I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Personal

  • Something Old, Something New – Something Special


    “I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I doubt I deserved my friends.”
    —— Walt Whitman

    Yesterday I visited with my favorite Aunt Lucille who lives in Beaumont which is ninety-nine miles east of Montgomery on Texas Highway 105. I always enjoy my visits with her. She’s got spunk, and contrary to Mr. Grant’s opinion of spunk on the Mary Tyler Moore show a gazillion years ago, I like spunk. She refuses to give up her independent living apartment in a retirement community that offers assisted living and other levels of care for which she would qualify. Instead, she keeps her mind active with crossword puzzles and word games in the daily newspaper, and her knowledge of current events acquired through the TV and conversations is as good as it gets. She pushes herself out of bed and showers and dresses and puts on makeup every day. My aunt will be ninety-three years old in May and has a list of ailments and a personal pharmacy to treat them. A recent setback makes movement even more difficult for her, but she has rebounded and makes a determined effort to rejoin her friends at their reserved dinner table downstairs almost every evening. It’s a long walk from her apartment on the third floor to the lobby of the next building for meals. Trust me.

    Yesterday she told me one of her friends was coming by in the afternoon for a visit. I recognized the name because she had talked about Jan for as long as I could remember. She told me Jan was recovering from a stroke and her caregiver would be bringing her by. When Jan arrived promptly at two o’clock, Lucille got up from the sofa in the living room and pushed her walker toward Jan’s. When they met in the middle of the room, they both smiled and hugged each other with genuine joy on their faces. After introductions all round, we sat down to talk.

    Lucille and Jan met in 1953 when they both lived with their husbands in an apartment complex in Beaumont. They first talked when they were outdoors hanging clothes on the clothesline behind their apartment building. Both women were new to Beaumont and Jan’s daughter was born in the spring before Lucille’s was born in October that year. They were new mothers and became new friends. Their husbands luckily liked each other, too, and the couples got together often. Lucy’s husband Jay died in 1979 and Jan and her husband Otis shared a sixty-fifth wedding anniversary before his recent death.

    What struck me as I listened to them talk about their families and what was going on in their lives now was how remarkable it must be to have a friendship that stretches across sixty years of change and challenges. Their bond survived everything life threw at them. Hot and cold seasons came and went for six decades, but their loyalty to each other never got too hot to go up in flames or too cold to freeze and wither away.

    In a separate happening this week I was reminded of friendships I’ve lost and the pain of losing them. We are a mobile society and our moving parts rarely stay in the same place for very long. We change our homes and jobs and the people in our lives that go with them. Sometimes we just change the people in our lives. Regardless, a true friendship for sixty years is worthy of a tribute and this is mine for Lucille and Jan.

  • Independence Day


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    Lone Star flies again on Worsham Street

    Texas Independence Day was yesterday March 2nd. and I didn’t remember until today so I am turning back time and celebrating today.  My Lone Star flag has been in the garage since December when my neighbor across the street rescued it from being blown away by hurricane force winds while I was in South Carolina.   Tonight my new next-door neighbors rescued me from certain disaster on my ladder and returned the flag to its rightful position on the garage.  But, I didn’t stop there…

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    Worsham Street lit up

    I knew there was a good reason I didn’t totally take down the Christmas lights yet and what could be more appropriate than firing up the lights in March for Independence Day?   For all of my readers who weren’t required to take Texas history in the fourth grade, March 2, 1836, was the day a group of disgruntled men met in a small frame building in a remote place called Washington-on-the-Brazos and signed a Declaration of Independence from Mexico.  Needless to say, the Mexicans were as fired up as my lights and a short war ensued.  And I do mean short.  On April 21, 1836, the Battle of San Jacinto was won by the legendary General Sam Houston over his adversary General Santa Ana and the Republic of Texas was born.

    And such is the stuff dreams are made of.  Words like independence and equality roll off the tongue as easily as chocolate and marshmallows for me today and I need to slap myself periodically to guard against my personal archenemy, Complacency.  I had a good lesson last week from a PBS documentary called Makers: Women Who Make America.  From Bella Abzug to Betty Friedan to Shirley Chisholm to Geraldine Ferraro to Barbara Jordan to Billie Jean King to Ruth Bader Ginsberg to Sonia Sotamayor to Elena Kagan to Sandra Day O’Connor to Gloria Steinem to Oprah Winfrey to Ellen DeGeneres to Nancy Pelosi to Patricia Schroeder to Hillary Clinton to Rita Mae Brown to Meryl Streep who narrated the program, I re-lived the significance of these pioneers in American history and the contributions they made to my own opportunities in the 1960s and beyond.   Personal s-a-c-r-i-f-i-c-e, and I have to be careful to say this word slowly so as not to underestimate its importance, and dogged determination to move the cause for basic human rights for gender equality forward made these women true heroines and  the past sixty years a tumultuous time of two steps forward and one step back.

    And yet, while I was in the process of earning degrees from universities to enter a workplace where I was worried about equal pay for equal work and domestic partner benefits for lesbians or other social justice issues, my sisters in  countries outside the United States worried about a crust of bread for their daughter or shelter from the elements or a chance for any education at all.  If you are one of my regular readers, you know I can hardly resist the urge to quote the great western philosopher Garth Brooks and tonight is no exception.

         “When the last child cries for a crust of bread, when the last man dies for just words that he said,  when there’s shelter over the poorest head, then we shall be free…When the last thing we notice is the color of skin and the first thing we look for is the beauty within, when the skies and the oceans are clean again, then we shall be free…When we’re free to love anyone we choose, when this world’s big enough for all different views, when we all can worship from our own kind of pew, then we shall be free…”

    So tonight I celebrate Texas Independence and the heritage I have as a native and, thanks to the genealogical research of one of my cousins, daughter of the Republic of Texas.  Freedom and liberty and equality have exacted a price and require my ongoing commitment and diligence.  Compassion and empathy and courage will define my character.   As my daddy used to tell me,  you can take the girl out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the girl.

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  • How Did Stella Really Get Her Groove Back?


    I was talking to one of my favorite soul sisters tonight and she said something that crackled across the phone and smacked me upside the head with a satellite wave whack. It’s time for me to get my groove back, she said, and I understood immediately what she meant because I knew that was my problem, too. I’d lost my groove. Somewhere in the midst of the vicissitudes of life, as my daddy used to say, I’d buried my groove as surely as I’d buried the ashes of my mother in the little Fairview cemetery ten months ago. I hadn’t heard the reference to “getting your groove back” since I watched the movie How Stella Got Her Groove Back a hundred years ago, but I remembered the essentials. Apparently a young sexy shirtless Taye Diggs was the spark plug for a middle-aged Angela Bassett’s recovery of her misplaced spontaneity and optimism for her life. As I recall, Stella (Ms. Bassett) located her groove in less than two hours of screen time and happily rejoined the human race that she had forsaken. Sigh. Now, that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Fixer-upper for lost groove. Quick and easy.

    I’m fairly confident a shirtless man won’t be my impetus for getting my groove back and I know with certainty the process will take longer than two hours. Regardless, I do recollect Stella’s outlook became brighter and she seemed more hopeful for her future at the end of the film. I’m beginning to feel a small crack in the tortoise shell of grief that has covered me during the last year. Death and dying are two separate but equal tragedies and both exact a price on those who watch and wait. The tragedies remind me of my own mortality which brings questions of legacy and the life I chose to live. For those of us who tend to be contemplative and who ponder on a regular basis, facing our own mortality is a daunting undertaking. Undertaking. Hah. Get it?

    The grieving doesn’t end, but the images I carry from the tragedies dim and dwindle away and I am left with a knowledge of the importance of this moment in this day in this time because I am not promised another breath. I’m thinking that’s my first step toward getting my groove back. Stay tuned.

  • Thank God for Unanswered Prayer


    One of my favorite country western songs has the catchy title  Thank God for Unanswered Prayer.  Garth Brooks wrote it and performs it and it’s played regularly on my Country Legends radio station that I live with when I’m in Texas.  If I were straight and young, I would be a Garth Brooks groupie.  Seriously.  Alas, I am neither so I will be content with listening to him every day along with his other gazillion fans.  Garth Brooks is in the same  category of record sales and awards as Elvis and The Beatles.   I kid you not.  Look it up in your Funk and Wagnall’s or, as I did, on Wikipedia which has the answers to all questions.  Elvis, The Beatles, Garth Brooks.  Chew on that for a minute.

    In this particular hit tune he and his wife have a random encounter with an ex-girlfriend and he remembers the intensity of that passion and the fervent prayers he uttered to his God for things to work out with her.  As you might imagine from the title of the song, he concludes his life is much better without her and that some of “God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”

    My theology is suspect.  As I grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist environment in the 1950s and 60s I developed serious misgivings about my place in the hereafter, but I’m not wrestling that old demon today.   Instead, I was reminded of a few of my own unanswered prayers when I heard Garth’s song.   A funny flashback came to me of a deep-sea fishing trip off the Oregon coast when I was in my early twenties.  A couple of the older women I worked with at Brodie Hotel Supply in Seattle invited me to go with them and their husbands on a salmon fishing adventure early one cloudy Saturday morning.   To make a very long fishing tale short, I have a vivid memory of praying to God from the boat’s only bathroom where I spent the day.  The captain’s apologies to me from the other side of the restroom door for the roughest seas he’d sailed in years mattered not.  I begged him to contact the Coast Guard to send a helicopter to rescue me from the wretched or retched boat and I promised God if He would just get me off that boat I would never bother him again from the open seas.  The prayer went unanswered until the eight-hour expedition was complete.  Too little, too late.  I counted it unanswered.

    Regardless of my theology and its well-documented demise in my later years, I confess to praying for outcomes in situations that were desperate during the vicissitudes of life.  One particular time I believed I wouldn’t survive the loss of an eighteen-year relationship that ended when I was fifty-four years old.   I was undone.  Woe was me.  But just like Garth Brooks in his song, I thank God for unanswered prayer during those difficult days.  This week I celebrate my twelfth anniversary with my version of a gift.   My partner Teresa is the spicy salsa for the rather tortilla chip person I’ve always been.  She’s brought laughter and love with her as she breezed passionately into the core of my being.   We are not strangers to struggles nor immune to heartbreak in the years we’ve been together, but the joys comfort us when we are called upon to share the sorrows.

    Life is good, and I am grateful for unanswered prayers.

  • I Is Flawed. You Is Flawed. We Is All Flawed.


    Since Lance Armstrong had to look up the definition of “cheat” to figure out if what he did throughout a storied cycling career was wrong, I decided to look up “flawed” in my trusty Oxford American Thesaurus that I use for help in my writing.  His explanation of sorts for his inexplicable ruination of the lives of his friends and fellow cyclists and their families in addition to the hopes and dreams of fans all over the world who rallied around his comeback kid cycling career for over a decade– was that he was “flawed.”

    Flaw noun 1 a flaw in his character.  fault, defect, imperfection, blemish, failing, foible, shortcoming, weakness, weak spot

    Aha.  I recognize myself and many of my friends and family in this definition.  Indeed. I fear I am eat up with flawed and find that Medicare age doesn’t necessarily correct the faults and weaknesses of my earlier years.  A good example I can point to is my sweet tooth.  Is it possible to have more than one?  If it’s possible, I think I’ve always had more than one sweet tooth.  I rarely meet a dessert I don’t like and even as I write this I wish I had one of Dick Hubbard’s delicious pineapple cupcakes and why stop at one?    If I weighed within the acceptable guidelines for a five feet two-inch sixty-six-year-old woman, my cravings for sugar wouldn’t be a flaw but alas, I need to be the height of the beanstalk Jack climbed to have a body mass index of less than thirty-two.  I have several less obvious foibles, but I guarantee you they are visible to my girl Teresa who will agree that I is flawed on many levels.

    Much of the chatter on ESPN today following Mr. Armstrong’s Oprah Outing last night has focused on the word legacy.   What will be Lance Armstrong’s legacy in light of his doping and his lyin’ and cheatin’ heart?  Really, it’s perfect material for a country western song.  Oh gosh, it’s already been written.  Your cheatin’ heart will tell on you.  Ain’t that right, Hank?  Ain’t that right, Bill?

    Legacy noun 2…inheritance, heritage, tradition, hand-me-down, residue.

    We will hear the  word legacy more and more as President Barak Obama takes the oath of office Monday for his second and final inauguration.  The political pundits are already sniffing around in that general area as the inaugural festivities will be front and center fodder for the media this weekend and for weeks to come.  The traditions and heritage the President leaves in four years will define his presidency as surely as Lance Armstrong’s confession to Oprah last night defined his.   The residue from that interview isn’t pretty and to borrow from the words of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg: “…the world will little note nor long remember what we said here, but it will never forget what we did here.”

    Legacy smegacy Lance.  I’m afraid your legacy is lunacy.

    Lunacy noun 2…madness, insanity, foolishness, folly, foolhardiness, stupidity, idiocy, irrationality, illogicality, senselessness, absurdity, absurdness, silliness, inanity, ludicrousness…

    You get the picture.  And  if the cycling shoe fits?