I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: photography

  • saltgrass tales (by GP Morris)


    GP Morris is the son of my father’s brother Ray. He is a graduate of the University of Texas in Austin. He has lived in or around Houston, Texas all of his life but has a son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter living in Seattle, Washington;  a daughter, son-in-law and another granddaughter live in Tyler, Texas.  He recently began a journal of stories for his grandchildren and sent several to me. This is my favorite to date.

    milky way
    Lying on my back, I could see him through the slats.
    He was doing the same. A smile on his face.
    It was bright inside and out. He got up and
    grabbed the top rail with both hands. He rocked
    back ’n forth. He was laughing.
    He bent down and picked up his bottle. Holdin’ it
    above his head…rockin’ on his feet. Something was
    about to happen. I quickly drug my bottle to the far
    corner and started drinkin’.
    His crib was four feet away. He flung his bottle
    across the room. It clipped the top rail of my crib,
    spun and shattered. He was still laughing.
    My mouth clenched a nipple attached to 1/2 a
    bottle. Milky shards of glass strewn about my crib.
    Hot and sticky…all shapes and sizes. Sparkly wet in
    the sunlight I put one in my mouth.
    At that moment she opened the door. She calmly
    took the glass from my mouth, gently inspected my
    mouth and said, “No blood”. In one motion she
    scooped me up, held me close and quietly sobbed.
    The salt of her tears mixed with the milk on my
    face. She turned around. He was crying.
    She picked him up and we were three. She did not
    put us down for an hour.

    Gene and his twin brother Dean surrounded by their Morris cousins

    Stay tuned.

  • nobody says it better than Serena


    This past Tuesday night I spoke at Chris Maw’s monthly social Words and Wine which brings authors and readers together in an informal setting for food, wine, and friendly interaction. My thanks to a friend of many moons, Fred Quattlebaum of Modern Family Asset Management, for sponsoring the event and to musicians Marty Lopez and Julien Kaprino for providing great entertainment. I was invited to talk about my newest book, Four Ticket Ride, but whenever I speak about my writing, my thoughts turn to truth and equality.

    I read while…

     

    …Pretty’s smile sells books!

    At her press conference this past Saturday following her loss in the finals at Wimbledon, Serena Williams was questioned about why she lost. Although she tried to say her opponent played a brilliant match, the members of the press wouldn’t let it go. They asked her if she thought her lack of match play in 2019 had hurt her, whether her role as a mother took too much time away from her tennis, and finally someone said they heard Billie Jean King wondered if she spent too much time supporting equal rights or other political issues.

    Serena’s quick response to that question was “The day I stop supporting equality is the day I die.” I can identify with her answer because I’d like to believe my actions to support equality and social justice are two of the dominant forces of my life.

    My first understanding of how it teels to be treated as a second class person came at an early age and became the impetus for my lifetime support of equality, too. My dad gave me the vision of looking at the whole world as my territory. Nothing should be impossible if I set goals and then worked hard to achieve them.  There were no limits, according to him. When I entered the work force at the age of 21 in 1967, I learned very quickly that there were, indeed, limits.

    Limits were imposed by powerful men in positions of leadership in the places I worked from Houston, Texas to Seattle, Washington to Columbia, South Carolina – men with tanned skins and silver hair who sat behind large impressive oak desks, men who saw me despite my impeccable credentials as lesser than my co-workers whose singular good fortune was that their gender and the color of their skin made them superior to me in the eyes of my bosses.

    It was a rude awakening for me to find out that my dad had been wrong. But that rude awakening changed my life as I took part in the battleground for ratification of the equal rights amendment here in South Carolina in the 1970s, my involvement in the civil rights movement in Columbia in the 1980s and eventually coming to the most passionate cause of my life: the LGBTQ movement for equality in the 1990s. I want to be able to say with Serena that the day I stop supporting equality is the day I die.

    For me, writing has been my platform for supporting equal rights during the past 13 years. For ten of those years, I have had the most fun as a blogger on my wordpress blog I’ll Call It Like I See It. When I finish a blog, usually after many re-writes, all I have to do is click on the word publish and my words fly through cyberspace to readers who either choose to follow me or randomly read my posts whenever a topic interests them. One observation I’ve made about my readers is that you all are far more interested in Pretty than you are in my political commentaries.

    I saw a segment about the author, vlogger and you tube super star John Green on Sixty Minutes this past Sunday night. John Green, the author of the Fault in our Stars and a ton of other titles has a Twitter following of more than 5 million. My blog, I’ll Call it Like I see It, on the other hand, has 1,700 followers. Thank goodness my daddy also offered me the good advice of never comparing myself to others. Some people will be better off and some people will not, but that’s not how we are measured.  In spite of that advice, I will do a small comparison.

    I am thrilled that in the first 6 months of 2019, I’ve reached people in more than 60 countries from Argentina to Vietnam through 36 posts with nearly 5,000 hits. My top five countries for followers are the US, the UK, India, Canada and France. Small potatoes to John Green, but quite an amazing audience for a little girl from deep in the piney woods of Grimes County, Texas who grew up in a time where her family’s only communication device was a two party telephone line that her grandmother on her daddy’s side used for spying on her neighbors.

    Truth telling is a lost art.  Honesty is no longer a virtue nor is it admired by everyone we come in contact with.  Nonfiction writing lacks the pop and sizzle of fiction, although I like to think sometimes it’s a close second.

    One of my favorite scenes in the movie Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the scene where the tortured son Brick played by Paul Newman discussed his problems with his father Big Daddy played by Burl Ives. Brick blamed his alcoholism on mendacity which he claimed affected everything in the universe but especially the family he came from.  Big Daddy wasn’t so sure about that claim, but I have to say Brick just might have been on to something powerful. I was so impressed with this idea that I devoted a chapter I call Human Frailty and Mendacity in my latest book Four Ticket Ride to the concept.

    Ideas for writing come to me in random places, but what I can promise you is that I try to bring truth telling to every piece I write.

    Stay tuned.

    P.S. Thanks so much to everyone who bought my books from Pretty Tuesday night – we almost sold out! I loved meeting you all and look forward to seeing you again in November.

    P.S.P.S. Thanks to our friend Saskia for taking pictures.

     

     

     

  • one woman’s bucket list is another woman’s good life


    me and my best friend Charly enjoy Pretty’s bucket list

    Pretty’ s bucket list got one wish lighter this summer with the nearly completed screened in porch in our backyard. We had a screened porch with a wonderful squeaky wooden swing in the first house we bought and lived in together. During the first nine years of our marriage we were way too busy for swinging though.

    Fast forward ten years, another four houses, and now too tired for swinging we are one door short of another screened in porch. Pretty is ecstatic to have her pool and porch waiting for her whenever she takes tiny amounts of time away from managing her antique empire to enjoy them.

    I, on the other hand, have only the Evil PT sessions to interrupt my porch sitting and playing in the cool pool this summer. Poor me.

    I thought about making a bucket list of my own but then decided why bother when Pretty’s list is working fine for me.

    Charly advises when the heat gets to be too much,  head for the porch

    Stay tuned and stay cool.

     

  • Daddy and his dogs


    Lordy, Lordy – my daddy loved his dogs.

    Daddy with his bird dog in his lap, his open Bible on the table, 

    and his hunting gun leaning in the background

    The first and last memories of my daddy always include his love for his dogs, his family, his church and public education; and I’m pretty sure I have those in the right order. He was an outdoorsman, a quail hunter during season so the dogs we had were supposedly purebred pointers, but they never succeeded in the field because they couldn’t get used to the sound of guns since they spent their lives indoors sitting in his lap.

    Daddy and his dog Dab watching a Longhorn football game on TV 

    Daddy holding Seth while Dab relaxes in his own chair

    This is how I remember my daddy – impeccably dressed in coordinated shirt, tie, jacket and slacks on his way to work or to church, but never too busy to say goodbye to one of his dogs.

    My daddy, Dr. Glenn L. Morris, died way too young at the age of 51 on June 30, 1976. I remember him on every Father’s Day and all the days in between – still.

    Cancer was the culprit for the loss of my father, and yesterday cancer claimed a friend of ours, Consuelo Heath, who also waged a long brave battle against this disease. Pretty and I send our sympathy and love to her wife Lynda Parker. Rest in peace, Consuelo.

    Stay tuned.

  • road trippin’


    To say my mom and I had a complicated connection is an understatement. What I am grateful for, however, is that neither of us ever gave up on the other; and occasionally we set aside our differences, however briefly, to share a common interest. Like, for example, the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas. I found these pictures she had saved from a rare combo family experience fifteen years ago that triggered a flood of emotions as I went back in my memories to a time when Pretty and I made one of many visits to Texas to see my mother (this one after we had been together four years),  a time when none of us knew my mom was three years away from living in a Memory Care Unit in Houston, a time when we all agreed visiting the Bush Library together would be fun.

    small note: Mom never would drop the “h” in Pretty’s name

    I had a higher than usual anxiety level planning the trip of nearly a hundred miles from Mom’s home in Richmond, Texas to the Bush Library in College Station. After all, my mother, my wife and I would be in the rental car I had picked up at the airport in Houston – close quarters for the day trip. I needed everything to go off without a hitch, but a hitch was waiting for me. The rental car had a flat tire just 40 miles up the road.

    Pretty and Mom all smiles when we discovered the flat

    Smiles turned to frowns while we waited for roadside assistance,

    but eventually we were back on the road to College Station

    Pretty and I love a presidential library – even one located in Aggieland

    Mom quickly lost interest in the library

    so we spent time wandering the grounds outside

    my mother and me in black and white – as we often were

    lunch break, anyone?

    Although neither Pretty nor I would ever say the George Bush Presidential Library made our library favorites list, the road trip was a memory maker, as my mother would say.

    The future belongs to those who refuse to put aside the past; you can quote me on that.

    Stay tuned.