Yesterday Governor Tim Walz became Vice President Kamala Harris’s personal choice to become her Veep in the 2024 campaign. Of course Pretty had vetted the governor before I even knew who he was. We both sat and watched their first campaign event together in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, the birthplace of America.
When the topic is women’s reproductive rights, follow the yellow brick road repaired by a Wizard named Walz in his home state of Minnesota six months after the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court in June, 2022, that took away a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. Minnesota became the the first state to restore personal freedom of choice for women in January, 2023, an effort championed by its governor Tim Walz who understood from his own experience that personal health decisions must be personal.
4-year-old granddaughter Ella watches at Aunt Coco’s house
Daddy holds 2-year-old Molly while Uncle Seth watches with them
both granddaughters will grow up with a woman President (hopefully!)
I like Tim, or as I have decided to call him, Happy Tim. I also had a Civics teacher in junior high school who was a football coach, and I credit that course with sparking my interest in understanding the importance of separation of powers in our government. Coach K smiled a lot, too, but our football team wasn’t nearly as good as Coach Walz’s.
Onward.
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P.S. Thanks to Mama Caroline for pictures used here.
“Naynay, I’ve been busy in the pool today so I need you to make sure you clean my tree house before we come back again. It’s really a mess,” said four-year-old granddaughter Ella to me as she handed me her small toy broom with a serious expression before she made a mad dash to keep up with her mother and two-year-old sister Molly who were already at the gate on the way to their car.
The girls, their mother and Pretty had been to the zoo one morning with cousin Caleb and his parents earlier this week, but I couldn’t rally for that fun excursion so I was happy they brought the party to our house in the afternoon. Everyone was trying to keep cool in the triple-digit summer heat.
Ella’s definition of “tree house” puzzling
hope my cleaning passes Ella’s inspection this week
(she was right aboutone thing: it was messy)
And yet, as I try to live every day in the present, I am a wanderer in the wilderness of my past during the quiet times when the dogs haven’t spied dangers from the mail delivery, Pretty is at work in her antique empire, the granddaughters are busy making new friends at summer camp – just me with the memories of another time and place.
George Patton Morris holding his granddaughter (me) in 1946
Barber Morris, as he was known for more than sixty years, wore a starched white shirt with a carefully selected tie every day of his life until he closed his barber shop in Richards, Texas in the mid 1980s. I thought of him especially this week on his birthday, July 29th., and rummaged through my first baby pictures book to find images of this man I adored until he died in 1987.
George was born in 1898 in Walker County, Texas, the ninth of eleven children born to William James and Margaret Antonio Moore Morris. Maggie Morris (1864-1963) was from Winn Parish, Louisiana and had her first child in 1882 when she was eighteen years old, her last child in 1906 when she was forty-two. Imagine what their family life was like raising eleven children on a small farm in rural southeast Texas at the turn of the twentieth century. Surviving the Great Depression of the 1930s as a widow with the death of her husband in 1927; living through two world wars. I knew my great-grandmother because my grandfather took me to visit her when she came to see her daughters, his sisters Erma, Berniece and Hattie Jane, in Huntsville which was only a half hour from where we lived in Richards. She was a tiny woman, frail, and like my grandfather, not very chatty.
George and his wife Betha holding their granddaughter in 1946
If only I could see my family again…I would ask countless questions I didn’t have sense enough to ask when I was a teenager absorbed with keeping my secret homosexual self safe. Today I’d want to spend the time thanking them for the lives they lived, the sacrifices they made, the foundation they laid that gave me the opportunities I’ve had to live the good life. I am grateful for my precious memories, how they linger, how they ever flood my soul.
Back to the present, though. It’s time to pick up Ella and Molly from summer school camp.
Naynay, can we have ice cream today? You betcha, and your tree house is spotless.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I am prone to worrying – that’s right. They call me the worrier, and apparently the older I am, the more I think I have to worry about. The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get as the saying goes; and the slower I go, the worrieder I am. The world to me has gone mad which makes me doubt whether the direction that long moral arc of the universe Dr. King talked about is actually bending toward justice. No justice, no peace is a chant sometimes used by marchers in various peaceful protest movements – I have internalized this slogan to define my world view, and that makes me worry about everything.
I need hope, I need to feel better. I need someone to stand for truth, for accountability, for a future for my granddaughters to live authentic lives free from fear. I need a woman who will cut through the crap of my cynicism and crisis of confidence in the institutions I’ve cherished for seventy-eight years. Have I been living in a fantasy country?
I need Letitia James, the first African American and first woman to be elected Attorney General for the State of New York in 2018; a woman who was born in New York City – was one of eight children; a product of the public school system, BA from City of New York University’s Lehman College, JD from HBCU Howard University in Washington, D.C., Master of Public Administration from Columbia University.
Return with me now to the thrilling days of yesteryear – in reality earlier this year in February – return with me to the feeling I had when I first heard James say those remarkable words “Justice has been served.” Mr. Trump and his financial cohorts were hit with an incredible civil judgment in the amount of $463.9 million dollars for a massive fraud case. When Mr. Trump called No Fair, AG James threatened to sell his real estate if he couldn’t come up with the assets. No one is above the law, not even the former president of the United States, right?
Oh, gosh. Turns out that’s not quite right anymore, according to the twice-baked, bought- and-sold Supremes in their 6-3 majority ruling last week on presidential immunity. Shame on you, John Roberts, Amy Barrett – you both knew better and yet still supported a decision that struck at the heart of that moral arc of the universe tilting away from equality under the law rather than bending toward justice. Gorsuch, Alito, Kavanaugh and Thomas continue on their road to constitutional perdition so no surprises there.
I also need the three women Supremes I call my Dream Girls, the women who dissented from the majority in the presidential immunity ruling: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagen and Ketanji Brown Jackson. I need for them to get two votes each instead of one since they are apparently the only justices interested in justice. Just a thought.
Okay. I see today is Old Blue Monday as my paternal grandmother used to say in her weekly letter to me in my college years and beyond. I wish I could chat with her now – she was a woman of substance if not a woman of means, a woman with a wicked sense of humor, a great storyteller. She was also a worrier which used to annoy me in my youth because I was often the target of her worries. Little did she know as a survivor of the Great Depression and two World Wars that she hadn’t seen anything yet.
Personal milestones are typically meaningless to others; but as I approach number 1,000 of these I’ll Call It Like I See It posts over the past fourteen years I decided to visit the archives with the objective of identifying some of my favorites. This one was originally published in Septemer, 2016. Return with me to those thrilling days of yesteryear. Uh, oh. The Undecided are probably still Undecided.
When I was a little tomboy growing up in southeast Texas, I had dreams of one day – sometime somewhere – being able to go to a beer joint. My family was Southern Baptist and the very mention of an adult alcoholic beverage would send my mother into horrible face contortions and very loud condemnations of beer and beer drinkers. Beer joints were the epitome of evil. Naturally her hyperbole aroused my curiosity.
My mother’s aunts, my grandmother’s German sisters, worshipped at the Church of the Blessed Beer Joint, however, and I loved to listen to their tales when they came from Bright Lights, Big City Houston to visit us in No Lights, Tiny Town Richards. They were a personal trip for me…and a glimpse of possibilities for me down the road.
The road did bring me to my share of beer joints in my adult life, although I confess I never shared the same enthusiasm for them as my Aunt Dessie and Aunt Selma did. Most of the ones I went to when I got old enough were drab, dingy, smoke-filled rooms with a jukebox, a few old tables and a bar with stools too tall for me to belly up to easily. I loved the jukebox more than the taste of the Lone Star beer.
As the fickle finger of fate would have it, Teresa and I moved back to Texas in 2010 and bought a home on Worsham Street in Montgomery, Texas – only 18 miles from Richards. We drove many times to visit my family in the Fairview Cemetery outside of Richards and on one of those drives up Highway 105 I discovered the Texas beer joint of my childhood dreams in the little town of Dobbin. Some dreams really do come true!
We stopped for the burgers and bbq
Best burgers EVER
We waited in the bar which the owner Bobby Holder built himself – took him three years to finish – perfection
A little something for everyone
Thirst quencher
Old family pictures on ancient organ
Bobby as a little boy
All in all, Holder’s had delicious food, and had I been younger, I would have come back for the night life…or maybe not. My Texas beer joint dreams had come true without the first sip of a Lone Star.
And finally, here’s a wall hanging at Holder’s that I thought of yesterday after the presidential debate on Monday night. I talked to my friend Carmen about the debate, and she said many of her friends weren’t going to vote this year…or were undecided…
I'll Call It Like I See It 
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