I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Slice of Life

  • WWF – Play On


    Since I’ve had a week of house arrest due to circumstances within my control but apparently without any interest in controlling them, I find my mind wandering.  My mind wanders at the drop of a hat anyway and unless I reel it in, it takes me down paths of intrigue and mystery that are too often dangerous.

    The past four years have been tumultuous and full of drastic changes that precipitated moving to and fro over great distances with such frequency I occasionally met myself coming while I was going.  Or at least it felt that way to me.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  Now I see me.  Now I don’t.  The rolling stone gathered no moss.  And so forth.

    Throughout these “transitional life experiences” one constant remained for me: my iPad and Words with Friends.  If there is any person in cyberspace who has never heard of this innocuous sounding game, please Google it immediately and get up to speed.  The rest of us will move on.

    My discovery of the game came from my partner Teresa who introduced me to WWF four years ago when I was under house arrest for a month for an ailment unrelated to the current one.  She gave me an iPad and told me that several of her tennis friends loved to play a little word game that was like Scrabble and that I should learn to play.   Sounds like something fun for you to do while you’re home, she told me.  I never argue with her about fun.

    The three tennis friends and I are still playing WWF four years later.  What I’ve found out since then is life goes on for all of us with changes everywhere, but we play on.  We may travel to exotic places, but we carry WWF with us.  We may have our first grandchildren who live a long way from us and we stay with them to help our children care for the new baby, but WWF gives us a connection to home.  Football seasons come and go and we live and breathe for our teams in Auburn, Clemson and Columbia – but we play WWF after the games no matter who wins or loses.  WWF transcends other loyalties.

    Cyberspace allows me to play WWF with opponents bouncing off satellites in other towns and states.  My friend in Charleston battles the everyday hardships of taking care of a mother who needs constant attention and affection, but she finds time to play WWF and beats me like a drum on a regular basis.  I have three other friends in Texas who play with me.  Their lives are busy and complicated, but they make time to make words every day.

    Recently I’ve added two new opponents who are locals – well, at least they’re local now.  They moved to Cayce two years ago from New York and love living in the South.  They also love WWF and so we meet on that battleground a minimum of once each day to determine who can outwit the other.

    In sickness and in health, for better or worse scores, I play on.  I prefer to win, but I’ve learned to lose.  Hm.  That’s kind of like life in general.

    Uh, oh.  Beep, Beep. Danger. Danger.  Time to reel it in.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • For Cindy from Little Man


    If time were not a moving thing

    And I could make it stay,

    This hour of love we share would always be…

    There’d be no coming day

    To shine a morning light

    To make us realize our night is over.

    It’s over.

    ——Jimmie Rodgers, 1966

    I lost a good friend today.  I lost a friend who greeted me with a smile and hug and kiss every time I saw her.  I lost a friend who had a quick wit and droll sense of humor and made me laugh whenever we were together which was, in the last few years, not often.

    She came into my life twelve years ago through her love of one of my oldest and dearest friends in Columbia: Millie Miller.  MM and I go way, way back to my first years in South Carolina in the 1970s.  We have seen the good, the bad and the ugly in each other’s lives and our friendship managed to survive.  That’s not easy these days.

    Cindy told great stories about her life before Millie and could entertain a living room full of people lucky enough to be eating one of her home-cooked New Year’s Day meals.  Black-eyed peas.  Collard greens.  Corn bread.  Fried chicken.  The girl could cook.

    From the first time I met her until the last time I saw her, she called me Little Man.  Hi Little Man, how you doing?  Hey Little Man, what you been up to?  Little Man, you need to come see us more.  We miss you.  I can truthfully say she is the only person on earth who ever called me by that name.  Why Little Man?  She would only say that I looked like a little man to her.  Enough said.

    Teresa’s favorite Cindy memory today was from a night a group of a dozen lesbians went to an Italian restaurant for someone’s birthday.  Neither of us could remember whose birthday it was, but both of us remembered Cindy’s hilarious performance of pretending to sing Happy Birthday in Italian at the top of her lungs with the waiters who really were singing in Italian and appeared totally undone by the woman who joined them.  Unforgettable moments.  Memory makers, as my mother used to say.

    Time is a moving thing and none of us can make it stay. The last few years were difficult ones for Cindy who faced many adversities in her life, but she never had to face them alone.  Millie was with her every step of the way.  Eventually, for all of us, the night is over, and we say goodbye to our favorite people.  Cindy Driggers was one of mine.

  • My First Taste of Texas


    In 1983 Ed Bruce and Ronnie Rogers co-wrote the lyrics to a song Ed later recorded – one that became a Top 10 Country Hit and is now a classic I hear regularly on my Legends radio and tv stations.

    “…My first taste of Texas still lingers in my heart and on my tongue…” ends each chorus.

    While the words are really a love song for a girl with blue eyes and golden hair,  they remind me today of my feelings as I leave Texas for the second time in my life.  My first taste of Texas…I can’t even remember because I was born there on an Easter Sunday sixty-eight years ago this month.  My date of birth – the 21st. of April – is also San Jacinto Day and for a Texan it’s a day of commemoration for Sam Houston’s defeat of the Mexican General Santa Anna which liberated the territory and led to the establishment of the Republic of Texas.

    I left Texas the first time in 1968 to do what many young people in the late 1960s wanted  to do: get out-of-town, get away from family and home and become my own person.  I wanted to be independent.  That seems strange nowadays in a time when young people appear to be more interested in staying put and hanging out in groups of friends and remaining close to their parents and discovering their brave new worlds on a computer screen.  What a difference a couple of generations make.

    I never planned to be away from Texas for more than forty years when I left the first time, but then that’s how life is sometimes.  The vicissitudes of life, as my daddy used to call those circumstances which altered our courses and over which we had little control, intervened and I didn’t return to my home state until 2010.  Sweet new home Carolina.

    I call these last four years in Montgomery, Texas, the Second Chance Years and they were years of redemption and reconciliation for me, but they came with a high price tag.  I was as prepared and ready for the deaths of my Old Ones as we can ever be, but I was unprepared for the aftermath and the wounds that wouldn’t heal.  I felt like I had been hit by a Mack truck.

    Every spring, though, I had the wildflowers that made the landscape in southeast Texas spectacular.  The bluebonnets were not so plentiful as I remembered them to be sixty years ago, but what they were –  were “cherse”as Spencer Tracy said about Katherine Hepburn in the movie Pat and Mike.  “There ain’t much meat on her, but what there is – is cherse.”  The bluebonnets brought color to my soul as surely as they painted the brown pastures struggling to turn green.

    And to add to my good fortune, I had three wild young boys who lived down the street from me and typically visited with the expectation of a full cookie jar in my kitchen.  It was impossible to picture a bleak future in the midst of the effervescence of inquisitive little boys who wanted to know Why about everything and oh yes, by the way, can I have another cookie please.

    Listening to the conversations of a classroom full of four-year-olds on Grandparents Day restored my faith in the possibilities of a world where people actually liked each other and resolved their problems with friendly negotiations or, at least, peaceful hostilities.   Watching a five-year-old boy learning to ride a bike without training wheels for the first time was almost as magical a moment for me as it was for him.  Little wheels keep on rolling.

    Wheels do, indeed, continue to roll, and I find myself saying goodbye to Texas again in 2014.  The Second Chance Years are relocating to South Carolina where they have more work to do, but my second taste of Texas will linger in my heart and on my tongue.

     

    P.S. I finished my third book I’ll Call It Like I See It: A Lesbian Speaks Out in 2012 while a bi-stateual and many of the stories in the book are about the Second Chance Years.  If you enjoy this blog, you’ll love the book!  You can order your copy here.

     

     

     

     

  • prop me up beside the jukebox if I die


    Lordy, Lordy.  I think I’ve just seen the green weenie, as my paternal grandmother used to say when she saw something so inexplicable she was at a loss for descriptive words. For example, if the  preacher at the Richards Baptist Church had stood up in the pulpit on a Sunday morning and said the title of his sermon was  Sin Was a Good Thing, my grandmother would say she’d seen the green weenie. Of course, he never would have said that in a million years, but if he had…

    Tonight I went to my favorite TexMex restaurant, The Big Sombrero, with my neighbors here on Worsham Street. I rank it very high on my all-time favorite Mexican restaurant list – definitely in the top five. I was one of the first patrons when it opened two years ago and have been a regular customer ever since.

    My friend Lisa and I arrived before the rest of our group and stood at the front counter which displayed the pecan pralines and other candies that were potential desserts in the event you weren’t stuffed when you finished your meal and got up to leave. I have yet to buy the first dessert.

    While we waited for the servers to set up a table for our party of five adults and three children, I saw something on the wall that I’d never noticed before. It looked like a flat-screen tv that nobody could see because it was in a wall facing the front door. But it wasn’t a tv. Guess what it was?

    It was a Do It Yourself touch screen digital jukebox. Are you kidding me?  Apparently not. I walked over to get a closer look and saw that the screen displayed songs and recording artists in an array of categories that boggled my mind. The screen looked like the DIY airline check-in system these days except the result wasn’t a boarding pass.

    I remember when the cost of buying five plays on the jukebox in a restaurant or Dairy Queen or honky-tonk of ill repute was 25 cents. Put in a quarter, and pick your five tunes. Uh, oh. The DIY digital jukebox required paper money or accepted plastic cards if you were fresh out of cash. That’s right. Forget about quarters and other coins. I never figured out tonight how much I had to pay to play, but that’s okay because I didn’t recognize any of the tunes anyway.

    I’ve always loved a jukebox and wasted many quarters to hear my favorite songs. Mark Chesnutt must be a fan, too, because he’s had two country music hits about them. Brother Jukebox, Sister Wine was one of them and Bubba Shot the Jukebox Last Night was another. Country classics for sure. If you haven’t heard them, I’m certain there’s a YouTube video somewhere in cyberspace that won’t cost you a penny to hear.

    But my favorite jukebox theme song is Joe Diffie’s Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox If I Die, Lord, I wanna go to heaven but I don’t wanna go tonight. Fill my boots up with sand, put a stiff drink in my hand and prop me up beside the jukebox if I die.

    As I stood before the DIY digital jukebox tonight, I wondered how in the world anybody could be propped up against this flat wall if they died, and that’s when I realized I’d seen the green weenie. It’s a digital world gone mad.

  • Suzanne (Part II) Stop! In the Name of Love


    Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river

    She is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters

    And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor

    And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers

    There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning

    They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever

    While Suzanne holds the mirror.

    And you want to travel with her and you want to travel blind

    And you know that you can trust her

    For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.

    —– Leonard Cohen

    Okay.  Let me define TMI for you, TMI as in Too Much Information.  The Great Spirit of Cyberspace giveth, and The Great Spirit of Cyberspace taketh away.  I’m not kidding you.

    In the summer of 1965 a very young, beautiful free-spirited woman named Suzanne Verdal moved into an apartment along the waterfront of the St. Lawrence River with her daughter Julie.  She was recently separated from her husband Armand who was a sculptor as well as her dance partner.  She was very much a part of the cultural scene in Montreal at the time.  The time was the 60s and the poetry was called Beat and the music was called folk.  Evidently Suzanne was so hot she became the muse for many of the Beat Poets and folk singers in Canada.

    Leonard Cohen was one of her frequent waterfront visitors in the summer of ’65. A year later he published a poem about their summer together – a poem that Judy Collins fell in love with – and the rest, as they say, is history.  Leonard Cohen became a  legendary  poet and songwriter as a result of the song’s success and went on to fame and fortune and a ton of awards.   I love happy endings.

    Why couldn’t I leave it at that?  No, that would be too easy.  I had to wonder what happened to the beautiful mysterious woman who was the bohemian inspiration for the poem and yes, it is possible to find out anything about anyone in cyberspace.  Beep, beep, beep – danger, danger.  Keep away from Suzanne and Leonard.  They didn’t stay in touch much.

     Through my research I learned that the tea of “tea and oranges” was Constant Comment Tea.  Seriously?  Constant Comment Tea?  I remember it well.  It was the tea in gift packages I got for Christmas in the 60s from people who didn’t know I never drank any tea brand other than Lipton.  It was a fancy tea all right because it came in tiny little expensive decorated boxes with only six bags and not the super size I usually bought of Lipton with at least twenty-four bags.

    And the “oranges that came all the way from China” and are indirectly responsible for my posts about the song were Mandarin oranges.  Duh.  Of course.  But here’s the difference between most of us who write and Leonard Cohen.  Leonard transformed la-tea-dah Constant Comment and ordinary oranges into exotic words that stirred our imaginations and became a part of the incredible beauty of a  love song that haunts a generation of lovers to this day nearly fifty years later.

    Suzanne was also an early recycling activist and really did make her clothes and her daughter’s clothes from pieces of cloth she bought at the Salvation Army in Montreal. She never reaped any financial rewards from her association with the song that bore her name, but she said in a BBC radio interview in 1998 she knew it was about her and that summer of 1965 in Canada.  She described her memory of the physically unconsummated spiritual relationship with Cohen and their subsequent lack of communication as now bittersweet but thought of it as a tribute to her youth.

     In one of life’s great ironies  Suzanne lived a few miles away from the Mt. Baldy Zen Monastery in California in 1998.  Yes, indeedy, the same monastery where Leonard lived for five years  from  1994 through 1999 and became a Buddhist monk.  I mean, they were just right down the road from each other and didn’t speak.

    Please don’t let me read any more, I said to myself but kept right on reading.  I  discovered to my horror that Suzanne’s later real life became a tragedy of looking among the “garbage and the flowers” when she suffered an injury in 1999 from a fall and became a homeless person living on the streets of Santa Monica.  Her career as a dance teacher and choreographer that had supported her in the years after she left Montreal was over – and so was my research.

    In 1966 when I heard Judy Collins sing Suzanne at the UT concert in Austin, I didn’t know anything about Suzanne Verdal and was just becoming aware of Leonard Cohen.  I didn’t care.  I only knew it was the most beautiful folk love song I’d ever heard and I memorized the lyrics and learned to play it on my tenor guitar and proceeded to sing it to girls I was trying very hard to impress with my romantic sense and sensibilities.  Those efforts were unsuccessful but it wasn’t the song’s fault.

    I confess my favorite song in 1965 was Stop! In the Name of Love by Diana Ross and The Supremes.  I belted that song out over and over in the privacy of my parents’ living room every time I was home from college.  I turned the stereo up full tilt and filled in for Diana Ross as The Supremes backed me up.  I never sang it to impress anyone other than myself.

    So two borders away (the US and Texas borders) from Suzanne and Leonard strolling along the St. Lawrence River of life in 1965, I was blissfully unaware that a song I will always love was being born and that the stories behind it are the life stories of us all.

    P.S. Luckily for you all, I skipped the second verse.