I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Personal

  • PTDS – Is There Any Cure?


    I called my doctor this morning after a sleepless night and gave him my symptoms.

    “Doctor, Doctor, I woke up this morning and wasn’t able to get out of  bed – I pulled the covers up over my head as high as I could and then felt paralyzed from my head to my toes. I tried to think of my mantra but couldn’t remember it so I just lay there – unable to even reach for my iPad to play Words with Friends or Yushino. I’m telling you – I had so much anxiety I couldn’t even tell Pretty good morning or give my poor dogs their breakfast. It was like I was trapped in some kind of nightmare.”

    “Hm. I see. Can you describe the nightmare? Was there a monster after you?”

    “Yes! That’s exactly how I felt – like there was a monster after me!”

    “Hm. I see. Can you describe the monster?”

    “Well, let me think. I think it was an overweight orange man with yellow hair – yes, an overweight orange man with yellow hair – and I couldn’t get away from him. Everywhere I turned, there he was right behind me. I felt like he was stalking me – he kept shouting and pointing his finger at me. I think he said he wanted to put me in jail or something like that. It was terrible, terrible. I’ve never been so afraid in any of my worst nightmares.”

    “Hm. I see. And by any chance, did this overweight orange man with yellow hair do a lot of wheezing?”

    “Yes! He did…every time he got close to me I could hear him make this odd sniffing sound. But how did you know that?”

    “Well, my dear, I have to say it’s the strangest phenomenon for a Monday morning I believe I’ve ever seen in my forty years of practicing medicine. You are the fifth woman to call me today with these same symptoms. Extraordinary, you might want to say.”

    “Oh, my goodness. Have you been able to make a diagnosis for us? Do you have a medicine that will help us?”

    “I have Good News and Bad News. The good news is I have been able to diagnose what you all have. You clearly are suffering from Post Traumatic Debate Stress or PTDS after watching the most recent 2016 Presidential Debate last night.”

    “OMG, not PTDS – that’s the Good News? I’m afraid to hear the Bad News.”

    “The Bad News is it is incurable in the short-term. However, I can promise you it will get better after November 08th. if you live that long. So hang in there, and my prescription is to stay away from your TV on October 19th…before, during and after the next debate.”

    Which is what I plan to do.

    P.S. Happy Thanksgiving Day to my Canadian friends – be thankful for your blessings which include not being in the middle of a bitterly divisive election campaign that might spoil your appetites.

  • Transformers That Go BOOM in the Night!


    Howling winds that blew buckets and buckets of rain all night were the demons that kept Pretty and me awake with jangling nerves as Hurricane Matthew pushed up the South Carolina coast to finally make land in the little fishing town of  McClellanville at some point this morning. McClellanville is between Charleston and Myrtle Beach and was devastated by Hurricane Hugo in 1989. It’s just 150 miles south of Casa de Canterbury and Matthew let us know how far he could reach with his power and fury beginning late yesterday afternoon as he whipped up the atmosphere around us before ending a little while ago with a whimper of light breezes and drizzle. Adios, Matthew. Good-bye. Good riddance.

    This was our conversation every hour on the hour while the hurricane winds and rain beat against our bedroom window panes on the second floor.

    Me: “I think we need to go down to the first floor and spend the night in the living room.”

    Pretty: “Let’s wait a little while and see how it goes.”

    Me: “I can see the trees moving in the shadows on the blinds, and I’m worried one of them might fall on our heads.”

    Pretty: “Yes, I’m worried about that, too. Let me check Facebook to see what everyone else is doing.”

    Me: “In the middle of the night during a hurricane you’re checking Facebook?”

    Pretty:  “Yes. I want to know how my friends are doing.”

    Me: “Your friends are sound asleep in the living rooms on the first floor of their houses.”

    Pretty: Silence. She closes her computer and pretends to sleep. I shut up.

    At four o’clock a transformer in our neighborhood went out with a Loud BOOM that shook our house. Pretty and I sat up straight and I muttered obscenities while Pretty reached down to comfort Spike who started to shake. Charly jumped up from her place at the bottom of the bed and flew to get between Pretty and me. We were all undone and waited for something terrible to happen.

    Miraculously the ceiling fan continued its pattern of movement and my electric digital clock kept on ticking. The winds and downpour were still swirling around us, but we remained relatively unscathed on the second floor of Casa de Canterbury.

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    The Orlando flag survived – but several big limbs didn’t

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    Dent Middle School not far from our house

    was a temporary shelter for low country evacuees

    We understand that we were very lucky to have minimal problems when so many across our state and our sister states along the southeastern Atlantic coastline suffered severe losses of property and lives. For that, Pretty and I are grateful. We talked the past few days about the people of Haiti and the plight they have in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew. Unimaginable devastation. Ongoing horrors and nightmares.

    Pretty is happily back on Facebook in the light of day and told me about the neatest post on Usain Bolt, the Olympian runner, who has donated $10 million dollars to the Haiti rebuilding efforts. That made me truly happy. May it all end up in the hands that need it most.

    Thank you to everyone who has been concerned about Casa de Canterbury and its family during Hurricane Matthew. The comments, prayers and well wishes have been wonderful and very much appreciated by Pretty, Charly, Spike and me.

    We’re still standing.

  • Matthew Moves Our Way – Casa de Canterbury Hunkers Down


    My, oh, my. Hurricane Matthew has brought just enough moisture to our back yard to ensure our little dog Charly  refuses to step outside. Barely a drizzle. A wisp of a breeze. But Charly has stood several times at the kitchen door we left open wide for her today, lifted her head for a sniff of the air pressure, turned around and returned to her place on the sofa to watch the TV for more news on Matthew’s path which is apparently to get closest to land in Charleston, South Carolina during the night tonight. The little dog clearly knows Casa de Canterbury is only a hop, skip and jump away from Charleston and obviously has a lot of free-floating anxiety, as do the rest of us.

    Thanks to our good friend Ann in Pennsylvania for the portable charger idea yesterday. We went right out to the Office Depot and bought one this morning, and I am delighted  to report there are picture illustrations of how to use it since the font of the instructional brochure is Thumbelina size and impossible for my eyes to decipher.

    Speaking of eyes, Pretty took me to a new eye doctor today because my regular eye doctor referred me to someone else for a possible surgery to re-attach a muscle in each eye that holds up my eyelids and has separated from its proper place due to guess what? Old age. Another hit for the home team known as Sheila’s Senior Fall – Aparts; the hits just keep on coming. Now drooping eyelids…hm…so many drooping body parts.

    The good news is Medicare will cover the procedure – the bad news is the surgery has the potential to activate the sleeping shingles nerve in my right eye and that would be a huge nightmare so now to do or not to do the surgery is the question. Sigh. Time to consult the old crystal ball if we can find it.

    Thanks also to my cousin Anne in Texas for the advice on the rocking chairs on the front porch. I have taken precautions and battened down those hatches to keep them safe. I have one Mounds bar remaining and am fighting the impulse to risk another run to the CVS drug store for the Buy One – Get the Second One for – a – Quarter Sale. The rockers should be safe, but the candy supply is already iffy.

    OMG, we came home to this sight at our neighbor’s house this afternoon.

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    The little girl who lives next door turns eight today and is having a birthday party. Lots of little girls in dresses being brave and ignoring Hurricane Matthew. Charly should take a lesson from them.

    Pretty continues the battle with her knee recovery regardless of Hurricane Matthew’s path. The City of Columbia continued trash collection today. The US Postal Service delivered the usual bills to Casa de Canterbury, and Spike sounded the alarm that the Evil Postman had arrived this afternoon. The South Carolina Electric and Gas spokesman advised that extra crews are on the way to help our state with restoring power that may be lost. The Governor called out the National Guard, the President declared we are a national disaster waiting to happen, and I am about to eat the one remaining Mounds candy bar. That about sums it up, don’t you think?

    Stay tuned.

     

     

  • Hurricane Matthew – Shake, Rattle and Roll


    Yesterday I had three unexpected phone calls from Texas  – one from my cousin Gaylen who lives in Houston, one from my sister Leora who lives in Rosenberg and one from my cousin Frances who lives in Willis. I also had a rare text from my good friend Carol who is one of the Little Women of Worsham Street in Montgomery and another text from a close  childhood friend Tinabeth who still lives in Richards where I grew up plus an email from another of my oldest Richards friends, Warren, who now lives in Arkansas.  All of them were worried about our safety at Casa de Canterbury as weather channels across the country focused on the path of Hurricane Matthew which was churning up the Caribbean wreaking destruction in Haiti and moving north toward the USA with projections for a path that would put it along our South Carolina coast Friday and Saturday. I imagine we weren’t the only ones contacted by family and friends.

    Our local TV news channels echoed the national weather bureaus with their models of Matthew’s trajectory and our governor declared a state of emergency with evacuation of the low-lying coastal areas. Interstate 26, the main highway leading out of Charleston, became so congested traffic crawled and stood still for hours. At 3:00 o’clock yesterday afternoon, the I-26 lanes moving into Charleston were re-routed so that they became outbound lanes to accommodate the heavy flow. An estimated 1.1 million people will leave the coastal areas headed north to Columbia and beyond to ride out the storm on higher ground.

    Early yesterday morning – early being a relative term – let’s say about 9 o’clock, I went to the grocery store to get our necessities: sweet ‘n low, bread, water, chips and toilet paper. The parking lot of the Kroger was packed. The carts were scarce so I knew the race was on. No problem finding sweet ‘n low. Evidently we were the only household requiring artificial sweeteners in an emergency. Bread, chips and toilet paper were more difficult but still available – water OUT. That ship had sailed. Shelves empty. Case closed.

    Not to be outdone I left the Kroger and drove down to the CVS drug store on the corner and saw more cars in the parking lot than usual but luckily they still had a dwindling supply of water. I bought two packs of bottled water but while I was waiting to be checked out, I spied the candy bar sale of buy one, get second one for a quarter. I picked up four Mounds bars and told Shirley the counter check-out lady I was now prepared for whatever the hurricane brought.

    I replaced the batteries in our four flashlights and have a lighter at the ready for our candles. I surveyed our front porch and brought in the cushions from the rocking chairs. I feel I have forgotten to do something major here at the casa, but I can’t remember what it is at the moment. If anyone has a recommendation, please comment.

    Hurricane season for us on the Atlantic Coast is from June 1st – November 30th., but don’t hold us to that schedule. Hurricanes are like babies – they can be later or earlier than planned. Most of them are harmless, but sometimes we have a Big One, a real Doozie, and then an estimated 12 million people along the Atlantic Coast are at risk for loss of life and possessions. That is apparently our situation this week as Hurricane Matthew is bearing down; and the elements are ready to shake, rattle and roll over us.

    Thanks to our family and friends for checking in with us. It makes us feel loved and reminds me that storms occur in all of our lives every day  – often we have our own personal hurricanes that have nothing to do with the weather. A phone call, a text, an email or God forbid – an actual visit – just might be the kindness that helps someone weather their storm. Be prepared.

    And stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Race is On – And the Winner Loses All


    Well the race is on and here comes Pride at the backstretch,

    Heartaches are going to the inside.

    My tears are holding back, they’re trying not to fall…

    The race is on and it looks like Heartaches.

    And the winner loses all.

    written by Don Rollins 

    immortalized by George Jones

    In May, 1964 I graduated from Columbia High School in West Columbia, Texas. There were eighty-seven other seniors in my graduating class that year. Two weeks later I was standing in registration lines in a gymnasium at the University of Texas in Austin to enroll for summer school as a freshman along with 19,000 other students. The dorm I moved into had seven floors – with elevators, thank goodness – and was huge to me. No wonder – I looked up the size today and it had 69,754 sq ft. The home I came from was a tiny cottage of maybe 1,200 sq. ft. that my parents rented from the people who owned the grocery story we lived behind. To paraphrase one of my grandmother’s favorite sayings, I was country come to town when I moved to Austin, and I felt it.

    Three months later in September, 1964,  a fellow Texan named George Jones released his hit single The Race is On. Supposedly the song was one of his personal favorites and one that he usually sang in concerts. He definitely tried to sing it at a concert I attended on the UT campus in the spring of my first full year (1965) but as I recall George was under the influence of alcohol and forgot the lyrics of that song and several others before making an early exit. No Show Jones was an appropriate nickname for him that night, but I really didn’t care because I was also under the influence for the first time ever in my nineteen years.

    The two friends who invited me to go with them to the concert had brought a bottle of scotch to mix with Seven-up. They poured my drinks with a heavy hand, and No Show Sheila walked back to her room on the third floor of the 69, 754 sq. ft. – dormitory…and threw up. I never drank scotch again.

    Thirty-six days from today until the election of 2016 on November 8th.; I heard that on the news this morning, and I have to say that seems like a long, long time to me. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait until I turned twenty-one. I thought that day would never get there. Starting on my sixteenth birthday, I counted each birthday in relation to that twenty-first. The wait was painfully slow. After the momentous twenty-first birthday, however, the years picked up speed; and the race has been on toward an unknown finish line at the speed of light…

    Until this election year when time has apparently stood still. The race has been on to the White House and the houses of Congress for the past two years with primary debates, billboards running rampant throughout the landscape of our cities and interstates, thousands of television and radio and cyberspace commercials approved by the people who are promoting themselves and unending polarization of the country that has a divided view of its direction. Yes, my friends, the race is on.

    Please forgive me, spirit of George Jones, for my transgression of making your love song into a political one. In this 2016 race for the White House I have seen Pride at the backstretch and Heartaches going to the inside and have had to hold back my own tears. I could weep for the absurdity of this race with its personal punches and counter-punches. I could weep for a nation so divided that I wonder if our house will stand. The race is on alright, and I feel Heartaches as it heads into the last days. My fear is that the winner loses all.

    It’s old Blue Monday for me, and I’m thinking about one of my favorite country music artists and his songs. George may be gone, but the race is still on.

    I’m voting early and often, as Lyndon Johnson used to ask us to do in Texas. I urge you to join me.