I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: racism

  • thank God for unanswered prayer


    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 via Alexa along with his other gazillion fans. One of my favorite country western songs he wrote and performed has the catchy title Thank God for Unanswered Prayer. In this particular hit tune the singer and his wife have a random encounter at a high school football game with an old flame of his that stirs a memory of the intensity of the passion he felt for this ex along with the fervent prayers he uttered to God for things to work out with her back in the day. 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. Because I was raised 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 supervised 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 most of the day as grown men pounded on the bathroom door – begging me to please get out. The captain’s apologies to me  for the roughest seas he’d sailed in years from the other side of the bathroom door 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 She would just get me off that boat I would never bother her again with prayer from the open seas. The prayer went unanswered until the eight-hour fishing expedition was complete. Too little, too late.  I counted it unanswered, and I was not thankful.

    Regardless of my faith and its well-documented decline in my later years, I confess to again praying for specific outcomes in situations that were desperate at moments during the vicissitudes of life. On one particular occasion 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, drowning in a different kind of sea with very rough waters. I fervently prayed my relationship would survive, although my psychiatrist at the time wasn’t encouraging during our sessions. She did, however, prescribe fabulous drugs

    But just like Garth Brooks in his song, I thank God for that unanswered prayer twenty years ago. Pretty became my personal Coast Guard that rescued me from the depths of my despair with her laughter and love as she breezed passionately into the core of my existence. Pretty  is the spicy salsa for the rather tortilla chip person I’ve always been, and her rescue gave me hope for happiness. We have had that happiness – and then some. 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.

    As the world around us tilts on its Covid-19 axis today, I confess my fears for all of our futures. I spoke to an old friend from Texas last night who reminded me we had been through and survived many health crises during our lives including polio, HIV-AIDS, smallpox, the bluebonnet plague – to name a few. Pretty and I laughed so hard about the bluebonnet plague when I got off the phone that I called my cousin Melissa who lives in Texas. She was equally entertained and added that the bluebonnet plague was definitely seasonal which caused Pretty and me to laugh uproariously all over again.

    Share a laugh, stay sane and safe wherever you struggle today.

    Stay tuned.

     

  • no one is born hating


    “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.  People must learn to hate, and if they learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013)

    My heroes when I was a child growing up in Grimes County, Texas were always the cowboys in old western movies I watched on Saturday mornings with my daddy. They were men who settled their differences with guns but fired only at the bad guys who were easily identifiable as thieves, cattle rustlers, or other desperadoes out to do wrongs to innocent ranchers or townspeople. The bad guys were often found drinking whiskey in saloons in the company of women with “loose” morals – women that sometimes turned out to be damsels in distress.  The movie cowboys rescued damsels in distress whenever they spotted one and fought to bring justice to the lawless frontier that was the American West.

    As I aged, my heroes have thankfully changed, but the people I most admire are still the ones who try to lift my vision toward higher ground; and by higher ground I mean a place where justice and equality reign in tandem against the forces of unfairness, dishonesty and outright evil. My cowboys have been replaced by men and women who choose to settle their differences with words that effect change more powerfully than did the guns of the Wild West. They are people whose examples give us hope of rescue when we find ourselves in the saloons we make of our lives.

    Nelson Mandela was such a hero to me, a man whose extraordinary personal sacrifice changed the politics of his own South Africa which inspired dreams for peace and democracy around the world. Facing the death penalty for sabotage at his trial in April, 1964  Mandela spoke these words:

    “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

    He was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in 1990 by President F. W. de Klerk who then negotiated with Mandela’s party to end apartheid in South Africa. Twenty-seven years of his life with no personal freedom, and Nelson Mandela became a symbol of freedom for his nation and the rest of the world.  In 1993 Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to end the oppression of apartheid in their country. Mandela became the first black president of South Africa in 1994.

    For me, Nelson Mandela was as brave as any cowboy I watched in the Saturday morning westerns of my childhood. In a world today where the ideals of democracy and personal freedom are under attack by forces as evil as the Covid-19 virus which claims the lives of the poor,  people of color, the elderly – those who are marginalized by our own divisive institutions as surely as the institution of apartheid did in South Africa – I look to Nelson Mandela for his sacrifice and courage that showed me the power of peace in the midst of turmoil, hope for unity in a world divided artificially by the hate we’ve learned to love.

    Nelson Mandela-2008.jpg

    (photo from Wikipedia)

    Stay tuned.

  • easter, comes the resurrection


    Ten years ago this Easter my mother was in a secured memory care unit of the Atria Westchase assisted living complex in Houston, Texas. Pretty and I had just bought a second home in Montgomery, Texas so I could be closer to Mom as her dementia progressed. On that Easter Sunday in 2010 I arrived in time for a chapel service before lunch with my mom.  After lunch, well, here’s what happened…

    The traditional Easter egg hunt came to us mid-afternoon through the children of the staff members. The day was beautiful, and the fenced courtyard area was the perfect setting for a party. Those in our lunch group pushed their walkers or were wheeled outside into the bright sunlight, those who could sat in the Adirondack chairs under the portico. I met three other daughters who were visiting their mothers that day which made me glad I was there with my mother, too.

    The Latino women who were the caregivers for the memory care unit brought their children to enjoy the search for the pastel colored plastic eggs filled with candy in the tranquil setting of the facility’s outdoors. Eggs were hidden everywhere, including on and around the residents.  Jim, a tall, sad, unshaven man who never spoke and struggled to move opened the chocolate egg Rosa placed in his shirt pocket; he ate the candy before the kids arrived. No one tried to stop him including my mother who in days of yore would have surely reprimanded him in her best elementary school teacher tone.

    The small group of children burst into the courtyard with an exuberance all youngsters bring to filling an Easter basket. Ages ranged from four to twelve, with one six-month-old baby girl held by her mother. They were dressed in their Sunday best. Little boys wore ties with their jackets, little girls wore pretty spring dresses. It could’ve been a movie set, I thought, because they were strikingly beautiful shildren. They flew around grabbing eggs with gusto as their baskets filled quickly. They were noisy, laughing, talking – incredibly alive.

    It was the resurrection. For a few brief minutes, the stones were rolled away from the minds buried deep in the tombs of the bodies that kept them hidden. The children raced around the residents searching for treasures, exclaiming with delight when one was discovered. One little boy overlooked a blue egg under a wheel chair, and my mother tapped his shoulder to point it out to him. He was elated and flashed a brilliant smile at her. She responded with a look of pure delight. The smiles and the murmurings of the elderly were clear signs of their obvious joy that proclaimed the reality of Easter in those moments.  Hallelujah. We were all risen.

    Memories were made and lost that afternoon. The children who came to the place where their mothers worked to find eggs among the old people were unlikely to forget this day.  Years from now some will tell the stories of the Easter Egg Hunt with the Ancient Ones.  The stories will be as different as their own journeys will take them.  For my mother and her friends, no stories will be told because they won’t remember. My mother doesn’t know I was there for her on Easter this year which is not unexpected.  But I remember I was, and it is enough for both of us.

    I was born on another Easter Sunday morning in April 1946, and that makes the year 2010 my sixty-fourth Easter. I recollect a few of the earliest Easters from my childhood: sacred religious days for my loving Southern Baptist family who rarely missed a worship service on any Sunday of the year but never at Christmas or Easter. I also remember having a hard time finding eggs in the church hunts. My baskets never runneth over. But to be honest, in recent years Easter Sundays had been difficult to distinguish from any other day of the week.

    When I moved away from my family in Texas in my early twenties to explore my sexual identity, I didn’t know I’d be gone for forty years. I also had no way of knowing one of the costs of my freedom from family togetherness was my absence from family rituals.  Distance, travel time, money, job obligations, girlfriends—these were the obstacles I had to overcome for visits home. Or maybe they were just excuses. I usually made the trip home at Christmas and less frequently one more time in the summer. But never for Easter.

    This Easter was special for me because it was a day with no excuses necessary. I shared a Sunday sundae with my mother for lunch today at a table neither of us could have envisioned a few years before. Today was just the two of us, and if there were barriers between us that once seemed too impenetrable, they were now lost in the cobwebs of time.

    We were all risen, indeed.

    Stay tuned.

    (This is an excerpt from my third book, I’ll Call It Like I See It.)

  • a prize fighter named Pain


    Reaching deep, deeper, deepest into my archives this time with a story that seems appropriate for our collective contemporary selves across the world. I offer this post first published here in September, 2011. I lifted it from my third book, I’ll Call It Like I See It, which is how my blog got its name. 

    Let me introduce you to my new friend Pain…well, not really new…and not actually a friend. I’m learning to live with him, but he’s a stubborn, persistent adversary.  I must have known him intermittently through my more than six decades of life, although the encounters were brief and unremarkable.  Painful episodes are the children of Pain.

    I met Pain himself three and a half years ago.  The mature, grown-up Pain.  He came to my body through the hardest part of me—my head.  He moved into the right side of my scalp and down my forehead to encircle my right eye and cheek.  He followed the nerves that travel through my face.  He had a cute little name that rhymes with tingles.  Shingles.  Such a harmless name for the devil who rules my life. He moved into his new home with the excitement of a pioneer staking a claim for a homestead in the Wild West during the glory days when every vista was unexplored territory.

    Pain is a hard worker who never sleeps.  He is relentless in his pursuit of control and domination.  Medicines amuse him with their efforts to ease his grip. He is like a prize fighter whose gloves are cinched for eighteen rounds. Medication sends him to the corner to be renewed, but he’s up and ready when the bell sounds. He is a bold opponent who stoops to cheap shots during the fray.

    When the sun goes down at the end of the day, Pain only works harder; sleep and rest flee from him.  He is their biggest fear, their worst enemy.  He loves the darkness of the night because it reminds him of his own nature. Pain pummels me with a ferocious pounding unmatched by mortal foes.  I understand him better now, and I know his tactics.  I know he leaves after a long fight to make me think I’ve won.  I step into the center of the ring with my hands held high in a victory salute.  It’s clear—Pain is the loser.

    But then he returns.  Sometimes to the head that now bears the scars of our warfare, sometimes with a fatigue that makes movement impossible because I have hit a wall which may as well be made of concrete.  Always to my eyes – which blur, burn and water incessantly as they produce protein deposits splattering the annoying eyeglasses essential  to replace the contact lens I used to wear.

    As I grow older and my immune system weakens, Pain appears stronger and more powerful.  I have a rendezvous with Pain, as the poet once said of Death.  I meet him on whatever battlefields he chooses, and we engage in our struggle in quiet isolation.  The stakes are high in this duel with no seconds available to offer assistance, no valiant rescue on the horizon.  It is just Pain and me.

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

    I’m sure I don’t say welcome to my new followers often enough, but I appreciate everyone who clicks “follow”  – you all give me encouragement to carry on. Many of you live on other continents that are foreign to me; but our shared humanity, particularly in this time of Covid-19, connects us across the oceans. Thank you all for taking time to read and reflect.

    Stay tuned.

     

  • ships that don’t come in


    “To those who stand on empty shores and spit against the wind
    and those who wait forever for ships that don’t come in.”

    Joe Diffie (d. 3-29-20) recorded these words written by Paul Nelson and Dave Gibson in 1992; I hear them several times a week on my favorite country legends radio station. Each time I listen to them I am transported to the 1950s to vivid childhood memories of my maternal grandmother who told me all the things we would do when her ship came in. We would take wonderful trips from our little town in Grimes County, Texas to exotic faraway places like Maryland to visit her brother Arnold with his wife Amelia and California to visit her favorite sister Orrie in Los Angeles. We would stop at the See’s Candy store in Los Angeles to buy all the chocolates we could eat. We could travel whenever we wanted because she wouldn’t have to clerk at Mr. Witt’s General Store anymore. She would buy my mother a new piano and my dad a new car. She would buy me anything I wanted. Life would be good.

    I will be as old this month as my grandmother was when she was buried on my birthday in 1972 at the age of seventy-four. She believed her ship never came in, and I understand why. Much of her life she stood on empty shores where she must have felt she was spitting against the wind, powerless in the face of poverty and its constraints, overwhelming loneliness when my parents and I moved out of her home in 1958, severe depression with sporadic shock treatments for therapy after we left her, debilitating medications she couldn’t afford. Spitting against the wind.

    Yet for me, life with my grandmother was a ship that did come in. During those ten years I lived with her she was the center of warmth, love and laughter for me. I learned to love playing games like dominoes from her and her mother, my great-grandmother, who visited every summer. I learned to laugh at pranks which made no sense to me because she thought they were hilarious when she played them. I learned to love the smell of her pies baking in the oven on Sunday mornings, the aroma of her kolaches baking on Sunday afternoons. I learned to fall asleep lying next to her in bed where she fell exhausted every night after rising before dawn for her Bible study and then standing on her feet for ten hours selling merchandise at Mr. Witt’s general store.

    I learned the ships that come in for some people are the same ones that never come in for others.

    So here’s to all the soldiers who ever died in vain,

    The insane locked up in themselves, the homeless down on Main

    To those who stand on empty shores and spit against the wind

    And those who wait forever for ships that don’t come in.

    Here’s to Joe Diffie, an American country singer, who died in the coronavirus pandemic at the age of 61. Rest in peace, Joe.

    Stay tuned.