I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Reflections

  • Two Women from Arizona: Unsolved Mysteries of Their Disappearance

    Two Women from Arizona: Unsolved Mysteries of Their Disappearance


    Full disclosure: I am a card carrying member of FOSG (Fans of Savannah Guthrie) and joined the millions of Savannah’s admirers who have watched the painful unfolding of events in the abduction of her 84-year-old mother, Nancy Guthrie, from her home in Tucson, Arizona, on January 31, 2026. Updates on her disappearance are closely watched at our house.

    I visited the FBI Kidnappings and Missing Persons website Thursday morning and took a screenshot of an FBI poster for Guthrie posted that day:

    DETAILS

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Phoenix Field Office and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona are investigating the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, last seen at her residence in the Catalina Foothills neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, on the evening of January 31, 2026. She is considered to be a vulnerable adult who has difficulty walking, has a pacemaker, and needs daily medication for a heart condition.

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

    Bill Chappell at NPR interviewed experts for his article on the Guthrie case published February 13, 2026:

    More than 500,000 people were reported missing in the U.S. last year, according to the Justice Department. But Tara Kennedy, media representative for the Doe Network, a volunteer group working to identify missing and unidentified persons, says high-profile kidnappings are rare.

    “I can’t remember the last time I heard about a ransom case besides Guthrie,” says Kennedy, who has worked with the Doe Network since 2014. “I always associate them with different periods in American history, like the Lindbergh kidnapping, not someone’s mother from the Today show.”

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

    Black faces. Brown faces. Little girls. Little boys. Teenagers. Stats, stats, stats. White women. Brown women. Black women. The FBI Kidnappings and Missing Persons website was like a patchwork quilt of the American experience. One woman’s picture caught my attention especially – a Native woman, Ella Mae Begay, from Sweetwater, Arizona. How far was Sweetwater from Tucson, I wondered? 131 miles as the crow flies according to a map. How far was Begay from Guthrie? Much closer.

    This is a screenshot of the Begay poster from the Kidnappings and Missing Persons FBI website – she was 61 years old when she was reported missing:

    DETAILS

    On June 15, 2021, Ella Mae Begay was reported missing from her residence near Sweetwater, Arizona, by family members. Early that morning, her vehicle, a Ford F-150, was seen leaving the residence. It was believed that the truck may have been driven toward Thoreau, New Mexico, and may have proceeded in the
    direction of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ella Mae’s vehicle was described as a 2005 Ford F-150, gray or silver in color, with a broken tailgate that would not close with Arizona license plate AFE7101.

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

    Be still, and the earth will speak to you. (Navajo quote)


  • Finding Inspiration Through Friends in Blogging

    Finding Inspiration Through Friends in Blogging


    For the past seventeen years, I’ve enjoyed the company of a special group of friends that have made my blogging experience both fun and challenging. Brian Lageose is one of this group of select cyberspace blogging buddies whose clever posts run the gamut from hysterically funny to sobering insights on the human condition – he’s one of my friends that I look to whenever I need inspiration.

    We exchange comments in addition to reading each other’s posts regularly. Recently I cried on his shoulders about the state of the world in general, and Minnesota killings in particular. He raised me up – I felt compelled to share (with his permission).

    I hear you, Brian. We aren’t done. No retreat. No surrender. America is the land that I love, and I cannot give up on her promises.

  • January 19, 2026 – Martin Luther King Jr. Day

    January 19, 2026 – Martin Luther King Jr. Day


    Hear ye, hear ye – all who have ears to hear, listen to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail where he had been imprisoned for his participation in nonviolent protests. The year was 1963, and Dr. King wrote in longhand the letter which follows in his response to a public statement of concern and caution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South. Dr. King, who was born in 1929, did his undergraduate work at Morehouse College; attended the integrated Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, one of six black pupils among a hundred students, and the president of his class; he won a fellowship to Boston University for his Ph.D.

    “But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the
    outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

    We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the
    oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was “well timed” according to the timetable of
    those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait.” It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “wait” has almost always meant “never.”

    It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say “wait.”

    But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored
    people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable
    corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs
    reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you
    are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are
    harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to
    expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of
    “nobodyness” — then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs
    over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”

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

    What do we want? Justice. Equality. Life. Liberty. The Pursuit of Happiness.

    When do we want them? Now.

    We don’t have another 250 years of waiting in us.

  • We are all just walking each other home

    We are all just walking each other home


    The sun was a gigantic circle of intense bright light as I walked on Old Plantersville Road tonight and the colors in the sky surrounding it took my breath away.  They were all that – and then some.  No camera this evening.  Just me and the Texas sunset.  It’s as close as I came to a spiritual moment and not surprising that the words of a hymn I sang over and over again during my Southern Baptist days played in my head while I walked.

    Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh.

    Shadows of the evening steal across the sky.

    Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose;

    With thy tenderest blessing may mine eyelids close.

    —-Sabine Baring-Gould, published 1865

    A few raindrops fell on me as I turned toward home from the railroad track which was my usual turnaround spot.  I didn’t even care.  The colors changed quickly in the sky as the sun went down behind the trees across the pasture.  I slowed my pace to catch as many of them as I could, and the rain stopped for me so I wouldn’t have to hurry.

    The day was over, and shadows of the evening stole across the sky right in front of me.  Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose.  My Random House Dictionary defined repose as, among other things, a dignified calmness…composure.  Yes, give the weary a sweet repose.  Let all who work hard and all who are tired of fighting the same battles or any whose pain leaves them exhausted – give them a sweet repose at the end of this day.

    And may our eyelids close.

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

    In September, 2013, when I first published this piece, I called myself a “bi-stateual” because Pretty and I had bought a place in Texas on Worsham Street which was a block off Old Plantersville Road, a favorite walking place for me when I liked to ponder the vicissitudes of life, as my daddy used to say.

    Today, thirteen years later, I was reminded of a truth I think my daddy would have liked:

    We are all just walking each other home.

    Some of us just have four legs, and a little less time to do it.

    (Pawprints of my heart)

    When the noises of the universe trample the joys within us, let’s remember we are all just walking each other home. What can we do to make the journey joyful for ourselves and for someone else today?

    Ollie, me, Red, Pretty, Chelsea, Drew, Annie in 2009

    Ollie, Red, Chelsea and Annie walked each other home ahead of us

     

  • Holiday Reflections: Stories of Love and Laughter

    Holiday Reflections: Stories of Love and Laughter


    Season’s Greetings, O Cyberspace Friends! We are now one week away from Christmas, and I searched the archives to find your holiday favorites over the past fourteen years based on your “likes” and comments. This was initially published here on December 21, 2016, under the title Dear Santa, Send Boxing Gloves; but it is an excerpt from my first book, Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing, published by Red Letter Press in 2007.

    “Dear Santa Claus, how are you? I am fine.

    I have been pretty good this year. Please bring me a pair

    of boxing gloves for Christmas.  I need them.

    Your friend, Sheila Rae Morris”

    “That’s a good letter,” my grandmother Dude said. She folded it and placed it neatly in the envelope. “I’ll take it to the post office tomorrow and give it to Miss Sally Hamilton to mail for you. Now, why do you need these boxing gloves?”

    “Thank you so much, Dude. I hope he gets it in time. All of the boys that I play with have boxing gloves. They say I can’t box with them because I’m a girl and don’t have my own gloves. I have to get them from Santa Claus.”

    “I see,” she said. “I can understand the problem. I’ll take care of your letter for you.”

    Several days later it was Christmas Eve. That was the night  we opened our gifts with both families. This year Dude, Mama, Daddy, Uncle Marion, Uncle Toby and I went to my other grandparents’  house down the hill from ours. With us, we took the See’s Candies from Dude’s sister in California, Aunt Orrie, plus all of the gifts. I didn’t like to share the candy, but it wouldn’t be opened until we could offer everyone a piece. Luckily, most everyone else preferred Ma’s divinity or her date loaf.

    The beverage for the party was a homemade green punch. My Uncle Marion had carried Ginger Ale and lime sherbet with him and mixed that at Ma’s in her fine glass punch bowl with the 12 cups that matched. You knew it was a special night if Ma got out her punch bowl. The drink was frothy and delicious. The perfect liquid refreshment with the desserts. I was in heaven, and very grownup.

    When it was time to open the gifts, we gathered in the living room around the Christmas tree, which was ablaze with multi-colored blinking bubble lights. Ma was in total control of the opening of the gifts and instructed me to bring her each gift one at a time so she could read the names and anything else written on the tag. She insisted that we keep a slow pace so that all would have time to enjoy their surprises.

    Really, there were few of those. Each year the men got a tie or shirt or socks or some combination. So the big surprise would be the color for that year. The women got a scarf or blouse or new gloves for church. Pa would bring out the Evening in Paris perfume for Ma that he had raced over to Mr. McAfee’s Drug Store to buy right before he closed.

    The real anticipation was always the wrapping and bows for the gifts. They saved the bows year after year and made a game of passing them back and forth to each other like old friends. There would be peals of laughter and delight as a bow that had been missing for two Christmases would make a mysterious re-appearance. Ma and Dude entertained themselves royally with the outside of the presents. The contents were practical and useful for the adults every year.

    My gifts, on the other hand, were more fun. Toys and clothes combined the practical with the impractical. Ma would make me a dress to wear to school and buy me a doll of some kind. Daddy and Pa would give me six-shooters or a bow and arrows or cowboy boots and hats. Dude always gave me underwear.

    This year Uncle Marion had brought me a jewelry box from Colorado. He had gone out there to work on a construction job and look for gold. I loved the jewelry box. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any jewelry.

    “Well, somebody needs to go home and get to bed so that Santa Claus can come tonight,” Daddy said at last. “I wonder what that good little girl thinks she’s going to get.” He smiled.

    “Boxing gloves,” I said immediately. “I wrote Santa a letter to bring me boxing gloves. Let’s go home right now so I can get to bed.”

    Everybody got really quiet.

    Daddy looked at Mama. Ma looked at Pa. Uncle Marion and Uncle Toby looked at the floor. Dude looked at me.

    “Okay, then, sugar. Give Ma and Pa a kiss and a big hug for all your presents. Let’s go, everybody, and we’ll call it a night so we can see what Santa brings in the morning,” Daddy said.

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

    “Is it time to get up yet?” I whispered to Dude. What was wrong with her? She was always the first one up every morning. Why would she choose Christmas Day to sleep late?

    “I think it’s time,” she whispered back. “I believe I heard Saint Nick himself in the living room a little while ago. Go wake up your mama and daddy so they can turn on the Christmas tree lights for you to see what he left. Shhh. Don’t wake up your uncles.”

    I climbed over her and slipped quietly past my sleeping Uncle Marion and crept through the dining room to Mama and Daddy’s bedroom. I was trying to not make any noise. I could hear my Uncle Toby snoring in the middle bedroom.

    “Daddy, Mama, wake up,” I said softly to the door of their room. “Did Santa Claus come yet?” Daddy opened the door, and he and Mama came out. They were smiling happily and took me to the living room where Mama turned on the tree lights. I was thrilled with the sight of the twinkling lights as they lit the dark room. Mama’s tree was so much bigger than Ma’s and was perfectly decorated with ornaments of every shape and size and color. The icicles shimmered in the glow of the lights. There were millions of them. Each one had been meticulously placed individually by Mama. Daddy and I had offered to help but had been rejected when we were seen throwing the icicles on the tree in clumps rather than draping them carefully on each branch.

    I held my breath. I was afraid to look down. When I did, the first thing I saw was the Roy Rogers gun and holster set. Two six-shooters with gleaming barrels and ivory-colored handles. Twelve silver bullets on the belt.

    “Wow,” I exclaimed as I took each gun out of the holster and examined them closely. “These look just like the ones Roy uses, don’t they, Daddy?”

    “You bet,” he said. “I’m sure they’re the real thing. No bad guys will get past you when you have those on. Main Street will be safe again.” He and Mama laughed together at that thought.

    The next thing my eyes rested on was the Mr. And Mrs. Potato Head game. I wasn’t sure what that was when I picked it up, but I could figure it out later. Some kind of game to play with when the cousins came later for Christmas lunch.

    I moved around the tree and found another surprise. There was a tiny crib with three identical baby dolls in it. They were carefully wrapped in two pink blankets and one blue one. I stared at them.

    “Triplets,” Mama said with excitement. “Imagine having not one, not two, but three baby dolls at once. Two girls and a boy. Isn’t that fun? Look, they have a bottle that you can feed them with. See, their little mouths can open. You can practice feeding them. Aren’t they wonderful?”

    I nodded. “Yes, ma’am. They’re great. I’ll play with them later this afternoon.” I looked around the floor and crawled to look behind the tree.

    “Does Santa ever leave anything anywhere else but here?” I asked. Daddy and Mama looked at each other and then back at me.

    “No, sweetheart,” Daddy said. “This is all he brought this year. Don’t you like all of your presents?”

    “Oh, yes, I love them all,” I said with the air of a diplomat. “But, you know, I had asked him for boxing gloves. I was really counting on getting them. All of the other boys have them, and I wanted them so bad.”

    “Well,” Mama said. “Santa Claus had the good common sense not to bring a little girl boxing gloves. He knew that only little boys should be fighting each other with big old hard gloves. He also realized that lines have to be drawn somewhere. He would go along with toy guns, even though that was questionable. But he had to refuse to allow boxing gloves this Christmas or any Christmas.”

    I looked at Daddy. My heart sank.

    “Well, baby,” he said with a rueful look. “I’m afraid I heard him say those very words.”

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

    I was 61 years old when Deep in the Heart was published, but I got a pair of black boxing gloves the following year for Christmas – better late than never, Santa, thank you very much. A different Santa brought me a pair of pink boxing gloves after reading my letter another decade later in this space. This Santa hoped my mother would have approved if the boxing gloves were pink.

    From our family to yours, wherever you are and whoever you call family, Pretty and I send our warmest wishes for love and laughter to you during this holiday season. Surely Santa will understand if you were just a little bit naughty…