I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: photography

  • changing of the guard in Queens (New York, that is)

    changing of the guard in Queens (New York, that is)


    As Serena Williams said in her farewell on-court interview following her loss this year in the US Open, there would be no Serena if it weren’t for her sister Venus. Tennis fans who have followed the professional tennis world for the past twenty-five years echo this sentiment. The two sisters have been prominent figures who not only set new records in the sport but also contributed to changing the evolution of women’s tennis players toward a more powerful game.

    Selected Women’s Singles Champions at the US Open:

    1999 – Serena Williams (17 years old)*

    2000 – Venus Williams

    2001 – Venus Williams, Serena Williams Runner-up

    2002 – Serena Williams, Venus Williams Runner-up

    2008 – Serena Williams

    2011 – Samantha Stosur, Serena Williams Runner-up

    2012 – Serena Williams

    2013 – Serena Williams

    2014 – Serena Williams

    2017 – Sloane Stephens, Madison Keys Runner-up

    2018 – Naomi Osaka, Serena Williams Runner-up

    2019 – Bianca Andreescu, Serena Williams Runner-up

    2022 – Iga Swiatek, Ons Jabeur Runner-up

    *Serena Williams was eliminated in the third round of the 2022 US Open on Arthur Ashe Stadium in the Billie Jean King Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York. Williams was 24 days shy of her 41st birthday. She holds the most combined major titles with thirty-nine: 23 singles, 14 women’s doubles and 2 in mixed doubles plus four Olympic gold medals representing the United States.

    Venus (l.) and Serena Williams win 1st Major Doubles

    together at US Open in 1999

    Carol Newsome/AFP/Getty Images

    2022 US Open Women’s Doubles Runner-up Team

    Caty McNally (l.) and Taylor Townsend

    photo by Pete Staples/ USA

    The Open this year marks, in my opinion as a tennis fan for more than fifty years, the beginning of a changing of the guard in both women and men’s tennis. New names emerged this year – names unfamiliar to the television viewers perhaps but nonetheless those we will need to learn how to pronounce, to watch for, and to embrace as they make their own places in history.

    Iga Swiatek won 2022 Women’s Singles at US Open

    from Poland – also won French Open in 2020 and 2022

    19-year-old Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz won 2022 US Open (l.)

    while runner-up was 23 year old Norwegian Casper Ruud

    Getty Images

    The US Open win for Alcaraz meant he was the youngest man ever to become #1 in the world in the ATP rankings. The year 2022 has not been a total changing of the guard in men’s tennis; Rafa Nadal won the Australian Open and the French Open, Novak Djokovic took the Wimbledon Championships. However, Roger Federer didn’t play at all in 2022, Nadal has many physical issues as well as becoming a father for the first time this fall, and Novak Djokovic has Covid vaccination problems. I do sense a shift in the winds away from the Big Three and their stranglehold on the majors in the Golden Era of men’s tennis for the first two decades of the 21st century. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

    Carlos said one of the greatest inspirations for him was Serena Williams. He grew up in the generation that watched the magical play of Serena. “She inspired me and a lot of players, you know,” he answered when asked what player on the WTA had inspired him.

    “It’s passion, it’s power, it’s everything; she is the GOAT for me, plain and simple,” said Casper Ruud on Serena Williams.

    photo of Iga in selfie with Serena at US Open

    posted by Dzevad Mesic in Tennis World

    “Her legacy is so big. She has shown us that it’s possible to play so good consistently for all these years and also play, and have a great business, and be a mother. She has shown us that there’s hope for that and for us.And with hard work, you can achieve really great things. So Serena is a legend of our sport for sure,” Swiatek said about Williams in a video for the WTA.

    The final word belongs to Pretty, of course, who has allowed me to quote her on Serena. “Coco Gauff, Naomi Osaka, and every other kid in America who picks up a racket – male or female – will do it because of Serena Williams.”

    There you have it. End of story except to say Serena will always be my Queen of Queens, and it’s hard to say goodbye.

  • setting boundaries with Molly

    setting boundaries with Molly


    Family times on our screened porch this summer have been far and few between, as my cousin Martin used to say, but Labor Day weekend Number One Son Drew brought his two daughters almost 3 year old Ella and 7 months old Molly for a visit with their Nanas for a final pool fling. While Daddy Drew and Ella took a bathroom break, Pretty captured my efforts to teach Molly the importance of boundaries.

    Naynay, why are your eyes always watering?

    Maybe you have something in there

    Naynay, stop talking about my fingernails – not nice

    Ok, Naynay – is this better?

    Naynay, please stop talking about boundaries

    Can anyone help me keep Naynay from talking about boundaries?

    What’s a boundary?

    ***********************

    For the children. Slava Ukraini.

  • Dimples, Butch, Buttercup, Sissy… Sissy?

    Dimples, Butch, Buttercup, Sissy… Sissy?


    Whenever someone asks me what I’m writing, I feel a fleeting twinge of guilty laziness for saying I continue to blog – no new book of essays, no great American novel, no legacy book for my granddaughters. This is me self publishing using the same platform I’ve had for thirteen years. Never reaching 2,000 followers but loving my local and international friends who faithfully hang with me. Averaging 150 hits per post in 2022, sometimes more in other years, sometimes fewer. Somewhere along the way I found a voice, but the Boomer passion for individual achievement in the realm of literature that produced six books is mixed now with the seasoned settling of comforting routines that continue to produce my cyberspace conversations. If I ever changed my mind about publishing a new collection of my flash nonfiction, I promise the following post from the archives would be included.

    Pretty, the great Treasure Hunter, occasionally brings home items that fascinate. One such find  was two versions of a board game I played as a child growing up in rural Grimes County, Texas in the mid twentieth century. Before the television set took over as our main form of entertainment, my family played all kinds of games from dominoes to gin rummy to board games Santa Claus left for me under the tree at Christmas. One of our family favorite board games was Go to the Head of the Class which was supposedly “educational” as well as fun. With school teacher parents, I played tons of “educational” games.

    fifth series copyrighted in 1949 by Milton Bradley, publisher

    The game was originally played with tokens that were cardboard images of children attached to wooden bases. Each game had 8 tokens, and their pictures were on the book that contained the questions.

    (top row, l. to r.) Sissy, Dimples, Liz and Butch

    (bottom row, l. to r.) Sonny, Buttercup, Susie and Red

    Sissy

    I can’t find the edition when publisher Milton Bradley eliminated the unsmiling player named Sissy, but I can assure you it would have been the last token picked in my family. Buttercup would have run a close second to the last.

    Take a good look at Sissy, the little boy whose two obvious distinguishing features were that he wore glasses and parted his hair down the middle like the little girl tokens.

    I remembered Jim Blanton’s essay in Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home where he talked about growing up in Gaffney, South Carolina and being called “sissy” as a child and teenager by bullies in school. Words, labels that cause pain.

    I’m sure my parents were oblivious to the subtle cultural messages being sent to me in our educational games, but for me this game was one more nail in the coffin of internalized homophobia and intentional segregation in my childhood. Never any people of color as the tokens. No one wanted to be known as a “sissy,” and how could I explain to anyone why I always picked “Butch” first?

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_20220827_150432507_hdr.jpg

    not sure where this picture of me was taken or why – 

    did I already feel different?

    Be aware of bias and labels that hurt. Be kind to each other. Be safe this weekend.

    Stay tuned.

  • from antiques to basketball via the Seminole Trail

    from antiques to basketball via the Seminole Trail


    US highway 29 a/k/a Seminole Trail in parts of Virginia – antiques galore for Pretty to explore

    Pretty and me leaving Jefferson’s Monticello

    (photo by Susan Moore-Cooke)

    Pretty in DC at Old Ebbitt Grill established in 1856

    While Pretty collects antique treasures, I collect words; I found my treasure on a WNBA Washington Mystics t-shirt when we went to watch our home girl A’ja Wilson and her Las Vegas Aces play the Mystics in DC. Our home girl scored 22 points and had 12 rebounds in a game the Aces eventually lost to the Mystics, but Pretty and I weren’t too disappointed. We were thrilled to feel the atmosphere of the big city small arena with its diverse enthusiastic fan following. I told Pretty I was transported that night in my thoughts to the first tiny Texas gymnasium in Grimes County where I watched high school girls play basketball seventy years ago – now I watched a professional women’s team “centered in the very soul of our nation.”

    From Jefferson’s home at Monticello to the Lincoln Memorial…from historic Old Ebbitt Grill to a sports arena in the Congress Heights neighborhood of DC, our four day trip last week along the Seminole Trail reminded me my country was built upon the work of those that dared to dream different.

    *****************

    Dare to dream different, and please stay tuned.

  • have you ever met a frog whisperer?

    have you ever met a frog whisperer?


     The sounds from our screened porch were connected to the sounds of my earliest memories of summer when I slept in a small double bed with my maternal grandmother while a cheap oscillating fan turned slowly from side to side as it valiantly tried to cool us in the hot humidity of an East Texas heat a thousand miles away from South Carolina, a heat that would not be relieved by opening every window on the porch where we slept or the random whisper of cool air from the small oscillating fan made by Westinghouse. The sheets were always clean but never actually cool.

    I never trusted the sheets anyway after discovering a scorpion hiding between them one night.

    But it was the sound of the frogs around our pool here on Cardinal Drive – particularly after a rain – that drew me to those hot muggy nights of Grimes County, Texas where I was raised. My grandmother’s wooden house made from a retail catalog blueprint had many design flaws, but its one awesome feature which had nothing to do with the design really, was the magical pond (or tank, as we called it in East Texas) behind her house.

    The tank was the focal point of my only-child imagination play stories during the day, but it was the tank’s music of those summer nights I hope will never be erased from my memory. Specifically, it was the frogs, or bull frogs as my grandmother used to call them  just before we drifted off to sleep. The low guttural sounds were always behind the house and were somewhat subdued until every light was turned off at night. But then, those frogs got louder and louder until they hit a mighty crescendo. My grandmother and I laughed out loud when we heard them.

    The frogs who live in our backyard on Cardinal Drive are rarely as raucous as the bull frogs in my tank in Richards – I think they are smaller frogs. But occasionally I hear one of those loud guttural sounds looking for something, probably safer water supplies, and I am transported to different days. To a grandmother who guided me with her wisdom and love. I was blessed with a loving eccentric family who in the end gave me what they could – so much more than I realized.

    This morning, however, a medium size solitary frog stared at me from our screened porch after he unsuccessfully jumped against the screen to flee. He looked at me as if to say, I survived the nightmare of your chemically treated swimming pool but hopped into your screen porch jail through a door that was slightly ajar. And now, woe is me. I can’t figure out how to escape.

    Never fear, I whispered. I stepped outside to get my pool scooper with the mesh frog retriever. I brought it back to the porch to fetch the frog who hadn’t moved. I carefully prodded the frog to get him to jump onto the rim of the scooper and hoisted him to safety on the deck.

    I swear this little guy looked suspiciously like the one I rescued from the pool skimmer earlier this week. Seriously?

    Regardless, I know we’ll hear him singing with his buddies tonight – we’ve had a summer rain this afternoon. The frog choir will rock on when darkness envelops them, and I will remember my grandmother’s laughter with a longing deep in my heart.