I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: sexism

  • Down a Rabbit Hole Through the Looking Glass

    Down a Rabbit Hole Through the Looking Glass


    Found your pilot. Died in 1956. Earl Matthew Quigg of Hokenbaqua, Pennsylvania. Born in 1930. Air force. Married. Died on Sept. 17 at 3:15 pm of crushing injuries and conflagration, .7 miles south of Richards, Texas in open pasture.

    Thanks to my first cousin Melissa on my daddy’s side who sent me this text message after our conversation earlier in the week, a conversation that went down a rabbit hole and somehow circled to a memory of school children playing softball one afternoon behind the little red brick public school building in Richards – play interrupted by the roar of a jet plane engine as the airplane careened crazily out of the sky.

    Melissa is the real journalist in our family; she wore many hats working for Texas newspapers during her career and that background makes her a wonderful sleuth/researcher on all subjects great and small. Naturally she was able to retrieve the information for me about a mysterious plane crash in Richards, Texas that remained a vivid memory for me 65 years later.

    I was ten years old at the time, but I still remembered our small group of boys and girls standing frozen together on the playground in the few moments the jet screamed past us to hit the ground in a field just beyond where we played, bursting into flames with thick black smoke billowing from the explosion, causing us to look at each other with horrified disbelief.

    For the tiny town of Richards, Texas (pop. 500+) this was the equivalent of the Hindenburg disaster. The theory of 2nd Lieutenant Earl M Quigg’s heroism discussed at great length by my grandparents at their kitchen table was that he refused to safely eject during his spiral in order to save the lives of the children he saw on the playground below. I never forgot the name of this pilot who I believed saved my ten year old life.

    As a teenager when I began writing my version of “poetry,” one of my poems celebrated the bravery of Lieutenant Quigg. I mentioned this to Melissa when we chatted earlier, and she made the mistake of asking me if I’d saved the poem. That would be from 65 years ago, in case anyone is counting. She suggested I write a blog about the plane crash and include my poem. Great idea, I said.

    While Pretty keeps everything she’s ever had in her entire life, I save almost nothing except words and pictures but that means decades upon decades of words and pictures which have made their journeys with me from the Pacific Northwest to the Atlantic Southeast, zigzagging back and forth to Texas in between. Surely I kept my first poetry attempts. Alas, as of this writing I have had no luck in my search.

    However, my digging around through boxes in my office encouraged me to step through the looking glass of another rabbit hole which allowed me to avoid the pandemic and politics (both equally disturbing) of today, transporting me to a time long ago and far away.

     

    my grandfather in his barber shop cutting 

     Melissa’s daughter Nikki’s hair: a Morris family tradition

    Maybe this picture of my grandfather in his single chair barber shop was taken Father’s Day weekend in June, 1984, the year I got this letter from my granddaddy. I did have the good common sense to save these words from him. He was born in 1898 and died in October, 1987, three years after this picture was taken. My paternal grandmother wrote me faithfully every week from the time I moved away from Richards at the age of 13 in 1959 to the year she died in 1983, but my grandfather was embarrassed about his lack of schooling and never wrote me until after my grandmother passed. In June, 1984 I was living in South Carolina, a thousand miles from Texas  and my grandpa.

    My Dear Sheila, I just came in from church out at Pool’s or Dark Corner as Tom Grissom called it. Bro. W.A. Curtis is doing the preaching not a Bad Preacher Tells a few Tales kinder mixas them up keeps you awake. Sheila, I have something to pass the time with now 15 quail 10 little ones & 5 grown I liked to make a miss count. Had a real good Father’s Day will give you a run down on that later.

    Tomatoes have just started to get ripe and the vines are loaded lots of string beans & baby lima looks like they are going to do good I have two rows about as long as a hoe handle. Now for the Father’s day. Your mother came first brought lunch & watermillon & a pretty shirt we had a real good visit enjoyed her so much. We discussed the Sheads at length not too bad. Ray came Fri. Lucille Sat. Sun. Mike, Melissa, Nikki. Ray a radio & Lucille a hat from London she had given me pr.pants Mike & Melissa shirt

    Gaylen card & face lotion Gene & Patti card and last but not least was a very pretty sweet card from my Dear Grand Daughter I can’t tell you how much I love you and always have. You ment so much to Ma & me, ole bald headed Pa

         ***********************

    Pa, I can’t tell you how much I loved you and Ma and always will. I hope Pretty and I can give our granddaughter the same unwavering love you always gave me.

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned, my friends.

  • yep – this is who we are

    yep – this is who we are


    The images flashing across the television screen this week were appalling but compelling. I couldn’t look away, even when I didn’t want to see, much less believe, what was happening in my nation’s capitol. An estimated 10,000 of mostly white people who looked like me stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC where the Senate and House of Representatives were in session to count the votes the 50 states’ electors had sent to the two bodies for a ceremony that was usually a pro forma final recognition of the results of the previous November election.

    Not so much this year. Donald Trump, not unlike Humpty Dumpty, had sat on the largest wall of power in the world as president of the United States and had suffered a great fall when he lost his position in a free and fair election on November 03, 2020. Since that loss, apparently all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Donald Trump together again.

    The king’s men ran around the country challenging election results in scores of courts ranging from state and federal courts to the Supreme Court of the United States with the same decisions. Humpty Dumpty lost fair and square; please stop bothering us with baseless complaints. But Mr. Trump, who had spent most of his adult life in court battles long ago learned to believe the courts were fallible – even unreliable. He thought his appointment of not one, not two, but three Supreme Court justices during his term of office would finally give him the wins he so desperately craved through the legal system. Shockingly, to him and me, the courts held fast and repeatedly ruled against him.

    Meanwhile, back at the ranch or the White House if you prefer, the Covid pandemic raged on with more ferocity than a Category 5 hurricane. Ignoring the warnings of our medicine men, millions of Americans traveled throughout the country by plane, train, bus and automobile during the holiday season to visit friends and family who either unknowingly carried the coronavirus to the travelers or caught it from them. Rates of infections in the past two weeks have skyrocketed while hospitals and their staffs have been stressed to breaking points. Deaths stand at nearly 370,000 individuals today. Mr. Trumpty hasn’t noticed, or if he has noticed, he hasn’t commented on the losses.

    He did, however, promise that the king’s horses would deliver a hundred million doses of new vaccines by the end of 2020 when in fact Newsweek reported on December 28th. that the actual number of vaccines administered on that date was closer to 2.1 million. Another loss to absorb and ignore.

    Was it really just one week ago today that Mr. Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State to ask him to find 11,780 votes to reverse the results of the November election in Georgia? Gosh, that bullying phone call, which accomplished nothing more than another revelation of his delusion, seems tame now compared to the events I witnessed four days later on January 6th.

    All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. Mr. Trump’s big lie that he won re-election in November, a lie that he tweeted incessantly over social media, a lie that he used to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from his more than 74 million faithful followers who voted to re-elect him was the lie that led to the images of destruction and deaths in our nation’s Capitol this week.

    Many of the king’s men and women reported for duty at a large rally in which the king and his surrogates urged them to storm the Capitol to bring an end once and for all to the transition of power to anyone other than himself on January 20th. Mr. Trump promised to march with them to accomplish the coup that would guarantee Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would not replace him. It was Humpty Dumpty and Custer’s last stand. By the way, he retreated to the safety of the White House to revel in the dangerous mission instead of keeping his word to join the march.

    The painful images keep coming – new ones every day – the wonder of cell phone cameras recording the faces and horrific actions of mob violence in my country. I feel overwhelmed, depressed, shamed, sickened at the sights of the attack on our democracy displayed for the world to see.

    President-Elect Biden and I grew up in the same generation, and from his words of hope and his insistence that what happened this week was not what America really was, I knew he and I were on the same page. The man carrying the Confederate flag in the rotunda of the Capitol, the man sitting with his legs propped up on a desk in Speaker Pelosi’s office, the men and women shattering glass, breaking historic relics, vandalizing individual offices, in general disrespecting the building that represented the legislative branch of our government – those people whose actions resulted in the deaths of five others – they weren’t the Americans Joe Biden and I remembered.

    Nonetheless, we are the Americans who immigrated from faraway places, spread disease and killed the population living on this land in order to take the land from them. We are the Americans who used slavery to build on this land, to work the crops on the land, to be the backbone of our agrarian economy. White equaled might for us and when the colors of our nation became more colorful, we are the Americans who feared for our destiny.

    When Joe Biden and I celebrated putting a man on the moon, we are the Americans who refused to guarantee health care for everyone. While he and I celebrated rugged individualism, bringing ourselves up by our bootstraps, we forgot some people didn’t have boots. More recently, we looked past the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay, brown children separated from their families living in cages at our borders, black children denied access to quality education which placed them at higher risk for quality jobs, poor people of all races who live today in food insecurity also known as hunger. Gun violence, police brutality toward people of color, denial of climate change, homelessness – the list goes on. We are all of these Americans.

    But Mr. Trump and his white nationalist friends are losers. He lost the presidency, he lost the Senate, and he lost the House of Representatives for his Trumpty Party. His attempt at overthrowing our democracy failed. His white nationalist friends are scattering to the winds as quickly as the planes can fly them home. The reality show is over for now.

    I believe Joe Biden and I can listen and learn to be better Americans. I think Kamala Harris will help raise the consciousness of what the next generation of Americans can be. That thought gives me hope for my granddaughter’s future.

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

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

  • cross over the bridge

    cross over the bridge


    In June, 2015 two separate events captured the attention of not only the United States but also countries on other continents. Yes, indeed. We were part of the good, the bad and the very ugly. I wrote this piece the day after the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage was the law of the land,  the day of the funeral for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney who was one of the Emanuel Nine in Charleston, South Carolina.

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

    Traveling to East Tennessee last week, Pretty and I listened to a collection of Patti Page hits. One of the songs she sang in this album which was recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1997 was Cross Over the Bridge – a song I hadn’t heard since 1954 when Patti originally recorded it –  but one I remembered singing while my mother played the yellow piano keys of the ancient upright piano in our living room in the tiny town of Richards in rural Grimes County, Texas. My mom bought sheet music like some people bought cigarettes back then…she was addicted to it. One of her favorites was Cross Over the Bridge so naturally eight-year-old me learned the lyrics as my mother sang and played which meant I was able to sing along with Patti in the car while Pretty and I rode through the gorgeous vistas of the Upstate of South Carolina toward the incredible views of the mountains in East Tennessee. Mine eyes did see the glory.

    Cross over the bridge, cross over the bridge…Change your reckless way of living, cross over the bridge…Leave your fickle past behind you, and true romance will find you, Brother, cross over the bridge.

    Admittedly this is a love song in the tradition of the 1950s favorite sentiments, but as I was trying to digest and cope with the overwhelming seesaws of emotion I felt yesterday, crossing bridges came to mind.

    Yesterday morning I woke up in a new world…truly a new world for me and my family. The Supreme Court of the United States lifted my status as a citizen. I was no longer “lesser than.” I was a person who mattered. By recognizing the fundamental right to marry for all same-sex couples in every state in the nation, SCOTUS recognized me as a person who was entitled to my own pursuit of happiness with life and liberty guaranteed as a bonus.

    Two years to the day after the favorable ruling in the Edie Windsor case that gave equal federal treatment to the same-sex marriages recognized in twelve states and the District of Columbia at the time, the Supremes crossed a bridge to leave a fickle past of outright discrimination behind all of us and yes, to allow true romance for whoever we love. We crossed a bridge to walk a path toward full equality for the entire LGBTQ community because of the efforts of people who worked at coming out to their parents, friends, co-workers – everyone in their daily lives – to reveal their authentic selves.

    It was a day of rejoicing for Pretty and me in our home; we were beside ourselves with an emotional high as the breaking news unfolded on the television before our eyes. To hear a Gay Men’s Chorus sing our national anthem outside the building in Washington, D.C. where history was being made brought chills and tears to our eyes. We savored the moment together.

    But the celebration was cut short by the next four hours of the television coverage of the funeral of the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of the Emanuel Nine slain in his church in Charleston, South Carolina the week before when he was leading a Bible Study group at the church. The celebration of his life was a long one for a man who had lived the relatively short life of only forty-one years. But this man’s life had counted for more than his years.

    He began preaching at the age of thirteen and was a pastor at eighteen years of age. The men and women who reflected on Reverend Pinckney’s life did so with exuberance and humor as they told their personal stories of interacting with him as friends, family and co-workers. The picture that emerged was that of a good man who loved his family, his church and his country with its flawed history of systemic racism. He was a man on a mission to make life better for those who felt they had no voice to speak about their basic needs of food and shelter, their educational opportunities, a flawed criminal justice system. He was a man who cared, he was passionate about making a difference.

    He was murdered by another kind of man who had a reckless way of living and a disregard for the sanctity of human life. He was murdered by a white man who was taught to hate the color black as a skin color in a society too often divided by colors, creeds and labels. We need to change our reckless way of living as a people.

    We need to open our eyes and our hearts to see glimpses of truth, as the old hymn admonishes. Open our eyes that I may see glimpses of truth thou hast for me. And may we not just see the truth, but may we speak and act as though the truth is important because it is. When our eyes are opened, for example, to the pain the Confederate Flag flying on the public state house grounds inflicts on a daily basis to many of our citizens, we must make every effort to take it down. We must speak up and act out. (the flag came down on July 10, 2015)

    President Obama spoke in his eulogy about the grace that each of us has from God, but that none of us earned. Regardless of our concept of God, we know grace is unmerited favor. We live in a country of contrasts and  sometimes conflicts, but for those of us to whom grace has been given, we are compelled to share this bounty with everyone we encounter – whether they agree or disagree with us in our political ideals. This is harder to practice than preach. Reverend Clementa Pinckney both preached and practiced grace  in his life as he crossed another kind of bridge – a bridge we will all cross at some point.

    The tragedy of his untimely crossing took Pretty and me on a roller coaster of emotions as we watched the funeral yesterday. From the euphoria of the Supreme Court ruling early in the morning to the depths of despair as we remembered the losses of the Emanuel Nine during the funeral of Reverend Pinckney to the stirring tribute filled with hope by President Barak Obama that raised our spirits once again to believe in the possibility of grace; we crossed over two bridges in one day that we will never forget. Patti Page had none of this in mind when she sang her love song in 1954, but I’d like to  think my mother would be happy to know her music inspired more than a little girl’s learning to carry a tune.

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

    Five years later we continue to cross over the bridges of systemic racism that divide us in this country. The murder of George Floyd in May of 2020 ignited marchers in the streets around the world to cross bridges for civil rights with similar passions to those of  John Lewis and the others who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965. I believe the Black Lives Matter movement along with the passing of civil rights icons Congressmen John Lewis and Elijah Cummings were the beginning of the end for a Trump presidency that failed spectacularly to successfully combat an enemy known as Covid 19 in 2020 – an administration committed more to the stock market than  the welfare of its citizens, a presidency that encouraged politics of divisiveness over unity, a political party with ongoing threats to democratic cornerstones. The loss of nearly 300,000 American lives was, and continues to be, a bridge too far of failed leadership that resulted in the contentious removal of a one-term impeached president  by 81 million plus voters in the November election; 74 million people voted to re-elect him. But that’s a topic for another day.

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

  • Happy Holidays! Clearance!

    Happy Holidays! Clearance!


    my books

    I have signed new copies available of several nonfiction titles of mine that will make great holiday gifts for yourself or someone you love:

    Get ’em while they’re not hot for $5. each plus shipping cost of $3.99. You can send $ through paypal.me/SHEILARMORRIS

    Pardon the interruption for this shameless self promotion. As my daddy used to say, whosoever tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooteth. That was my dad.

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

  • the essence of giving thanks


    “The oak trees were alive with color in the midst of the evergreens. Bright red and yellow leaves catching the sunlight as Daddy and I walked through the brush on this Thanksgiving morning. The smell of the pines was fresh and all around us. We didn’t speak, but this was when I felt most connected to my father. Nature was a bond that united us, the gift that he gave me, and not just in those East Texas woods. He envisioned the whole earth as my territory and set me on a path to discovery. In 1956, this was remarkable for a girl’s father…

    I loved our farm place that sat on the Grimes/Montgomery County line. It was 105 acres of rolling pasture and dense timber land three miles out from the small town where we lived. The land was at the edge of the Sam Houston National Forest which marked the beginning of the East Texas piney woods. We had a medium sized pond in those woods – we called it a tank – that was the main source of water for our few Hereford cattle we raised there…

    To this day, Thanksgiving remains my favorite holiday. It seems less commercial than the others and struggles to hold its own before the onslaught of merchandising that we call Christmas. The dinners in the fancy restaurants and hotels and cafeterias never measure up to the feasts my grandmothers served their families.

    Perhaps, though, it is the love and closeness of those family ties that leave the sights and sounds that last a lifetime.”

    This excerpt from the chapter Thanksgiving in the Piney Woods is from my first book Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing. Those of you who follow me will recognize this as the traditional introduction to my annual holiday piece.

     Morris family on my grandparents’ front steps 

    (I am seated on the bottom row in my flannel shirt and corduroy pants, unsmiling, at my mother’s request for some strange reason. My dad is the man with the suit and tie on the right. The date is circa 1956.)

    One by one my family dwindled, as all families do, so that only four of the five children in this picture remain. I won’t see any of my first cousins during the holiday season on either side of my family this year nor will I see my sisters Leora, Carmen and Lorna –  they are all scattered around Texas while my home is with Pretty in South Carolina.

    We will have a strange Thanksgiving due to the Covid pandemic that has returned to our nation with a second wave more vicious than the first devastating attack. More than 250,000 Americans have died in 2020 – unimaginable, and the numbers increase daily as empty chairs at the holiday dinner tables remind families of lives and love lost.

    Americans face another insidious attack from a president who refuses to allow the peaceful transition of power following an election he lost by nearly six million votes. Stoking flames of division and mistrust, this would-be king and his subjects flail away at the basic fabric of our democracy while the coronavirus destroys our fellow citizens. Nero fiddles while Rome burns.

    We are advised by our medical experts to avoid all travel, be wary of sharing the air with anyone other than immediate folks we live with, only very small gatherings. If we sacrifice now, we should be here for next year’s Thanksgiving, the medicine men tell us.  Wear masks, wash hands, keep safe distances, no hugging or other touching. Why is this difficult? Because those are not the norm for us.

    This Thanksgiving is an unusual one for sure. but I still believe in the love and closeness of family ties no geographical nor physical distance can sever, family bonds that usher in the sights and sounds which last a lifetime. I am thankful for those memories of my Texas family but oh, how grateful I am for the family Pretty and I have shared for the past twenty years.

    Pretty Too, Pretty Also and Baby Ella

    Number One Son, Pretty and Baby Ella

    Pretty and our granddaughter Ella James

    (birthday number one for our girl)

    Pretty and I wish all our friends in cyberspace that love and closeness on this special day for giving thanks – plus in this year we add our wishes for your  safety and sanity in these extraordinary times. We are thankful for you.

    Stay tuned.