I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Random

  • if these are the last days, we better have cash according to Pretty


    Last night Pretty and I were watching who’s the greatest of all time on Jeopardy, bemoaning the fact that neither of us will ever make a million dollars answering questions which we might be able to think of the answers to in due time but certainly not so quickly as the three guys who pushed the buttons in lightning speed for the correct responses on the TV. Pretty said speaking of money, we need to get cash out of our bank account.

    Like most people (I assume most people although I have no concrete proof) we make our purchases with our bank debit cards these days. Rarely is there any actual cash in either of our possession at home or when we’re out among the masses, but apparently Pretty had been alerted by her Twitter folks that these may be the  “last days” as the result of America’s killing an Iranian general in Baghdad over the weekend.

    If these are the last days, she continued, we need to make preparations that include taking money out of the banks which might close as the result of a cyber attack, converting to currency, and hanging on to it for dear life.

    Yes, I said jumping on board with any suggestions Pretty recommended for the last days, and let’s make sure we have gasoline in both vehicles at all times in case we need to make a run for it, I added.

    What about food? Pretty asked. Hm, I thought. That’s a real problem since neither Pretty nor I ever used any appliance in the kitchen except a microwave to heat the takeout and the refrigerator for storing leftovers from the takeouts.

    Evidently Pretty was also worried about the food situation. Never mind, she said, we’ll just buy fast food with our cash.

    After Ken Jennings polished off Round 1 of the Jeopardy tournament, I switched to Rachel Maddow but could barely listen to her detailed explanation of the events of the past few days and our country’s precarious position in the Middle East because I was still mulling over our family plans for the last days.

    For example, how much cash would we need. Pretty had suggested $500. Was that enough? Too much? Who knew? As for making a run for it with two tanks of gasoline, where in the world was I planning on going? Charleston? Charlotte? Landrum?

    Thankfully today tensions appeared to cool after Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes in Iraq yesterday. I will check in tonight with Rachel Maddow after Round 2 of the Jeopardy tournament to try to learn more about the world we live in (for now anyway) and Pretty can revisit with her Twitter peeps to see if they have further suggestions for the last days.

    In the mean time, I have a few unrelated pictures of several of the 24 dogs I’ve had in my lifetime – if these are the last days, I want to think of happy ones – and these are some of the happiest.

    Stay tuned.

    The Red Man and the Old Woman Slow

    (in the early days – spring, 2001)

    Tennis Ball Obsessed Chelsea, Smokey Lonesome Ollie, and The Red Man

    (at Casa de Canterbury, sometime in 2012)

    Spike, he who appeared on Worsham Street and never left us

    (spring of 2012)

     

  • pretty in fine form for new year’s day


    ‘Twas the week after Christmas, and all through the house two creatures are stirring, and neither’s a mouse. Only Spike and I are up so far, and in all fairness we’re probably not even stirring – more staring than stirring. Me at my computer – Spike at the front yard from his panoramic view in the living room.

    Spike, our rescued shepherd mix, is the early riser in our family, but his main goal of being the first one up is to serve as an alarm clock for Pretty, Charly, and me. Pretty has perfected the pretense of ignoring him, I  get up when I hear Spike’s nails clicking on the hardwood floors in our bedroom and Charly makes a great show of jumping out of bed with me as the three of us walk together to open the doggie door in the sun room for the day.

    I usually walk outside with Spike to greet the colors of the sunrise and to see the squirrels he will bark at while he chases them around for a few minutes until they scamper up the huge oak tree to safety. Charly, on the other hand, may or may not come with us, her decision resting on whether she determines breakfast will be served early or later. At the signs of no early breakfast, she turns and runs to go back to get in bed with Pretty whose philosophy is she’s never met a sunrise she liked.

    Today is the first day of a new year, a new decade, I said to Spike this morning when we walked outside. He stood still for a second while I talked to him but then spotted two squirrels that were taunting him with their bushy tails in the yard near the old oak tree. He was off and running, but they weren’t frightened by either his loud barking or thundering toward them. I swear I saw one of them wink at the other one as they chased each other up the tree. Spike’s best efforts were thwarted once again. He turned away and walked back to me. His work was done until the pesky little varmints ventured into the yard again.

    ***********

    Happy New Year, I said to Pretty an hour later when I heard her in the kitchen popping the top on her first can of Diet Coke for the day.

    Happy New Year, Pretty responded and then continued, the first day of 2020 and the first day of a new decade.

    I know, I said. When I was a teenager in Texas in the 1960s, I never thought I would live to be thirty years old. When I had my 30th birthday in 1976, I said well, I will never live to see the turn of the century and now here I still am on the verge of a third decade in the 21st century. What do you think about that, Pretty?

    Pretty looked directly at me and said, I think you must be a drama queen.

    *********

    “We trust that time is linear. That it proceeds eternally, uniformly. Into infinity. But the distinction between past, present and future is nothing but an illusion. Yesterday, today and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected.” (Dark, Season 1)

    Lordy, Lordy. Whenever I do pass, I hope I somehow stay connected to Pretty.

    Happy New Year!

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

  • gold, frankincense and myrrh with a 21st century twist


    I’m a basic Bah, Humbug Christmas person and have been for years.   I’m not clinically depressed during the holiday season, but neither am I joyful.  I resist the pressure to shop ‘til I drop, but that isn’t limited to a particular time of the year, either.  I’m considering the possibility I may suffer from borderline Scrooge disorder or at a minimum, Holiday Harrumphs.

    This year is different.   I’ve been jolted and shaken out of my cynicism and once again believe in the magic that is Christmas.  I think my transformation actually began last year when my new neighbors in Texas on Worsham Street decorated their homes and yards with spectacular exterior holiday lighting.  They adorned trees, bushes, windows, doors, porches, benches, roofs – anything they could find to attach a string of lights – and the little street came alive with white icicle lights and plain white lights and multi-colored lights of all shapes and sizes that glowed and blinked and gave the appearance of a miniature Disneyland.  I absolutely loved them and of course, I had to participate with my own lights on our house on the street.  I felt my Christmas ice melt just a little each time I turned the switch that lit my bright lights.  This year the street is again beautiful, and I thank my neighbors for the inspiration of their lighting traditions.

    I miss my family at Christmas, the family that defined Christmas for me as a child.  That family is gone as that time and place are gone, but the child inside me mourns their loss every time I hear “Silent Night” and other carols sung during this time of the year.  We were musical people and much of our holiday revolved around music in our Southern Baptist churches where my mother was always responsible for the Christmas Cantata.  Sometimes she played the piano for it so my dad could lead the church choir and sometimes she drafted another pianist so she could lead the choir herself.  Regardless, music was the reason for the season for us and we celebrated the season in church.

    Family has been re-defined in my adult life by my wife and four children in furry suits that I adore.  I have a son who now has a girlfriend he lives with and so our family grows together.  Through the past forty years I’ve been away from Texas I’ve been fortunate to have wonderful friends who have become closer than the DNA-linked group I left behind.  In my gay and lesbian community in South Carolina, the term “family” is a word we use to describe ourselves.  The question, “Do you think she’s family?” is translated, “Do you think she’s a lesbian like us?”  Being part of a marginalized sub-culture creates strong bonds within that environment and my friends have been simply the best.

    Coming home to Texas to live has connected me once again with my DNA family and that’s been an incredible experience and part of the magic of Christmas for me the last two years. First cousins, second cousins, third cousins once removed and the people they’ve married and their children are good, and a few questionable, surprises for me.  Gathering for a cousins’ Christmas potluck luncheon or going with cousins to the Montgomery Annual Cookie Walk or having cousins come to our home or visiting in their homes rekindle good memories of the times when our hair wasn’t white and our figures were slimmer and the great-grandparents at the table weren’t us. I see these relatives and I am a part of them, and I feel good to belong to them at Christmas. Our conversations honor and celebrate our heritage and the ones who are no longer with us.  We laugh and cry together because we are moved by our memories. My family is a Christmas gift.

    But just as the familiar story goes of the Wise Men who followed a bright light to Bethlehem and brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the baby boy in the manger, Wise Women in my life have brought gifts that rocked my Christmas complacency. My wife surprised me with an early gift at Thanksgiving when I went home to her in South Carolina.  It’s worth its weight in gold to me.  It’s a western saddle made of leather and rides a wooden quilt holder that a Worsham Street neighbor gave me when she saw the saddle.  It’s a perfect combination and looks good in my Texas den underneath a picture of a cowboy sitting on a fence.  Whenever I look at the saddle, I think of two of my favorite things: my wife who knew me well enough to buy this treasure for me and my days of riding horses as a child. I feel the love of the giver of this perfect gift.

    Frankincense was used in ancient times for medicinal and calming purposes including treatment for depression.  Burning frankincense was also thought to carry prayers to heaven by people in those days.  One of the Wise Women in my life gave me my own version of frankincense last week when she bought a plane ticket to South Carolina for me to be with my wife for Christmas.  I marvel at this generosity from a friend who surely loves me and who chased away the potential Christmas blues. This gift came from prayers to heaven that were unasked but answered on the wings of a snow white dove called US Airways and the spirit that is the magic of Christmas in the heart of my friend.

    Myrrh is an Arabic word for bitter and it is the resin that comes from a tree that grows in the semi-desert regions of Africa and the Red Sea.  The Chinese used it for centuries to treat wounds and bruises and bleeding.  The Egyptians used myrrh as an embalming oil for their mummies.  Yesterday I received another gift that reminded me of myrrh – not the bitterness nor the embalming properties – but the unexpected present was a live blooming cactus plant that arrived at my house via a congenial UPS driver who I believe thinks he is Santa Claus.  When I opened the box and removed the moss packing per the enclosed instructions, I was stunned by the beauty of the pink blooms and the deep rich green of the plant.  The gift came from another Wise Woman who is married to my cousin in Rosenberg, Texas and was an additional reminder of the magic that lives in Christmas.  Every day I’ll see these blooms and think of my cousins who sent them and the healing power beauty affords us when we take a moment to consider it.  I’ve always loved a Christmas cactus.

    Gold, frankincense and myrrh with a 21st century twist.  The Christmas story of Mary and Joseph’s plight in the manger in Bethlehem has been told and re-told for thousands of years.  Regardless of your belief, it is a tender tale of a family who welcomes a baby boy into a world of conflict and hardship and hopes he will somehow change it for the better.   The same conflicts continue two thousand years later and hardships of every shape and description plague our families today, but we move on.  Sometimes forward, sometimes backward.  But onward we go.  And in this spirit of hope for a better world where peace becomes the norm and hardships are made more bearable, I abandon my Bah, Humbug  with a Merry Christmas to all!

    Stay tuned.

    (Note: this post was published originally in December, 2011)

    picking just the right cookies at the Christmas Cookie Walk

  • a hard candy Christmas


    I’ll be just fine and dandy,

    Lord it’s like a hard candy Christmas.

    I’m barely getting through tomorrow,

    but still I won’t let sorrow bring me way down.

    ——  Carol Hall lyrics from the musical

    The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

    Gosh, the hard candy Christmas has gone viral.   I thought we could keep it local with just a few hits along the holiday trail stories but nope, Newtown, Connecticut changed the name of that tune.   We Americans have a tragedy of unspeakable grief that will quickly reverberate in cyberspace around the world to a populace who will ask themselves, What is wrong with those people in America?

    I think it’s a fair question and one that we must ask ourselves.   What is wrong with us?   How do we enable and encourage this rage and senseless violence against our own?   Why do we have a Columbine in our not-too-distant history and how will these same historians record the massacres in Aurora, Colorado and at Virginia Tech?  What can possibly be written about the Sandy Hook Elementary School horror of losing twelve little girls and eight little boys and six adults who were their educators in a few minutes on a regular Friday morning at their public school.  Much will be written through the coming years, but what we do in response to these shocking events will define our culture and our country.

    To the politicians in Washington I say, You need to become statesmen and stateswomen.  You need to set aside your vitriolic verbal attacks on each other.  You are the adults in our family, and we have placed our trust in you by electing you to represent us and when what we see on our Ipads and Iphones and other high-tech gadgets as well as on our regular old television programs is bitterness and bickering and bashing each other verbally, you’re setting a bad example for your children.  You make them believe that rage is not only acceptable but necessary.   Take a deep breath.  Step back for a moment.  Look at yourselves and see what images you project for your people.   Could you please just play nice.

    To the parents who have brought children into our world and have great expectations for their futures and who now are bipolar between anger and anguish, I say I’m so sorry.    No one deserves this.   No one is being punished for removing God from Sandy Hook Elementary School.  God isn’t in this equation or else we would have to blame Him for allowing the assailant to have weapons, wouldn’t we?  Not so fast, my friend, or as my daddy and Ann Richards used to say, That old dog won’t hunt.  But what can we do?  Should we as parents insist on police protection for our children in all public schools regardless of age?   Would police protectors be able to thwart the enraged and armed assailants?  These are the questions we ask ourselves.

    Which brings me to the central dilemma of the complex  challenge of early identification and intervention for our Angry Ones and that is, of course, beyond Thunder Dome to me.  Our children are now raised in a culture of violence.  They play games with it, they sing songs about it, their heroes are violent athletes, their movie stars make action movies with so much “action” their hearing is impaired when they leave a theater, their country sends soldiers to places they have to learn to pronounce and spell like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria…Viet Nam…Korea..and these soldiers kill other people in the name of peacekeeping.   Our children are surrounded by violence.   They may go to sleep with the sound of gunfire in their neighborhood and on their street corners.  They may wake the next morning to find a friend, cousin, uncle, father or brother has died during a battle over what?   Drugs?   Gangs?  Money?   Territory?  Aha.  There we have it.  There is no escaping the violence so why on earth would we be surprised that these children who are accustomed to violence, who have access to weapons, would shoot us when we make them mad or when we are, well, just being ourselves and they don’t like us that way?

    This is the season of hope, joy and celebration for some; the Prince of Peace and Santa Claus are the bearers of Good News and Great Gifts for many of us. But it is also a season of sadness for those who have lost family during 2012 and who will be reminded that their holiday season is different this year. The season won’t be the same – ever.  Some people will struggle to find the money to give their children what they want under the tree.   Friction and tension will make family gatherings more problematic than peaceful.  In our sense of hurry and anxiety over putting food on the table we might miss the opportunity to say: I love you today, I love you every day and you will always be special to me.

    I remember a hard candy Christmas with the disappointment of not getting what I wanted from Santa Claus but rather getting a sack of penny candy of bright different colors that tasted alternately sweet and sour but couldn’t be chewed at first because it was so hard.  Gradually though, if you waited long enough, you could bite the smaller piece in two and swallow them both.  Success.  Astonishingly delicious.

    I expected a hard candy Christmas personally this year for a number of reasons, but I wasn’t prepared for a national one.  Regardless, here it is and my hope is that America will never be the same – ever.  That our national consciousness is raised to include in our vocabulary the words kindness and reconciliation and forgiveness and a genuine passion for a better world.   We’ve waited long enough.  We have tasted both the sweet and the sour and, as Dolly Parton sings through the lyrics of Carol Hall, we won’t let our sorrows bring us down.

    Stay tuned.

    (Originally posted on December 16, 2012)

  • a little spanish mixed with a little bit of yankee and a lot of midwest


    Pretty and I (along with the rest of the world) watched the final episode of Season Two of Big Little Lies this past week which reminded me of a story I wrote that became a chapter of I’ll Call It Like I See It: A Lesbian Speaks Out – my book that inspired this blog.

    A LITTLE SPANISH MIXED WITH A LITTLE BIT OF

    YANKEE AND A LOT OF MIDWEST

          “Hey, hon,” the middle-aged waitress said as she brought my cheeseburger and fried onion rings to me.  “Give me a second while I clean the grill, and I’ll visit with you while you eat.  It’s just about closing time.”  She gave me a friendly, but tired, smile.  She appeared to remember me from my prior visits.

    I sat at one of the four wooden picnic tables at Holder’s, my new all-time favorite hamburger and barbecue place.  The day had cooled from the earlier rain, and a slight breeze blew through the outdoor eating area that provided a vision of the quintessential Texas roadside café.  Waiting for food wasn’t a problem here.  If you ran out of license plates and signs to read on the walls, the personal carvings on the wooden tables guaranteed entertainment.

    In theory, I’m a vegetarian.  In reality, I’ve loved hamburgers since my mother made them for me at home and Miz Inez Wood cooked them for me at the Richards Café more than fifty years ago.  Hold the mayo—extra mustard.  Lots of onions, tomatoes, lettuce, pickles, and cheese, and meat that’s cooked on a grill until it’s done.  No pink showing.  The burgers at Holder’s are always perfect.  Bobby Holder, the owner, trains his cooks to do them the same way every time, and I fear it’s a lost art.  I was in hamburger heaven, and I wasn’t particularly interested in conversation.  I don’t mind eating alone, and today was a day I’d planned to enjoy the total Holder’s experience by myself.  The biggest decision I had hoped to make this afternoon was whether I wanted barbecue or the cheeseburger.  I started dipping the onion rings in ketchup and wondered if anything could possibly taste better.

    The woman who cooked for me, and served me, had an average height and very good posture for someone who was at the end of a long work day.  I recognized her as one of several cooks/waitresses who worked at Holder’s on random schedules.  She wore a pair of blue jeans and a tight-fitting blue T-shirt.  Her hair was bleached blonde and pulled back under a navy blue Lowe’s baseball cap that left curls showing around her face.  The face, however, was a dead giveaway for how tired she was this day, and all the other days just like it.  Heavy makeup couldn’t mask the erosion of youth and the impression that her life required too much from her.  I guessed she was in her late forties or early fifties.  She began wiping the tables while I munched on the onion rings.  She finished cleaning the table next to mine and stopped to sit down on the bench opposite me.

    “Did you see that car and those guys who were here just before you?  They kinda scared me,” she said.  “One of them came in first and ordered, and then the other one came after I had already finished cooking the first order.  It was odd.  That’s all I’m saying.  Odd.”

    “I saw them,” I said.  “They had two little children in the back seat of their car.”

    “I’m not prejudiced or anything like that.  I don’t care that they were black.  It’s just that I’m here at the front by myself this afternoon, and anything unusual these days makes you nervous.  You know what I mean?”

    “Yes.”  I nodded.  “I don’t blame you for being careful.”  I saw her point, and I tried to empathize more, but basically, I just continued to eat.  Did anything smell better than a cheeseburger and onion rings?  The grease-coated batter covering the onion rings created a wonderful, crunchy bite.  Somebody stop me before I eat all of them.  A dozen big home-made ones.  This was definitely too many.

    “I mean, they could be purple for all I care, and I would’ve felt the same way.  If you had acted like that, I would’ve felt the same.  It wasn’t about them being black or anything.”  She stood up and started cleaning the tables around me again.  I wondered if she had spied the Obama 2008 bumper sticker on my pickup truck or had seen a small frown steal across my face when she spoke about her fears.  Methinks the lady doth protest too much, I thought.

    I didn’t say anything.  I hoped that was the last word on the subject of the previous customers.  Actually, I hoped that was the last word on any subject.  The tomatoes on the cheeseburger were fresh off the vines and mouth-watering.  She had put the extra mustard that mixed with the onions in a taste that I’d missed for more than a month.  No meat was better than hamburger meat in Texas.  This was hallowed ground, and I wanted to worship.

    “Are you from around here?” she asked.  She’d finished cleaning the tables and now stood next to mine, across from me.

    “Yes,” I said, mentally giving up on a solitary dining experience.  “I grew up in Richards and bought a home in Montgomery several months ago.”

    “Oh, well, that’s a coincidence!  I live in Montgomery, too,” she said, and we were off and running on a lively monologue that included her, and her brother, being born in Massachusetts to an Army family that moved from the northeastern part of the United States to Nebraska where she attended junior high and high school.  Her parents eventually settled in El Paso, Texas, and her father still lived there.  Her mother had died two years ago after a lengthy illness.

    “I lived in El Paso for twenty years with my second husband, and I can tell you that we were in the minority there.  It’s a border town, you know.  There’s more Hispanics in that town than you could ever imagine.  Everybody always wonders about my accent, and I say there’s a little Spanish mixed with a little bit of Yankee and a lot of Midwest.”  She laughed at her own joke, and I laughed with her.

    Her demeanor changed abruptly, as if she had taken a wrong turn on a one-way street.  The smiles vanished, and her good humor went with them.  Her voice lowered significantly, although we were the only two people in the place.  “My second husband was abusive,” she said.  “Mentally, and physically, too.  I put up with it for twenty years.  He ran around on me all the time and came in at all hours of the day and night and beat me when he got home.  He said I was unfaithful and useless.”

    I was horrified at this intimate revelation, and I couldn’t think of an appropriate response. I’m not the best at quick reactions, so, before I could say anything, she went on with her story.

    “We had a daughter, and I worked as a bookkeeper to help pay our bills.  My mother used to ask me why I had black eyes and bruises, and I just lied about it.  I told her I ran into things.  She knew, though.”  The woman began to gather the bottles of hot sauce and salt and pepper shakers from the tables to take them to the kitchen for the night.  She kept up the conversation, and I began to experience the pain that prodded it.

    “Gosh, that sounds like a nightmare,” I said, trying to think of more to say.  “Twenty years?  That’s a long time.  What finally happened that made you leave?”

    She stopped in her tracks and turned to face me. The matter-of-fact voice returned.  “My daughter grew up and left home.  One night I decided to turn the tables on my husband and give him a taste of his own medicine.  So, I stayed out until four o’clock in the morning.  I wasn’t doing anything but driving around, but I knew what he would think.  He beat me so bad he broke my nose and busted my ribs kicking me with his boots.  I crawled through the doggie door to get away from him because I couldn’t walk.  I made it to my neighbor’s house, and she called 911.  They took me away in an ambulance, and the emergency room doctor said he was amazed I wasn’t dead.”

    “Oh, my God,” I exclaimed at this picture.  I couldn’t imagine that brutality against her, and the rage I felt touched a fury within me that was like a powder keg sure to be ignited whenever I encountered oppression of the defenseless.  I exploded with the same violence in my mind that her husband had shown in her living room.  “Why in the world didn’t you just shoot your husband?”

    “I don’t keep a gun in my house, and I didn’t keep one then either.  I was afraid he might kill me with it.  I left after that with my dog and my clothes in a car that I bought myself.  That’s it over there.  I still have it.”  She pointed out the window to an older model Pontiac sedan.  “My dog and I drove around the country for eighteen months.  She thought it was her home for a long time since we slept in it.  She’ll jump in it today if I leave the door open.  I can’t get her out.”  She smiled at the thought, and I made an effort to relax with her.  I was still reeling from her revelations and working to subdue my own anger.

    “We ended up in Texas, but I’ll never live in El Paso again.  I don’t have much in the way of material things like other people, but I don’t care.  Money doesn’t buy you happiness.  It really doesn’t.  I have a two-bedroom home and two dogs that love me.  I’ve had a couple of boyfriends, but I’m not getting married again.  Two abusive husbands are enough.”

    “Your first husband did that to you, too?” I asked in disbelief.  This was too much, and I struggled to make sense of this woman’s complexities and tragic circumstances.

    “Yes, but I divorced him after three years.  I was twenty-three when we parted company.  We didn’t have any children, thank goodness.  I guess I must have ‘I love a man who’s an asshole’ tattooed right here.”  She grinned as she pointed to her forehead.  “Are you finished?  You didn’t eat all your onion rings.”  Evidently, she was finished, and ready to go home.

    “Yes, I’m done,” I replied.  I was at a loss for words to end our conversation.  “You gave me so many I couldn’t eat them all.  Thanks so much for everything.  It was delicious.  You’re a good cook.”

    “Yeah, I may be slinging burgers over a hot grill for the rest of my life, but at least I’m not a bookkeeper any more.  I was as fat as a pig when I had that job.  I sat at my desk all day, and I had me this little secret stash of candy that I snacked on during the day.  Bills and Baby Ruth bars.  I paid one and ate the other one for too many years.  Say, it looks like that storm is heading back in.  You better get going.”

    “You’re right,” I said.  “The clouds are headed this way, and my dog will be going crazy in the truck.  He’s afraid of bad weather.”

    “He sure is cute.  What kind is he?”

    “I think he’s a Welsh terrier.  Whatever he is, he’s got a phobia about storms.”

    “My daughter’s got a Chug a little bit smaller than your dog,” she said.

    I must have looked puzzled as I tried to process the information.

    “You ever hear of a Chug?  It’s a mixture of Chihuahua and Pug.  Get it?  Chug.  That’s one ugly dog with a smushed face on that little body.”  She laughed one more time.  “Well, I enjoyed talking to you.  Hope to see you back in here soon.  Be careful driving home.”

     

    As I drove the five miles home to Montgomery, the rains came in a downpour, very much like my thoughts from the conversation with the waitress.  My dog Red was a wreck, and he threw himself from one window to the other in the back seat of the truck while he panted frantically.  Luckily for him, this storm was brief.  It was over by the time we pulled into the driveway, and he was calm again.  I was also an emotional wreck, with a jumble of feelings stirred by her words and had a strong impulse to fix a rare cocktail, so I did.  As I sipped the bourbon and ginger ale and replayed her story in my mind that night, I sifted through the tumultuous feelings of outrage and compassion to a sense of admiration for a woman who refused to give up on herself.  I toasted her courage that must surely have come from a little bit of Spanish mixed with a little bit of Yankee and a lot of Midwest.

    Here’s to you, and others like you.

    Stay tuned.