I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Life

  • Renaissance Woman: Maya Angelou


    I love women.  I truly do.  No offense, guys, because some of my best friends are men.  But when push comes to shove and choices have to be made about the company I keep, I’ll choose a woman.  Every time.

    One of my favorite women is Maya Angelou.  I treasure images of  book covers of her books I’ve read, images of the lines of her poetry and images of  her face and presence  on a television screen.   I revere an image of  her on a presidential dais at the inauguration ceremony of an American President.  Images of her with Civil Rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. leave an indelible mark on me because they are a reminder of her lifelong commitment to social justice issues and equal opportunities for all. Today when I heard she died at her home,  all those images flooded my mind.

    But what I will miss most about this woman is what I hear and not what I see. The rich, slow – almost ponderous – rhythms of her speech mesmerized me, and the deep rumbling voice was like the sound of my old Dodge Dakota pickup truck’s muffler when I start it first thing in the morning.  Music to my ears.

    In 1998 Maya Angelou spoke at the Second Annual Human Rights Campaign National Dinner and the HRC Blog today posted an excerpt from her speech that evening on the importance of gay people coming out of the closet.  I lifted an excerpt from the excerpt.

    You have no idea who you will inform because all of us are caged birds,

    have been and will be again.

    Caged by somebody else’s ignorance.

    Caged because of someone else’s small-mindedness.

    Caged because of someone else’s fear and hate…

    and sometimes caged by our own lack of courage.

    Maya Angelou was a woman with many gifts and abilities who had the courage to use them to lift us to higher ground and take us to a place we can all call home.  A Renaissance Woman, a legend in her own lifetime, a woman of substance – all these and more. I will miss her words and the voice that gave them life.

     

     

     

  • Memorial Day – Remembering Harvey Milk


    Today, May 22nd., 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.  Harvey was one of the first openly gay elected LGBT 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 with 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 for 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 just had to be there to take it all in.  Wow.  We were inspired and empowered.  For many of us the closet doors would never be shut again – except from the outside.

    If you are a regular with me, you know my heroes have always been cowboys like  Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid, Wyatt Earp.  These were my guys in white hats and they always righted some wrong or rescued a damsel in distress.  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.

  • WWF – Play On


    Since I’ve had a week of house arrest due to circumstances within my control but apparently without any interest in controlling them, I find my mind wandering.  My mind wanders at the drop of a hat anyway and unless I reel it in, it takes me down paths of intrigue and mystery that are too often dangerous.

    The past four years have been tumultuous and full of drastic changes that precipitated moving to and fro over great distances with such frequency I occasionally met myself coming while I was going.  Or at least it felt that way to me.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  Now I see me.  Now I don’t.  The rolling stone gathered no moss.  And so forth.

    Throughout these “transitional life experiences” one constant remained for me: my iPad and Words with Friends.  If there is any person in cyberspace who has never heard of this innocuous sounding game, please Google it immediately and get up to speed.  The rest of us will move on.

    My discovery of the game came from my partner Teresa who introduced me to WWF four years ago when I was under house arrest for a month for an ailment unrelated to the current one.  She gave me an iPad and told me that several of her tennis friends loved to play a little word game that was like Scrabble and that I should learn to play.   Sounds like something fun for you to do while you’re home, she told me.  I never argue with her about fun.

    The three tennis friends and I are still playing WWF four years later.  What I’ve found out since then is life goes on for all of us with changes everywhere, but we play on.  We may travel to exotic places, but we carry WWF with us.  We may have our first grandchildren who live a long way from us and we stay with them to help our children care for the new baby, but WWF gives us a connection to home.  Football seasons come and go and we live and breathe for our teams in Auburn, Clemson and Columbia – but we play WWF after the games no matter who wins or loses.  WWF transcends other loyalties.

    Cyberspace allows me to play WWF with opponents bouncing off satellites in other towns and states.  My friend in Charleston battles the everyday hardships of taking care of a mother who needs constant attention and affection, but she finds time to play WWF and beats me like a drum on a regular basis.  I have three other friends in Texas who play with me.  Their lives are busy and complicated, but they make time to make words every day.

    Recently I’ve added two new opponents who are locals – well, at least they’re local now.  They moved to Cayce two years ago from New York and love living in the South.  They also love WWF and so we meet on that battleground a minimum of once each day to determine who can outwit the other.

    In sickness and in health, for better or worse scores, I play on.  I prefer to win, but I’ve learned to lose.  Hm.  That’s kind of like life in general.

    Uh, oh.  Beep, Beep. Danger. Danger.  Time to reel it in.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • For Cindy from Little Man


    If time were not a moving thing

    And I could make it stay,

    This hour of love we share would always be…

    There’d be no coming day

    To shine a morning light

    To make us realize our night is over.

    It’s over.

    ——Jimmie Rodgers, 1966

    I lost a good friend today.  I lost a friend who greeted me with a smile and hug and kiss every time I saw her.  I lost a friend who had a quick wit and droll sense of humor and made me laugh whenever we were together which was, in the last few years, not often.

    She came into my life twelve years ago through her love of one of my oldest and dearest friends in Columbia: Millie Miller.  MM and I go way, way back to my first years in South Carolina in the 1970s.  We have seen the good, the bad and the ugly in each other’s lives and our friendship managed to survive.  That’s not easy these days.

    Cindy told great stories about her life before Millie and could entertain a living room full of people lucky enough to be eating one of her home-cooked New Year’s Day meals.  Black-eyed peas.  Collard greens.  Corn bread.  Fried chicken.  The girl could cook.

    From the first time I met her until the last time I saw her, she called me Little Man.  Hi Little Man, how you doing?  Hey Little Man, what you been up to?  Little Man, you need to come see us more.  We miss you.  I can truthfully say she is the only person on earth who ever called me by that name.  Why Little Man?  She would only say that I looked like a little man to her.  Enough said.

    Teresa’s favorite Cindy memory today was from a night a group of a dozen lesbians went to an Italian restaurant for someone’s birthday.  Neither of us could remember whose birthday it was, but both of us remembered Cindy’s hilarious performance of pretending to sing Happy Birthday in Italian at the top of her lungs with the waiters who really were singing in Italian and appeared totally undone by the woman who joined them.  Unforgettable moments.  Memory makers, as my mother used to say.

    Time is a moving thing and none of us can make it stay. The last few years were difficult ones for Cindy who faced many adversities in her life, but she never had to face them alone.  Millie was with her every step of the way.  Eventually, for all of us, the night is over, and we say goodbye to our favorite people.  Cindy Driggers was one of mine.

  • My First Taste of Texas


    In 1983 Ed Bruce and Ronnie Rogers co-wrote the lyrics to a song Ed later recorded – one that became a Top 10 Country Hit and is now a classic I hear regularly on my Legends radio and tv stations.

    “…My first taste of Texas still lingers in my heart and on my tongue…” ends each chorus.

    While the words are really a love song for a girl with blue eyes and golden hair,  they remind me today of my feelings as I leave Texas for the second time in my life.  My first taste of Texas…I can’t even remember because I was born there on an Easter Sunday sixty-eight years ago this month.  My date of birth – the 21st. of April – is also San Jacinto Day and for a Texan it’s a day of commemoration for Sam Houston’s defeat of the Mexican General Santa Anna which liberated the territory and led to the establishment of the Republic of Texas.

    I left Texas the first time in 1968 to do what many young people in the late 1960s wanted  to do: get out-of-town, get away from family and home and become my own person.  I wanted to be independent.  That seems strange nowadays in a time when young people appear to be more interested in staying put and hanging out in groups of friends and remaining close to their parents and discovering their brave new worlds on a computer screen.  What a difference a couple of generations make.

    I never planned to be away from Texas for more than forty years when I left the first time, but then that’s how life is sometimes.  The vicissitudes of life, as my daddy used to call those circumstances which altered our courses and over which we had little control, intervened and I didn’t return to my home state until 2010.  Sweet new home Carolina.

    I call these last four years in Montgomery, Texas, the Second Chance Years and they were years of redemption and reconciliation for me, but they came with a high price tag.  I was as prepared and ready for the deaths of my Old Ones as we can ever be, but I was unprepared for the aftermath and the wounds that wouldn’t heal.  I felt like I had been hit by a Mack truck.

    Every spring, though, I had the wildflowers that made the landscape in southeast Texas spectacular.  The bluebonnets were not so plentiful as I remembered them to be sixty years ago, but what they were –  were “cherse”as Spencer Tracy said about Katherine Hepburn in the movie Pat and Mike.  “There ain’t much meat on her, but what there is – is cherse.”  The bluebonnets brought color to my soul as surely as they painted the brown pastures struggling to turn green.

    And to add to my good fortune, I had three wild young boys who lived down the street from me and typically visited with the expectation of a full cookie jar in my kitchen.  It was impossible to picture a bleak future in the midst of the effervescence of inquisitive little boys who wanted to know Why about everything and oh yes, by the way, can I have another cookie please.

    Listening to the conversations of a classroom full of four-year-olds on Grandparents Day restored my faith in the possibilities of a world where people actually liked each other and resolved their problems with friendly negotiations or, at least, peaceful hostilities.   Watching a five-year-old boy learning to ride a bike without training wheels for the first time was almost as magical a moment for me as it was for him.  Little wheels keep on rolling.

    Wheels do, indeed, continue to roll, and I find myself saying goodbye to Texas again in 2014.  The Second Chance Years are relocating to South Carolina where they have more work to do, but my second taste of Texas will linger in my heart and on my tongue.

     

    P.S. I finished my third book I’ll Call It Like I See It: A Lesbian Speaks Out in 2012 while a bi-stateual and many of the stories in the book are about the Second Chance Years.  If you enjoy this blog, you’ll love the book!  You can order your copy here.