

    Big City, turn me loose and set me free.”

    Yep, in 1981 I was thirty-five years old and the owner of a very small CPA firm that had a growing clientele and low overhead.  How small was very small?  That would be one person: me.  I had been working full-time since 1967 and was in robust health – full of piss and vinegar – and had visions of acquiring great wealth through hard work and perseverance in America, the land of equal opportunity.  Retirement?  Social Security?  Bah, humbug.  Irrelevant and unimportant, but I paid my Social Security taxes right along with everyone else.

    Fast forward to 2008, the year I turned sixty-two.  My robust health became more of a pisser than vinegar, and I was forced to retire much earlier than I had planned – and long before acquiring great wealth.  I had worked for forty-one years in a variety of jobs with numbers as their primary common denominator and had made both good and bad career moves in those years.  I was moderately successful in the good years and financially challenged in the lean ones.

    Frank Sinatra sang about all the good and lean years and all the in-between years, and he could have been talking about my life as an entrepreneur.  Of course, he wasn’t, but still…

     Regardless of the triumphs and tragedies in my working life, I continued to pay my income taxes and Social Security taxes every year right along with everyone else and at age 62 I became disabled and began to receive my retirement benefits from the Social Security Administration.  At the end of each benefit year, the SSA sends me “Important Information” for the next year which typically includes my benefit amount, new rules and regulations, how to contact them if I have questions,  Medicare premiums, blah, blah, blah.

    At the end of 2013, I noticed a new bullet point:

    Benefits for Same-Sex Couples

    Due to a Supreme Court decision, we now are able to pay benefits to some

    same-sex couples.  We encourage people who think they may be eligible to apply now.

    It wasn’t a super-sized bullet point or anything like that.  As a matter of fact,  it was squeezed in between “How to Access my Social Security Online Services” and the “Affordable Care Act.”  If you blinked or skipped the info page to only look at “Your New Benefit Amount” which is probably what most people do, you would have missed it.  I read it with disbelief and amazement and a sense of immense satisfaction for the couples in places like Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and California – a few of the eighteen  states and District of Columbia where marriage equality was a reality at the end of 2013.  The SSA would be making re-calculations on a host of benefits for affected American citizens.

    This year, at the end of last week, my “Important Information” arrived from the SSA.  Once again, squeezed in between “To Access my Social Security Online Services” and the “Affordable Care Act” was the following:

    Benefits for Same-Sex Couples

    We now are able to pay benefits to more same-sex couples.

    We encourage people to contact us to find out if they or their children are eligible for

    benefits or a different benefit amount.

    Indeed.  “More same-sex couples” refers to the increasing number of states with marriage equality at the end of 2014.  The total is up to 35 plus the District of Columbia, and my feelings of disbelief and amazement and immense satisfaction are combined with the joy and exhilaration that comes with residing in the 35th. state, my second home state of South Carolina.  Yee Haw – pigs are now flying over the Palmetto State Capitol, and there is a definite chill to the weather in hell these days.

    Because my prospects for acquiring great wealth look slimmer than my prospects for acquiring great weight, I’m afraid I can’t sing along with Merle who apparently didn’t want his Social Security.  I’m happy to have mine and to be on the receiving end of what I paid into for more than forty years – and even happier to know that my family will be accorded the same respect and fair treatment that every American family deserves.

    Thanks Merle, but gimme all I got coming to me including my so-called Social Security, and then Big City, turn me loose and set me free.

  • What’s Done is Done


    In a few days the year 2014 will be in the history books, and the glass will be half empty or half full depending on which glass you pick up for 2015.  So many glasses to choose from in a New Year.

    Time to shed the skins of what ifs and buts and the Three Stooges of couldas, wouldas and shouldas.  What’s done is done.  We can’t change 2014, but we will have a new opportunity in 2015 to make amends for our transgressions and forgive ourselves as we forgive others, to celebrate our achievements and victories won in the past year as we remain committed to each other and to the causes we support.

    In this world of too much information bombarded relentlessly in cyberspace every day, can we somehow manage to maintain an up close and personal connection to the people who matter in our lives; and can we be warriors for kindness in 2015 and set good examples in our homes first and then our communities and then our nation so that the news is better for everyone.

    In a nation of plenty may we find food for the hungry, walls for the wind and roofs for the rain for the homeless, laughter and joy for the chronically ill; comfort for those who grieve, and hope for those who struggle with the demons of doubt and depression.  These are our opportunities for the New Year and Resolutions that will transform our lives and the lives of others.

    No need to wait for 2015 – the glass is half full already.

    We can start today.  Be kind to one another.

    Thank you so much for stopping by to spend time with me here in the past years.  I appreciate your comments and visits and Teresa and I wish you all a Happy Holiday Season and a New Year of promise with whatever glass you choose.

     

    pasta fresca 2

     

     

     

     

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  • Calling All Book Lovers!


    I have a few limited edition copies remaining from my first three published books and will sign and ship anywhere – please check out my Super Saving Prices by clicking on my about.me link on this page!

  • The Subject is Betrayal


    I feel strangely torn between the euphoria of our marriage license issued on the 19th. of November and the depression I felt four days later on the 23rd. when Columbia City Councilman Cameron Runyan wrote a column in the State newspaper entitled “Why I Cannot Support the Redefinition of Marriage” to explain his solo vote against extending marriage benefits to same-sex partners of city employees.  In the editorial Councilman Runyan asked us to respect his “worldview” which he said doesn’t include a city with equal rights for all of its employees.  And I totally would respect it except…

    His “worldview” mysteriously changed the day of the vote.  Was he the same Cameron Runyan Facebook friend who visited our Guild and other GLBT meetings during his campaign for City Council – the same Cameron Runyan who asked us to raise money for his election because he was a fresh new voice that pledged to speak for fairness and equal rights for all the citizens of Columbia – apparently not.  Then who was that masked man who spoke with forked tongue and whose hand I shook in friendship.

    With friends like Cameron Runyan, who needs enemies?

     betrayal n. 1. treachery, treason, sedition, disloyalty, unfaithfulness, falseness, breach of faith, bad faith, perfidy, double-dealing, double-cross, two-timing; deception, chicanery, duplicity, trickery.       (Webster’s everyday thesaurus)

    Ferguson has become a new word added to the vernacular of shameful American tragedies involving betrayal mixed with violence and the loss of too many young people in too many different parts of our country as a result of too many guns.  Columbine…Sandy Hook…Trayvon…Ferguson…is this the Legacy of the Lost that will haunt us as a nation for generations.  Is this the breach of faith that defines us as a people in the eyes of the rest of the world and, more importantly, is it the duplicity that we fail to see in our own eyes and hear with our own ears.

    I hear the sounds of betrayal at night when sirens scream to answer the calls from gunshots behind my house.  I hear the cries of betrayal when a young woman who lived not far from me was killed by youthful gang members who shot her by mistake.  This is the ultimate betrayal of a nation and a community, yet it is often impossible to trace the footsteps that led us to an environment of distrust among ourselves and the inability to change our culture of violence.

    We cannot look to our elected representatives in the Houses of Congress or, indeed, the White House, for different directions of positive change in our own houses and neighborhoods.  They are unfaithful to their electorate and poor examples for any of us to follow.  They are double-dealing double-crossing contentious factions which display no real interest in the daily lives of the people they supposedly represent.  Their betrayal is creeping and insidious and creates an atmosphere of indifference and disrespect from their citizens.

    We must look to ourselves then and accept our responsibility for our part in Ferguson.  Columbia is Ferguson.  South Carolina is Ferguson.  Texas is Ferguson.  We are all Ferguson.  We must examine our own lives – what we do, how we feel – and whether we have a sense of urgency in doing good for others, in treating everyone fairly and with respect.  We must turn betrayal into loyalty and faithfulness, into safeguarding and protecting.

    Margaret Mead said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

    And that, Councilman Runyan, is my “worldview.”

    Onward.