I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Personal

  • Handel’s Messiah (My Favorite Love Song)


    Teresa gave me the best gift of the holiday season last night when she took me to a Sing-Along Messiah concert at the Washington Street United Methodist Church where I sang along with a packed church audience of  other “Messiah” lovers who were mostly white-haired like me but had a good mixture of younger voices that gave me a feeling of hope for many more years of these sing-alongs.

    It was a special night for us because the first official “date” we had fifteen years ago this Christmas was to go to a presentation of Handel’s Messiah by the choir and orchestra at the Park Street Baptist Church here in Columbia.  I remember how nervous I was to ask her to go, although we had been friends for many years and done lots of things together like going to Panther football games several times, eating lunch frequently to discuss Guild business, meeting at my office for work on Guild mailing lists. We had been friends and activists in our community for seven years, but now things were different because we were both “available.”  Our other long-term relationships were over.

    Teresa laughs now because she said she didn’t know I was asking her out on a “date” when I asked her to go  hear the Messiah. She says she was surprised that I asked her to go because neither of us went to church –  and even more surprised when I suggested we go to dinner afterwards since I hadn’t said a word about that in my original “ask.”  She was busy. She had to mail her Christmas cards. She had her fourteen-year-old son Drew to get dinner for, she said when I tried to prolong our evening. I must have looked so disappointed that she took pity on me.

    Hm. Why don’t you go to the post office with me to mail my cards and then we can get a pizza to take home to Drew?  Sure, I’d said, as my dream of a romantic dinner evaporated right there in her car in front of the Post Office on Assembly Street while she rummaged through her large purse looking for stamps for her cards. Before I knew it, I was sitting in Teresa’s living room eating a pepperoni pizza with her and her son watching her wrap Christmas presents. Her dog Annie stared at me from the safety of her vantage point under the coffee table. I stayed way too long.

    The music last night transported me to the many wonderful places I’d performed Handel’s Messiah as a chorus member and soloist – even director in cities from Seattle, Washington to Fort Worth, Texas to Cayce and Columbia, South Carolina. I had always loved this music that symbolized Christmas for me whenever and wherever I’d heard it.  Last night, however, I found those memories as fuzzy as the notes on the alto lines were as I tried my best to keep pace  with the  sing- along.

    The most magical place the music took me last night?  The living room of a little house on Wessex Lane where I sat eating pizza with a woman and her son. The most vivid memory? This was the night I realized I was falling in love with my best friend. Now that’s a memory to cherish.

    I wish you all the hope for peace that this season offers and the joys of your favorite sounds of the season, but most of all, I wish you love.

     

     

     

     

  • Ready – Set – Ho! Here Come the Holidays!


    We have put away our ghosts and goblins and all things orange at our casa and  turned our attention this weekend to the reds and greens of the ghosts of Christmas Past which Teresa has carefully preserved in boxes, drawers and various nooks and crannies in the garage and bodega. I am always impressed she can recover the same decorations year after year in the midst of chaos and confusion, but then she functions at her highest level under pressure.

    The tabletop silver tree appears intact with the tiny ornaments still in place from last year – which was my brilliant idea since I am responsible for all tree trimming to include the dozen or so miniature ornaments  that are the only decorations other than the lights for the small tree. I decided last year that  taking the ornaments off at the end of one season and then hanging them again at the beginning of the next holiday was a waste of my time and energy – much like my philosophy of dusting furniture – so I left them on the tree last year and here they are safe and sound with minimal casualties. Key word: minimal.

    I made the 21st. century switch to LED lights for the little tree last year and decided to leave them on the tree in the storage box, too. Hm. Not so brilliant. They seem a bit worse for the wear and not too interested in glowing red and white, but I told T they would be fine once I got new batteries. She looked skeptical and frowned, but I reminded her of the gazillion sets of lights we replaced every Christmas when we used the other lights that weren’t guaranteed to last a lifetime. These LED lights would last forever, according to the boxes. Okay. Sounds good. Did the fine print say anything about surviving being crushed…just wondering,

    The transition from Halloween to Christmas will be in full swing for us this week with a detour Thursday for Thanksgiving which happens to be my favorite holiday of the year. Yep, my personal best. I love Thanksgiving because the focus is on my favorite f-words: family, friends, food and football with a passing nod to decorations and gifts until the day after. T and I will make our traditional trip to the Upstate to be with her late mother’s Alverson family in the fellowship hall of the First Baptist Church of Fingerville, South Carolina late Thursday afternoon as the sun sets behind the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. There’s not a prettier drive in the state or a more beautiful time of the year.

    This Thanksgiving I am particularly grateful for my best buddy and faithful companion , Red, who has celebrated not only fifteen of these with me but has also been with me for the entire 21st century of my life – a century I never dreamed I’d live to see but one I wouldn’t trade for anything… except maybe the 1950s. Red may not be here for the next Thanksgiving, and I’m trying to figure out how I’m ever going to take a shower without his lying on the bath mat next to me waiting for me to finish. Red Man, I am thankful for you.

    For Chelsea who also will probably not be with us next Thanksgiving and Spike who probably will, I am equally grateful. For Teresa who functions at her highest level under stress, I am so very thankful. I love and adore her beyond any degree of reason, and I know I would be lost without her. I do not function well under stress unless I am prepared for it. Even then, it’s iffy.

    Finally, I am grateful for all of my friends and family in my virtual reality as well as those who surround me up close and personal in living color.  My blogging friends in other countries and other states have become another kind of family for me, and I treasure our shared experiences via words and images. I’ve grown accustomed to our posts.

    Ready – set – ho!  The holidays are upon us. Celebrate the ones you choose to celebrate in whatever fashion you choose to celebrate them in, but take time to be thankful this Thanksgiving.

    Teresa and I send our warmest wishes to all of you for a Happy Thanksgiving and wondrous holiday season. We are thankful for you.

     

  • In this Case, Fiction is Stranger than Truth


    Usually whenever I do a reading from one of my nonfiction books, someone raises a hand during the q & a to ask, “Yes, but why don’t you write fiction?” or “Have you ever thought about writing fiction?”  My response is fiction is too hard for me to write.  Nonfiction is no piece of cake for me, but at least it begins with the truth as I know it which makes it grounded in something and somehow that is important for a Taurus. I like to have a starting point – it creates less anxiety for me in writing.

    Fiction is like flailing around in emptiness and space where I am responsible for creating something out of nothing, and that makes me incredibly anxious before I even begin to sit down at the computer to write. So many hurdles for me to overcome in writing fiction.

    The first problem I have is character names. I can’t think up good names for my characters and it’s not for lack of a reservoir to draw from. I collect names like I collect sayings – I have literally folders of names that I’ve saved through the years, but when it comes to putting them in a story, I can’t find the right ones. None of the names belong  with my plot, which is my second problem. What are these nameless characters going to do? And how can I possibly keep them doing it for more than a chapter?

    The short story has been my salvation, although not a soul realized my redemption except  me. I have submitted a number of short stories for various literary contests, anthology collections, and magazines over the past ten years. One of them, Honky Tonk Cowboy, was published in the storyteller magazine in 2013  and another one, Dear Auntie O, recently appeared in a local magazine Fun after Fifty.net.  If I were a major league baseball player with this batting average, I wouldn’t be on a team roster anywhere.

    With that record, why in the world would I take on a serialized fiction project? Good question. I believe the answer is timing. As Teresa reminded me today as we were driving through town after lunch, timing is everything. And so it is.

    Channillo came along at a time when I was in the process of writing a novel or novella or a very long short story – I’m not sure which – a story I started before Brokeback Mountain was a major motion picture hit. It’s a story I take out periodically, dust it off and proclaim I can write fiction. The jury is out on that.

    However, Channillo is a venue that offers serialized literature for a very nominal monthly fee much like Netflix does for the small screen, and  I decided to give my fiction one last ride. Chapter One of my story Cowgirls at the Roundup is available now on Channillo in the Historical Romance genre. Yikes! I must be fifty shades of red.

    Click on the link in my blogroll to the right between Books I Buy and Don.

    Saddle up.

  • Learning New Tricks from Old Dogs


    From the time I was five or six years old growing up in rural southeast Texas in the 1950s, my daddy used to take me with him to hunt quail during what I remember as a relatively short season in the late fall and winter months. Quail lived in coveys in fields in the countryside around us and were excellent at hiding from their enemies in the tall grasses that would become hay when baled. You could walk and walk and walk some more until you felt like your legs were going to fall off if you had to put one foot ahead of the other again, but the quail were always one step ahead of you unless you had help locating them.

    Enter the hunter’s best friend: the German short-haired pointer a/k/a in Grimes County, Texas as the bird dog. A good bird dog could run through a field sniffing and sniffing, sometimes whining, until he caught a whiff of a covey of quail and then he would stop, raise his right front leg to a ninety-degree angle,  curl his medium-length tail over his back and point his nose exactly in the direction of the covey. He remained in this precise position until the hunter walked up beside the dog which would cause the quail to take flight with the sound of their fluttering wings making a whoosh noise as they left the ground.

    Whoosh! Bam! It was over that quick. The covey rose from the ground cover, and my daddy would shoot his twelve-gauge shotgun. Occasionally a bird would fall, and I would run to retrieve it and put it in my jacket to take home to my grandmother who would be happy to fix it for our supper. We rarely got our  legal limit, but we would usually have enough for a meal.

    The problem my daddy had was he never had a “good” bird dog.  He got the puppies from different people  in the area who always assured him their dogs were the best in the field, but invariably the pointer he got didn’t respond well to training. A common trait Daddy’s dogs had was rather than stopping to point and hold their position, they would  stop to point for a split second and then run as fast as they could to try to catch the birds by themselves. Of course, the quail would take flight when they heard the dogs and be long gone out of  shooting range by the time we caught up with the dogs. Daddy would halfheartedly fuss – and the dogs rarely improved.

    As I think back on this now, I believe our dogs had an identity issue which caused their lackluster performance in the field. Whether they did well or not in the hunting arena, they were fed regularly with  delicious scraps from our table (dog food wasn’t on Daddy’s radar screen) and petted and hugged on an equally regular basis. They came indoors for their pets and Daddy often scooped the big dogs up and held them on his lap while he talked to them about their shortcomings. My daddy was a very diminutive man – about five feet six inches tall – and those dogs weighed almost as much as he did. They looked at him with adoring eyes and absolute trust…and seemed to be saying I promise I’ll do better next time…but they wouldn’t.

    My daddy loved his bird dogs. We always had at least one dog in our family for as long as I can remember and at one time when I was in high school, we had three.  I know that for sure because I still have the original oil paintings he commissioned  at that time from an artist friend of his.

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    Daddy’s Bird Dogs: Rex, Seth and Dab (circa 1966)

    No wonder I love my dogs. I’ve never personally owned a bird dog, but I’ve been on the receiving end of the adoring eyes and plaintive expressions of more than a few dogs of my own throughout my adult life. I confess to holding them on my lap if I can scoop them up, but even if I can’t do that, I will give them lots of love and kisses whenever and wherever they will stand  or sit or lie down to be so smothered.

    Loving dogs – or any animal for that matter – is the gift that keeps on giving to us mere humans, but the gift comes with a high price tag because their lives are relatively short. Indeed,  it seems the older we are, the faster we lose them.

    Two of our three remaining dogs that have given us much more loyalty and adoration than we deserve over the past decade have now been diagnosed with cancers that will ultimately take them from us. What I have learned from them is that they both keep their pain to themselves without complaints. They are not troubled by wondering why they are in their particular situations, and I think this allows them to try to keep changes in their routines to a minimum. They like to roll the way they’ve always rolled if they possibly can.

    I am a contemplative person – I can’t help myself. I find I can spend a great deal of time trying to figure out “why” this happened or that took place. Unfortunately, discovering “why” doesn’t necessarily lead to productive change. As a matter of fact, the opposite is likely to occur. So when I find myself in a position similar to the ones my dogs are facing today, I hope I have learned my lessons from the examples they have set for me and focus less on “why” and more on “so what.”

    That’s the way I’d like to roll.

    P.S. My daddy never asked anyone to make an oil painting of me.

  • The Good, the Bad and the Ugly


    The Good:

    This past Thursday evening a small group of LGBT activists met at a local restaurant in Columbia, South Carolina to celebrate with Jim Obergefell, one of the plaintiffs in the  recent historical SCOTUS decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all fifty states in the USA. We were a jubilant group – full of laughter, chatting happily, enjoying the fruits of many years of hard labors, toasting with champagne given to us by the delightful wait staff who wanted to recognize our group for our “contributions to the state of South Carolina.” An amazing evening. Unimaginable in 1984 when our organization of the movement began in earnest in the state.

    The Bad:

    On that same Thursday last week on a different continent a world away six people were stabbed as they marched in the Jerusalem annual gay pride parade – stabbed by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who had just been released from serving ten years in prison for stabbing a gay man in another march  those years before. Two of the people were taken to the hospital, and yesterday Shira Banki, a sixteen-year-old activist, died. An amazing event – unfortunately,  still not unimaginable in any country today – but a tragic loss for the entire LGBT community which shares the sorrow of her family and friends in Israel.

    More Good:

    Jim Obergefell and local activist Nekki Shutt served as co-Grand Marshalls of the Charleston Pride Parade two days later on a rainy Saturday in the low-country capitol of the state- but the rain didn’t dampen the spirits of the  hundreds of marchers who had waited for the opportunity to step out for equality with pride. The music was loud, the floats were festive – and the entire atmosphere was electric with the possibilities ahead for the LGBT movement toward full equality.

    More Bad:

    That same weekend a Russian Military Holiday was observed in St. Petersburg, Russia. Several gay activists staged individual protests  during the festivities because of recent government anti-gay measures and were taunted by the Russian Airborne Services who tore up the protesters’ posters. Russian police intervened in the confrontation and took the activists away, although the law permits one-person protests. One of the paratroopers had this to say: “We’re in Russia and not in America. Let them do what they want in America, but not in Russia.”

    The Ugly:

    And finally, a report released  today by an independent project called Airwars alleges that U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in the past year targeting the Islamic State group may have killed more than 450 civilians. The U.S. denies these numbers but said there are four ongoing military investigations into allegations regarding the deaths of civilians during airstrikes.

    I understand why…no, I don’t. Not really. Life is so much better for me when I don’t read or listen to the news. Just let me drink my champagne in peace, but no…

    How can one man love another man so much that he will try to change the attitudes of an entire country so that their love will have the same status  in that country as  those who love members of the opposite sex? And then how can one man hate this same love so much that he will stab a teenage girl to death simply because she chose to get out of her bed one Thursday morning and look in the mirror and say, Today I will be myself. I will be who I really am, and I want the world to see me as I am.

    Life isn’t always filled with days that are good and bad or even ugly. Most of our days are just opportunities to go one way or the other – to choose to make a difference right where we are in this moment – or to let that chance slip away with a shrug of indifference. Jim  Obergefell chose a path that led him on a long journey to the highest court in the United States. Shira Banki’s choice led to a much shorter journey – but one that was no less important.   As for the civilians allegedly lost in Iraq and Syria, well, they had no choice.

    My investigation is ongoing, but the preliminary findings indicate good and bad are always in a tight race for our best selves and some of us win or lose depending on the day of the race. Blessed are those that win more days than they lose, for they shall drag the rest of us to the finish line and we will be grateful.