I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Random

  • ode to the Old Woman in the Shoe

    ode to the Old Woman in the Shoe


    There once was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many health issues she didn’t know what to do.

    From the white hair on her head to the arthritic joints in her swollen toes that bent in odd overlapping shapes like desperate prisoners trying to climb over each other seeking escape from their confinement of pain, arthritic joints that were mysteriously connected to a right foot whose contour she barely recognized anymore.

    From the small red knobs poking out the top of aching disfigured fingers in both hands she once thought to be beautiful like her father’s hands had been, to the true personification of the legendary Achilles heel connecting that same strange right foot to one of two legs held together with artificial knees easily identified by long scars.

    From the ugly shades of brown, crusty, smelly skin patches under her sagging breasts that retreated in different directions following their loss of the Battle of the Bras, to the deep wrinkles now covering both sides of her face just like the trenches on her grandmother’s face had done.

    From taking an inordinate amount of time in a public restroom because of kidneys not interested in competing with younger bladders to being overlooked by adolescent pharmacists who preferred serving younger customers first regardless of their place in line.

    From the perpetually tearing eyes now struggling to discern shapes, colors, depths, and distances to the earring resistant ears engaged in a similar scuffle over distinguishing conversations in noisy restaurants, loud indoor arenas, small family gatherings, even cell phones.

    From icy hands and feet at night that could easily be used for injury first aid treatment or be equally effective for use in a Yeti cooler in the summertime to prevent melting chocolate caramel candies…to the gradual loss of the teeth necessary for eating any chewy sweets or, more importantly, popcorn. 

    Behold the old woman who still lives in a shoe, but now the shoe is a Croc of shoe.

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

    Slava Ukraini. For the old people.

  • why I called it like I see it – yes, but are you still lazy?

    why I called it like I see it – yes, but are you still lazy?


    Six-year-old Finn came inside the house from the pool and ran dripping wet past me on his way to the kitchen to get a bag of chips. I was sitting in my antiquated deep blue velvety cloth recliner in the den watching TV when he zipped by.

    “Every time I come to your home, you’re always sitting in the same chair watching TV,” Finn commented as he raced past me.

    “Hey,” I said to his back. “Why do you think I do that?”

    He barely turned and said with a tone of dismissal in his voice, “I guess it’s because you’re lazy.” Point taken.

     Six years later I continue to hover in my recliner in front of the same TV but with a different new brown leather comfy chair that includes a remote for adjusting my sitting positions. Ah, technology at its finest thanks to the generosity of our best friends Francie and Nekki.

    Sometimes I feel I’ve earned my laziness as reparations for the forty-five frantic years I labored with numbers in the work force, at other times I worry I inherited the right to laziness through the hard work of my ancestors whose sacrifices for family shouldn’t be disrespected by my inability to be productive; but today, I cast laziness to the winds, muted the TV, sat in an upright position and committed anew to this project of recapturing images of the people and places that shaped my solitary journey from playing outside on the dusty red dirt roads of a tiny town in rural southeast Texas as a child to living seven decades later inside a middle-class suburban home in South Carolina facing a blank computer screen screaming give me words.

    I will be seven and seventy years old this year with a life expectancy of fourteen more according to reputable statistics – a sobering thought to see numbers like these in print. Nothing is available to predict quality of life for those fourteen years, however, but laziness is not recommended by any of the experts on aging I have read. 

    One of the great bonuses of getting older is the freedom to own your truth, to reclaim the unfiltered mind of the child you were before the onslaught of the certainties from the adults in your rooms created doubts about who you were and what you believed. Today I get a free pass on words with my white hair, arthritic hands and feet, wrinkled sagging skin, watery eyes.  Oh, ignore her, they laugh. She is old.

    And so, I continue to tell it like I see it as I have done for the past fifteen years. For sure I’m closer to the end of my life than to the beginning, but maybe the words I own will resonate, rejuvenate, even cause us to celebrate our shared humanity which is relevant regardless of age.

    Onward.

  • in the beginning was the Tower

    in the beginning was the Tower


    On August 01, 1966 twenty-five-year-old Charles Whitman drove from his house on Jewell Street in Austin, Texas to the University of Texas campus where he arrived between 11:25 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.. He drove directly to the Tower that was the focal point of the campus, a building completed in 1937 that was Austin’s tallest building at 913 feet with twenty-eight floors and a public observation deck on the top floor. Whitman entered the Tower between 11:30 a.m. and 11:35 a.m.; he wore overalls that gave him the appearance of a workman with dolly and equipment (in reality a footlocker filled with guns and ammunition) which allowed him to take an elevator to the twenty-seventh floor where he exited the elevator to drag the dolly up three half flights of stairs and a short narrow hallway to a landing that led to the observation deck. The first person he shot and murdered in the building was the receptionist who would normally have had the day off.

    Ninety-six minutes later, following a meticulously planned attack that resulted in the deaths of fifteen people and thirty-one others injured, Charles Whitman was dead, shot and killed at the top of the Tower by two city of Austin policemen on the same deck his reign of terror had been carried out.

    “It took Charles Whitman an hour and a half to turn the symbol of a premier university into a monument to madness and terror. With deadly efficiency he introduced America to public mass murder, and in the process forever changed our notions of safety in open spaces. Arguably, he introduced America to domestic terrorism, but it was terrorism without a cause.” (A Sniper in the Tower, Gary Lavergne, 1997)

    This past weekend three funerals were held for the latest victims of another horrific attack at a university, this one at Michigan State University on February 13th. I had followed the coverage of those students whose lives were lost, whose families’ dreams for their children were destroyed by random violence at a place that should have been safe. On the very next day, Valentine’s Day, here in South Carolina at a grocery story fifteen minutes from our home two women had an exchange of hateful words that resulted in one of the women shooting the other woman, killing her in front of her two year old child and infant.

    So I already was troubled by these unrelated tragedies when Pretty casually handed me a paperback copy of A Sniper in the Tower, the Charles Whitman Murders. She found the book on one of her treasure hunts and gave it to me because she knew I had been a student at the University of Texas when the Tower killings took place. Normally when Pretty hands me a book I scan the contents but don’t follow through with actually reading, but the memory of the Tower massacre is as shocking today as it was when I first heard of what happened during summer school at UT. I had a job in Rosenberg, Texas and was living with my parents when Whitman rode the elevator to annihilate as many people as he could. I read every word of this 300+ pages account by Gary Lavergne that explored not only the lives of Charlie Whitman and his family but also the situations of the victims that led them to the Tower area on that fateful day. I was mesmerizd by these stories and finished the book in two days.

    In August, 1977 author Harry Crewes wrote an article in Esquire about his visit to the University of Texas where his host gave an unsolicited tour of the Tower massacre site. “What I know is that all over the surface of the earth where humankind exists men and women are resisting climbing the Tower. All of us have a Tower to climb. Some are worse than others, but to deny that you have your Tower to climb and that you must resist it or succumb to the temptation to do it, to deny that is done at the peril of your heart and mind.”

    When I returned to UT for the fall semester following the Tower shootings, I saw visible reminders of the events of that day. Nearly sixty years later today I remember seeing bullet holes left in buildings where I attended classes, heard first hand accounts from summer school friends that made me shiver as I felt their fear, and for a while dreaded the Tower chimes on the quarter hour that I had loved when I first enrolled in summer school after graduating from high school in 1964. My last year of classes at UT was always overshadowed by the Tower that had been my beacon of orange light like a lighthouse when I drove my old Nash Rambler over a particular hill on Highway 71 on the way back to school from Rosenberg, the Tower lit orange by a football team victory on the Saturday before.

    Lavergne closes his introduction with these haunting words:

    “Periodic attempts to understand what happened and why are worthy; since 1 August 1966 there have been other Charles Whitmans, and there will certainly be more. Potential mass-murderers live among us; some of them are nice young men who climb their towers. It is no longer enough to look upon the University of Texas Tower and sigh, ‘This is where the bodies began to fall,’ because the story is larger than that. It is a story of how a nation discovered mass murder, and that nation’s vulnerability to the destructive power of a determined individual.”

    In the beginning was the Tower, and sadly, the Tower lives on.

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

    Slava Ukraini. For the children.

  • Valentine’s Day murder at local grocery store called senseless

    Valentine’s Day murder at local grocery store called senseless


    “Unfortunately, this is a situation where tempers flared, and someone let anger get the best of them,” Irmo Police Chief Robert Dale said. “One rash decision has impacted the lives of two families and countless others who witnessed this tragic event,” Dale stated. “Senseless is the only word I can think of to describe what happened today.” (Lexington Chronicle, February 14, 2023)

    One woman was killed yesterday by another woman she did not know in the parking lot of a local grocery store fifteen minutes from our home. Random act of violence, right? Who hasn’t gotten angry over another vehicle sliding into a parking spot we were waiting for? Or maybe a new shiny SUV was taking up two parking spaces near the door to the store – that’s an entitled elite being entitled and elite, for God’s sake. Makes me mad just to think about it. My blood boils. Hateful words hurled at the other woman over the parking space or whatever the important issue was at 4 o’clock in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day when someone needed candy or cookies. The shouting between the two women intensified, grew louder. Cell phones taking a video…

    If I had a gun, I’d shoot that bitch.

    Oh, look. I do have a gun. Take this. Trigger pulled. Boom. End of discussion.

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

    The killer in the tragedy yesterday was a twenty-three year old woman who turned herself in to the police and has now been charged with murder. The victim was twenty-six years old, did not know her killer, but what happened was known. The casual encounter of the two women led to an “altercation” in the parking lot – an altercation that then escalated to a gun being fired and a life taken. Really, two lives were taken while traumatized witnesses who will also never be the same watched in horror and disbelief.

    Just another Valentine’s Day massacre of someone in America following a mass murder the night before on the campus of Michigan State University where three students were killed and five more seriously wounded by a man who then killed himself which brought the count to four known dead. Anyone who has access to news knows “gun violence is a fixture in American life.” (BBC)

    The population of the United States is currently estimated at 336 million by Worldometer with the number of guns in the US close to 400 million. I can’t wrap my brain around this insanity. The inmates are running the asylum – and they are heavily armed. I can, however, wrap my brain around two young women going to a grocery store on Valentine’s Day with only one surviving to drive away.

    Did the woman with the gun carry it in plain sight of the woman she shot or was it concealed in her purse, her handbag? Did the woman with the gun have a Concealed Weapon Permit for it? That’s for the prosecution and defense to discover in the coming days. However the shooter obtained the gun, however she carried her gun, whether legally or illegally, another woman is dead because she was shot by that gun.

    Molly Ivins was a syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate, Inc. and on March 13, 1993 published a column called Taking a Stab at our Infatuation with Guns. Thirty years later her words sadly continue to be relevant.

    In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster. Those who want guns – whether for target shooting, hunting or potting rattlesnakes (get a hoe) – should be subject to the same restrictions placed on gun owners in England – a nation in which liberty has survived nicely without an armed populace.

    The argument that “guns don’t kill people” is patent nonsense. Anyone who has ever worked in a cop shop knows how many family arguments end in murder because there was a gun in the house. Did the gun kill someone? No. But if there had been no gun, no one would have died. At least not without a good footrace first. Guns do kill...letting the noisy minority in the National Rifle Association force us to allow this carnage to continue is just plain insane. Ban the damn things. Ban them all.

    You want protection? Get a dog.

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

    Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Hopefully.

  • a letter to our granddaughters about love

    a letter to our granddaughters about love


    Dear Ella and Molly,

    Once upon a time before you were born, before your daddy had even met your mommy, before your Nana and Naynay were your grandmothers, your two Nanas went on a magical first vacation to a land far, far away in a place called Mexico.

    They packed their suitcases early one Friday morning, then drove to the airport and got on a very big airplane to fly high in the sky. While they were in the airplane, Nana asked Naynay are we there yet? several times because she did not like to fly in the airplane. Naynay would laugh and say not yet.

    Finally the airplane landed in Cancun, Mexico. Your Nana was so happy to be on the ground again, but your Naynay was very nervous about making sure they could find their luggage and a car ride to the hotel.

    They found their suitcases and got in a taxi that drove them to the most beautiful hotel, a tall white building with more floors than the hotel where Ella stayed with us when we went to the basketball game. Their room had blue tiles and a balcony where they could stand to see the people on the beach, the blue ocean, and the big blue swimming pool down below. Everything was blue except for your Nanas who were very happy to be on their first ever vacation together.

    The food was delicious in Mexico – every restaurant had salsa, chips, cheese dips and quesadillas better than the ones at places we go to here at home. The swimming pool at the hotel had water that was not too cold for swimming even in the winter; the beach was great for walking at night because the moonlight was so bright the sandy beach looked like a huge version of Ella’s sandbox in the back yard. It was fun to walk around holding hands at night after the hot sun had set.

    When you are older, we will tell you more stories about that magical first trip to Mexico when Nana and Naynay began to realize how much they loved each other. Your Nanas have taken many trips together since that first one, but you will see that sometimes the first time you experience deep feelings of love for someone can be the moments you never forget. For now you need to know we love you both more than you can imagine, and our vacations with you in the mountains and at the playground in Florida have been magical, too.

    We wish you joy and happiness wherever life leads, but most of all we wish you love,

    Naynay

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

    Happy 22nd Anniversary, Nana. You still bring the spicy salsa to me every day, and I love you dearly.