I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Personal

  • the Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter holiday card collection


    Following the shady corruption of power in the Nixon administration, the American people were ready for a newcomer outside the beltway of Washington, D. C. In walked Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from Plains, who was a Sunday School teacher in a Baptist church with a reputation for honesty and integrity. He was just the recipe needed in the 1976 election after the Watergate years.

    I had followed and admired Jimmy Carter even before his run for governor in 1970 so I was hopeful for what his administration could accomplish from the White House. Alas, being an outsider must be much more difficult  than I thought, and for Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter it was a mountain too high to climb. The many good measures he accomplished including the Camp David Accords were often lost in the rhetoric surrounding the hostages in Iran that were released on the day Ronald Reagan took office at the end of Carter’s one term.

    Jimmy Carter was only 56 years old when he left the Oval Office for his home in Plains, Georgia, but he and his wife Rosalyn have continued to be advocates for the poor and disenfranchised since he returned home. In 2002 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his open resistance to the War in Iraq in addition to his countless contributions toward creating and preserving democracy around the world. The Carter Center has been a model for presidential libraries, a thriving institution whose motto is “Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope.”

    During the last years President Carter not only wrote a number of books but also found a passion for painting. Pretty and I are always grateful for the Christmas cards we faithfully receive every year from Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter, and we are particularly happy whenever the cards are works of art by the former president.

    Enjoy with us.

    2018 message: Blessings, love, and peace to you this Christmas

    (Cardinals in Winter, original painting by President Jimmy Carter)

    2017 message: May the Joy and Peace of Christmas be with you now

    and throughout the new year

    (Mountain Laurel, original painting by President Jimmy Carter)

    (White Dove, original painting by President Jimmy Carter)

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    And finally, just for fun, this one designed by Amy Carter who “created this original painting of her with her father carrying a Christmas tree home from the woods.”

    Message: May your home be filled with the warmth of family and friends

    this holiday season and throughout the New Year

    I couldn’t have said it better myself.

    Stay tuned.

  • the james brown holiday card collection


    No, not THAT James Brown – this is my friend of many moons, Jim Brown. I first met Jim in the early 1990s when I was selling life insurance, and he was selling health insurance. He cold called on me in my tiny Jefferson Pilot office one day, and I invited him to come in and tell me about his Golden Rule insurance plans. He folded his tall frame into my one and only office chair designed for very short clients, and we were off and running.

    Throughout the years, Jim sent us countless holiday cards that were truly unique and signaled the beginning of the holiday season. Pretty and I loved them all.

    2012 – Photo from Sheri Blackshire-Cochrane

    2015 – Photo of downtown Greenville, South Carolina

    2013 – Photo courtesy of Charlie Register

    2014 – Photo taken from downtown Greenville, South Carolina

    2016 – Highlands, North Carolina

    Each of Jim’s cards carried his best wishes for Pretty and me, and I’ve chosen one of his greetings to send to all our friends in cyberspace:

    “May you enjoy a bountiful Thanksgiving Day…

    a joyous Holiday Season…

    and a prosperous, healthful, Happy New Year.”

    From our family to yours, too.

    Stay tuned.

  • ’twas two weeks before Christmas…


    …and all through the yard only Spike and I were stirring,

    Pretty and Charly were inside and warm.

    Pretty and I like to keep the pool open in the winter,

    but it has a much different look from summer fun

    Spike keeps me company whenever I walk around the pool

    (I think he likes the cold, and I like his company)

    so beautiful, but Pretty battles the leaves until they’re all gone

    the bottom of the pool looks like a Rorschach test picture to me sometimes 

    even the bottle tree loses its colors in wintertime

    Spike is ready to go inside to check on Pretty

    While family members in the upstate of South Carolina have been without power this weekend after unusually large amounts of snowfall, we have been covered in grey clouds peppering us with rain, rain and more rain. Almost cold enough for snow, but not quite.

    I am reminded of Granny Selma’s motto: Sheila, we have to smile more on rainy days.

    Think about it, and stay tuned.

     

  • shadows of the evening


    “The sun was a gigantic circle of intense bright light as I walked on Old Plantersville Road tonight and the colors in the sky surrounding it took my breath away. They were all that – and then some. No camera this evening. Just me and the sunset. It’s as close as I ever come to a spiritual moment and not surprising that the words of a hymn I sang over and over during my Southern Baptist days played in my head while I walked:

    ‘Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh.

    Shadows of the evening steal across the sky.

    Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose,

    With thy tenderest blessing may mine eyelids close.’

    —–Sabine Baring-Gould, published 1865

    A few raindrops fell on me as I turned toward home from the railroad track  which is my usual turnaround spot. I didn’t even care. The colors changed quickly in the sky as the sun went down behind the trees across the pasture. I slowed my pace to catch as many of them as I could, and the rain stopped for me so I wouldn’t have to hurry.

    The day was over, and shadows of the evening stole across the sky right in front of me. Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose. My Random House Dictionary defines repose as, among other things, a dignified calmness…composure. Yes, give the weary a sweet repose. Let all who work hard and all who are tired of fighting the same battles or any whose pain leaves them exhausted – give them a sweet repose at the end of this day.

    And may our eyelids close.”

    ——–The Short Side of Time

    When I wrote these words in September, 2013, there was no way I could have known that in December, 2018 a special train would roll over those railroad tracks that were my turnaround point in my  Old Plantersville Road walks in Montgomery County, Texas. The special train was carrying the remains of President George H.W. Bush, the 41st. president of the United States, to his final resting place at the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas.

    I’ve watched most of the coverage of his death, two funerals, countless images of the Bush family and friends during the past six days. I was reminded of how true patriotism finds a way to express itself in the lives of selfless leaders who may be ambitious but never blind to the responsibilities of public service. In a day of tweeting presidents, I needed that reminder.

    Now on this night the special train will come to a stop, and the body of our 41st. president will be laid to rest in a place 22 miles from where I was born in Navasota, Texas. His family and friends will say a final farewell for now. My prayer for them is that they will find a calm and sweet repose at the end of this day.

    Stay tuned.

     

  • my mother reads from Deep in the Heart


    “I love this book,” my eighty-three-year-old mother says, startling me awake from my nap with her words. I had drifted off while sitting in the dark blue recliner in her room in the memory care unit of the assisted living facility she’d called home for the past two years. She was asleep when I sat down in the recliner.

    I open my eyes to see her sitting across from me. She’s in the small wooden chair with the straight back. I can’t believe she’s holding the copy of my book, Deep in the Heart, which I gave her two years ago. I never saw the book since then on any of my visits, and I assumed she either threw it away or lost it. I was also stunned to see how worn it was. The only other book she had that I’d seen in the same condition was The Holy Bible.

    “I know all of the people in this book,” she continues. “And so many of the stories, too.”

    “Yes, you do,” I agree. “The book is about our family.”

    And then with wonder, I hear another reader say my words. My mother reads to me as she rarely did when I was a child. She was always too busy with the tasks of studying when she went to college, preparing for classes when she taught school, cooking, cleaning, ironing, practicing her music for Sunday and choir practice – she couldn’t sit still unless my dad insisted she stop to catch her breath.

    But, today, she reads to me. She laughs at the right moments and makes sure to read “with expression” as the teacher in her remembers. Occasionally, she turns a page and already knows what the next words are. I’m amazed and moved. I have to fight the tears that could spoil the moment for us. I think of the costs of dishonesty on my part, and denial on hers. The sense of loss is overwhelming.

    The words connect us as she reads. For the first time in a very long while, we’re at ease with each other. Just the two of us in the little room with words that renew a connection severed by a distance not measured by miles. She chooses stories that are not about her and her daughter’s differences. That’s her prerogative, because she’s the reader.

    She reads from a place deep within her that has refused to surrender these memories. When she tires, she closes the book and sits back in the chair.

    “We’ll read some more another time,” she says.

    I lean closer to her.

    “Yes, we will. It makes me so happy to know you like the book. It took me two years to write these stories, and I’m glad you enjoy them so much.”

    “Two years,” she repeats. “You have a wonderful vocabulary.”

    Note this is an excerpt from a chapter called The Dementia Dialogues – Stage 1 from my book:

    The mysterious mother – daughter relationship complicated by a thief we call dementia is one of the themes of one of my favorite books. The cover shows a ten-year-old me struggling with gloves I’m sure I didn’t want to wear standing between my hip crew-cut dad and my correctly posed mom, my favorite aunt Lucille standing next to her brother, and my aunt’s daughter Melissa looking somewhat perplexed in an adorable bonnet sure to be the hit of the Easter service at the Richards Baptist Church.

    Stay tuned.