I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

For any who want more, complete list of all posts by month since 2011

  • 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.

     

  • not what we’d hoped she would be


    In June, 2014 Pretty, Spike and I took one of our famous family weekend road trips through our neighboring state of Georgia that began with Finnster Fest in Summerville, continued to Berry College near Rome, with a final stop in Milledgeville before turning east toward South Carolina and home. Milledgeville was the home of Flannery O’Connor, an American author (1925 – 1964) born in Savannah, Georgia who wrote fiction set in the rural south. Her thirty-two short stories are considered by many to be some of the best published in the 20th century. In November, 2014 I reflected on that trip.

    This past summer we visited Flannery O’Connor’s home at Andalusia Farms outside of Milledgeville, Georgia.  It was my kind of place – her mother’s old dairy barn, Flannery’s peacock coop, a small frame house where their caretakers lived, and a bigger white farmhouse with a screened front porch that overlooked the pine tree lined road leading up to the farm from the highway.  Rural, agrarian, somewhat secluded.

    The author and her mother lived on the farm together until Flannery died at the age of  thirty-nine from lupus. The illness limited her activities in her last years but according to our docent Flannery loved to sit on the screened front porch in the afternoon to entertain and be entertained by visitors who came from places around the country for an opportunity to meet her. Often Flannery’s relatives who lived in the local area “dropped by” to meet the O’Connor’s guests. On one of these occasions several people were chatting while they sat in the rocking chairs on the porch and one of Flannery’s cousins was relaying a particularly boring story that did not entertain Ms. O’Connor.

    Flannery leaned over to a person sitting next to her and said in a voice loud enough for everyone on the porch to hear, “She’s just not what we’d hoped she would be.”

    Pretty and I laughed to think of Flannery O’Connor  making that remark from her rocking chair on the front porch. We laughed again after we left Andalusia Farms on the ride home to Columbia. We still laugh at the line months later and have now appropriated it when we share an inside joke – something or someone is just not what we’d hoped they would be, are they?

    Actually, though, I believe there’s more truth than poetry in the remark.  Disappointment is a universal experience that strikes when we least expect it and lingers longer than we’d prefer.  When disappointment comes from a person, the feeling generally comes from a person we love, trust or admire.  When the letdown comes from a place, well then, politics or organized religion is usually involved; when it comes from a football team, losing is the culprit.

    Here’s my remedy for most disappointments: lower your expectations.  Forget lofty idol worshipping – it didn’t work well for the followers of Baal in the Old Testament, and it’s likely to run into trouble with people we put on pedestals today.  Pedestals topple like the walls of Jericho with just as much noise, confusion, pain and suffering. None of us live in a glass house with the luxury of casting the first stone at a fallen pedestal so if a particular pedestal falls, add a dash of forgiveness…seventy times seven is about right. Where little has been forgiven, little love is shown. How do I know? The Bible tells me so.

    Politics and organized religion, on the other hand,  tend to merge in disappointing convergence with neither being what we’d originally hoped they would be. They’re so far gone we’ve forgotten what we’d hope they would be. That’s disappointment of epic proportions. I got nothing.

    Finally, as for football teams, losing occurs in the midst of much noise, confusion, pain and suffering but don’t lower your expectations.  Simply fire the coach.

    He’s probably not what we’d hoped he would be.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

  • the words she didn’t say


    The year was 2013, the month was November, the day was the day before Thanksgiving  when I originally published this post. Am I (a) too lazy to write new material (b) too stressed by Covid-19 to be creative (c) having fun looking again at my cyberspace legacy (d) all of the above.  Let’s go with (d).  I hope you enjoy along with me.

    the words she didn’t say

    She wanted to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.

    They stuck in her mind like pavement to gum.

    Release me, release me the words cried today.

    I’m afraid, she said, as she held them at bay.

    We will be heard, they told her with force.

    She shook her head to quiet their source.

    They rattled around in the core of her brain,

    But got up again and began to raise Cain.

    Leave me alone, she shouted out loud.

    They mocked her and told her they came in a crowd.

    So even if caught and turned  out to sea,

    Others would come and one day be free.

    It must be the holidays because I’ve just written a poem with the same meter as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Good Lord.

    My usually introspective self typically becomes more reflective during the holiday season, and I believe this poem officially crosses the line to brooding.  However, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year; Pretty and I once again look forward to making the trip to the upstate to spend an evening with her family in the recreation hall of the First Baptist Church of Fingerville, South Carolina.  Even if I didn’t love her family, I’d go to a Baptist Church with that name.

    To everything there is a season, and this is the season for being thankful before the madness that is Christmas and New Year’s Day overwhelms us.  My wish for each of you is the familiar admonition to count your blessings and name them one by one. And if there are words you want or need to say to someone, set them free.

    From our family to yours – Happy Thanksgiving!

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

    From our family to yours,  we are thankful for you. Please be safe and 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.

     

     

     

  • my new BFF Ellen


    In November, 2013 when I first published this post I was struggling with losses so overwhelming I felt like a stranger in my own skin. If I had had a voice, that voice would have been the lone one crying in a wilderness of pain. I needed a friend and luckily found one every afternoon for an hour when the always smiling, invariably sunny Ellen DeGeneres walked into my life with an opening monologue that never failed to make me laugh. Today I believe laughter is still the best medicine for whatever ails any of us – pandemic raging without or within.  

    I have a new relationship with a younger lesbian who shares my core values, is wicked smart and witty, too – a huge plus in my list of desirable qualities for long term hooking up.  We get together every afternoon at 3 o’clock, laugh at silly jokes she makes and dance to the music played by her favorite DJ for the day. This girl puts me to shame on the dance floor, but she never makes fun of my moves.

    We only meet for an hour, but that hour is jam packed with top entertainers from all over the world who are thrilled to visit with my BFF. Of course, you know who my new girlfriend is because she’s probably one of your BFFs too. Ellen. As in DeGeneres.

    Oh yeah. Ellen and I go way back, but we’ve had a kind of off-again/on-again relationship since we first discovered each other in the mid 1990s. I let her do her TV shows and helped her find Nemo back in the day; we saw each other briefly backstage at the Oscars and Emmys she hosted. But I have to admit I put her on the back burner when she started her own talk show eleven seasons ago.

    I mean I didn’t totally forget her, but I was in a relatively new relationship with another woman who required my full attention plus one of those high-pressure careers that kept me in an office during my usual Ellen liaisons.  So we languished…

    Until this year. The unlikely year of 2013. Why unlikely, you ask? Well first of all, it’s an odd numbered year and if you’ve been with me for a long time, you know I never think anything good takes place in an odd numbered year. Unless there’s an exceptional turn around in the last two months, I have to say my instincts of foreboding have been spot on.

    That’s what I love about my getting back together again with Ellen. I swear the girl lifts me up. As Andra Day sings, “I’ll rise up, I’ll rise like the day. I’ll rise up, I’ll rise unafraid. I’ll rise up, and I’ll do it a thousand times again.” Tell it, sister.

    Ellen is a rare commodity in the world these days. She’s an optimist who wants to spread the spirit of love and hope to a people who need to look at life with renewed faith in the kindness of each other. Her generosity touches the hearts of the hardened, encourages them to try again. Give each other a chance.

    So for the naysayers who shake their heads and mutter Oh well, anybody can be nice for an hour, I say shame on you. My BFF Ellen rocks and you’ll agree if you take the time to get to know her – which is kind of like what we should be doing with everybody else we meet.  For an hour or even longer.

    Stay tuned.