I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Slice of Life

  • if it weren’t for second chances, we’d all be alone

    if it weren’t for second chances, we’d all be alone


    Our lecture for today, o cyberspace class, is the epistemology of the second chance. (Sometimes I just throw in a big word to see if anybody’s paying attention.)  Frankly, I don’t remember  much about epistemology from my scholarly life except I heard it used in my undergraduate philosophy classes and my graduate studies in theology.

    To refresh my memory, I looked up the definition and found the word epistemology involves knowledge and the justification of knowledge; but then the dictionary wandered off into a question of what is knowledge, how can it be justified and I immediately remembered why I dropped out of seminary. Way too much digression and grey areas for a 23-year-old CPA who dealt in absolute numbers before answering a “call” to the ministry that was surely a wrong number.

    During the forty years I wandered in the wilderness of numbers I grew accustomed to vague responses and  half-truths. I tried to blend in with a landscape camouflaged by degrees of knowledge that were justified with competing strident voices blasting away at each other from polarized positions of territorial absolutes.

    Yep, nothing like trying to convince people you own a piece of knowledge when they don’t agree with you. You can’t justify it to them no matter how hard you try and how loud you get because they own a piece of knowledge, too, which happens to be totally different from yours. That’s how it all goes downhill and the histrionics aren’t far behind. If only knowledge depended on the wisdom of golfers, epistemology would include the concept of Mulligans.  Mulligans are second chances.

    If someone hits a shot with a driver off the tee on the first hole and the little white golf ball vanishes mysteriously in deep woods closer to the fairway for the third hole than it is to the first hole, the golfer can say Mulligan and have a second chance to locate her own fairway again. She may hit a beautiful shot for her Mulligan or she may not, but the important thing is to have a new opportunity.

    In our personal lives second chances are sometimes painfully obvious and at other times so subtle we may miss them. As an old numbers person, I couldn’t resist creating a list of five lessons for successful second chances.

    Lesson Number One: Be open, available, alert to identify second chances; don’t think you won’t ever need one. You will.

    Lesson Number Two:  When you get a second chance, try not to think of it as an opportunity to repeat mistakes. Mistakes are hard to take back so don’t blow your Mulligan.

    Lesson Number Three: Be sure to tell your friends about your second chance. It may give them hope and inspire them to offer one or accept one. Honestly, can there be too many second chances going around?

    Lesson Number Four:  Your second chance may be your last chance.   Really?  100%.

    Lesson Number Five: Never be afraid to take a second chance when you have one. As Franklin Roosevelt famously said when the Hounds of the Baskervilles were closing in around him, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

    Finally o cyberspace class, the lecture concludes with a little bit of knowledge mixed with a bunch of justification that adds up to the epistemology of the second chance as seen from the eyes of a 66-year-old who has had her own share of second chances; and has at various times in her life blown them, needed a third or fourth chance, and had some of them bring incredible happiness.

    Be generous to those you love and even to those whose knowledge is different from yours. Ouch. Is that really necessary?  Absolutely.

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

    This piece is one I originally published in September, 2012 following the death of my mother which had been a long time coming but given me a wonderful second chance for a more honest relationship with her in the final two years of her life – it was a second chance I embraced. Another second chance was on the horizon, but I had broken all of my own rules which made me oblivious to a second chance that came perilously close to being disastrous. I was reminded of this time in my life recently when I heard Gregory Alan Isakof’s song Second Chances that included the lyrics which became the new title for this post.

  • Molly’s Big Birthday Weekend

    Molly’s Big Birthday Weekend


    Her family and friends celebrated Molly’s January 26th. second birthday with vigor, an occasion she seemed content to embrace while managing to control her focus. The festivities began Friday afternoon after school on the playground when her Nana (Pretty) and Naynay (me) came to pick her up – her great Aunt Darlene and Dawne had driven down from the upstate to get the weekend started. They took great pictures!

    Molly going full speed ahead with Ella close beside her

    Molly all smiles when Ella is near

    Ella and her best buddy Thomas made it to the top,

    sharing a moment

    Molly takes a playground break –

    turning two years old wears me out

    Birthday dinner at Mexican restaurant – where else?

    left hand? right hand? both work fine to eat Mexican food by myself

    Ella and Naynay study chips, salsa and queso – they’re wasting time

    The Party

    Ella and Molly tackle the Bounce House in the back yard

    I think my school friends found my toy box

    oh well, they make me say sharing is caring…but she has my doll

    my teacher Miss Stefanie came to my party – she brought her son Cole

    my mom Caroline and dad Drew love me to the moon and back

    Mama and her friends worked so hard for my birthday party –

    I had the best time

    my Nana and Naynay love me, too –

    they let me do whatever I want to do

    BIRTHDAY CAKE!

    Happy Birthday to me!

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

    Molly was oblivious to another birthday gift she received when a woman named E. Jean Carroll received an $83.3 million dollar settlement on Molly’s birthday against a former president of the United States for his years of bullying her in public. Carroll’s stand was a ray of hope that will help Molly and all little girls have the courage to be brave when they are confronted with behavior designed to make them feel lesser than. Thank you for that gift, Ms. Carroll.

  • the times they are a-changin’

    the times they are a-changin’


    Queen Elizabeth II wasn’t feeling jubilant for her Silver Jubilee in the trailer for Season 3 of the Netflix series The Crown as she rode in the parade inside the royal golden carriage pulled by six white horses. Rather, the fifty-one year old Defender of the Faith was portrayed briefly as a middle-aged woman sitting alone in a coach, focused more on her failures than hope for the future as the ominous percussion of Fort Nowhere grew louder when the lyrics to the music began: Come gather ’round people wherever you roam, for the times they are a’changing...The enormity of the changes that would take place before the Queen’s death during her Platinum Jubilee year in 2022, forty-five years following the Silver Jubilee in 1977, made Bob Dylan’s classic song from 1964 more prophecy than poetry.

    Meanwhile, on another popular Netflix series a Canadian woman in her twenties who was sometimes known as the Miracle Girl from Hudson, Alberta because of her unique relationship with horses was suddenly forced to confront unimaginable loss by tragic circumstances that left Amy the Miracle Girl with similar feelings of hopelessness and dread of the future in Heartland‘s 14th. season as Queen Elizabeth II had faced in the third season of The Crown. Episode 7 (Courage) of that season ended with Fort Nowhere again framing the background music while Amy began her lengthy journey from despair to hope: Come gather ’round people wherever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown. And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone if your time to you is worth saving. And you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changing…As the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fading. And the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changing.

    Now you may be thinking I watch too much Netflix when I can connect random dots from Queen Elizabeth II to a Miracle Girl from Alberta, Canada; but it is the music of Bob Dylan through the voices of Fort Nowhere, a person (group?) I didn’t know, that inspired me to reconsider the lyrics to the times, they are a-changing. When I did look at Dylan’s words, I found a powerful personal message which is, after all, the secret to his musical legacy.

    Come writers and critics
    Who prophesize with your pen
    And keep your eyes wide
    The chance won’t come again
    And don’t speak too soon
    For the wheel’s still in spin
    And there’s no tellin’ who
    That it’s namin’
    For the loser now
    Will be later to win
    For the times they are a-changin’

    The older I get, the faster the wheel spins.

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

    Slava Ukraini. For the Ukrainian tennis players in the 2024 Australian Open.

  • the Civil War, old tapes, social media and crazy liberals

    the Civil War, old tapes, social media and crazy liberals


    As the race toward the 2024 election begins to heat up with Iowa caucuses in the rear view mirror, the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday,  I look more frequently at the map of the red states and blue states that make up our United States to wonder anew at Abraham Lincoln’s commitment to keep the country united as one. I understand the problem better for sure. I always wondered how brother fought brother on different sides during the Civil War. They were family first after all, right? Not so fast, my friend. A post I published in the summer of 2017 is a reminder of how messy families can be – particularly when we get together in cyberspace.

    My grandmother invented social media via the telephone party line we had in our little town as surely as Al Gore invented the internet. She relished listening in on other people’s conversations and delighted to repeat juicy gossip at her kitchen table… but please dear God, don’t ever mess with her family.

    This week I did something I almost never do. I responded on social media to a post made by a first cousin twice removed who has a world view that I have long ago accepted as different from mine. Most of the time I hide his offensive posts from my timeline and move on.

    I can’t bring myself to “un-friend” him because I truly love the little boy I remember visiting us in Richards so often with his grandmother who was my grandmother’s sister. But this week he posted that liberals must have a “mental illness” to think the way we do, and that struck a nerve for me.

    You see, I grew up during a time when being a homosexual was considered to be a mental illness. Think about how you would feel if you grew up believing that you had a secret mental illness and, if exposed, you could be institutionalized. Lock her up. Throw away the key. I heard an old tape begin to  play in my mind.

    Somehow our thread on Facebook took an unpleasant turn, as I already knew it would and we got into a discussion regarding a prevailing Muslim  belief in some places that gays should be killed. Unfortunately, one of my cousin’s friends chimed in with the following comment: “We knew someone many years ago that would probably want to buy a plane today, load them (gays and lesbians) up and drop them off over there (wherever Muslims live). I sure miss him.”

    Wow. I was transported to a conversation I had in the early 1990s with a client who sat in my office and said, “If it were up to me, I’d take all those queers and put them behind barbed wire in Kansas and tell them to stay there.” I didn’t respond then. The old tape was playing louder now.

    One of my mother’s most infamous quotes for me was that she wished all those gays would go back in the closet where they belonged. She would be happy to slam the door shut. The old tape was so loud now I could barely hear myself think.

    Luckily, I didn’t accept the old tapes as I don’t accept my cousin or his friend’s thinking about who I am today. I’ve spent my entire adult life working for equal treatment and fairness – my liberal social justice beliefs. In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. I was 28 years old. In 2017 at the age of 71, I am personally declassifying liberalism as a mental illness.

    I resolve to limit my social media interaction with my first cousin twice removed to Happy Birthday wishes. No need going up that blind alley again.

    I feel better already.

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

    P.S. Sadly I have “un-friended” my cousin twice removed in the intervening years since 2017 because I had to get out of his kitchen. I couldn’t take the heat.

  • hail, hail – the gang’s all here – what the heck do we care now?

    hail, hail – the gang’s all here – what the heck do we care now?


    Sometimes a song won’t let go of you for reasons known only to the universe and your memories. I published this piece in March, 2018; but the song (first published in 1917) has been playing in my head again so I thought this post was worthy of a second look. What the heck do I care now – let me explain.

    Christmas memories seem strange on Good Friday, but then the mind often ignores time or at least is able to reconstruct its meandering corridors to bring buried secrets to the surface of consciousness.

    One of my favorite Christmas gifts when I was a child growing up in Richards, Texas in rural Grimes County was not one I received but one  I gave to my maternal grandmother Louise whose name I shortened to Dude when I was unable to pronounce Louise. Louise became “Dude-ese,” then simply Dude.

    I was two years old when my dad, mother and I moved into my grandmother’s small Sears Roebuck designed house in Richards in 1948. We lived in that little house with her for eleven Christmases, and each Christmas she gave me two new pairs of underwear she bought from the general store where she clerked six days a week from 8 in the morning until 6 in the evening with an hour for lunch. Two new pairs of underwear wrapped in last year’s red paper she carefully saved, used again and again, tied with a gold string and a tiny tag signed in her scrawling handwriting Lots of love, Dude.

    The Christmas before we moved away from Richards I bought Dude a present at Mr. McAfee’s drug store from money I saved from my allowance. I had never bought her a gift before and was so excited about my purchase: a door chime that played Hail, Hail – the Gang’s All Here. I hadn’t told anyone about my gift, so imagine the look on Dude’s face when she opened it. Just what she needed, she said, and had me believing it.

    Dude had been 50 years old when we moved in with her and was 61 when we moved away to a town 70 miles from Richards leaving her with a disabled adult son, no transportation since she never learned to drive, and very little income. My family came back to visit her every two weeks; whenever the front door opened we were welcomed with the chimes playing hail, hail – the gang’s all here, what the heck do we care? On those weekends her gang was there.

    I was totally unaware of what loneliness combined with the loss of laughter and love must have been for her the other days and nights of her life at that time because I was, after all, a self-absorbed teenager whose only experience with loneliness was self-imposed and transitory. I was never at a loss for laughter.

    By the time I graduated from high school, my grandmother’s life had the beginnings of her roller coaster battle with depression that would plague her for the rest of her days – a war really – on battlegrounds she fought in doctors’ offices and hospitals,  fought sometimes with medicines, sometimes without medicines, sometimes with electroshock therapy.

    My visits to see her became less frequent when I went away to college, and I remember being surprised on one of those visits to discover the door chimes no longer played when I opened the front door. Surprised, but totally unaware of the significance. Her gang was no longer there.

    This morning I was taking a shower and for some reason the shower song du jour was Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here which brought the Christmas memories of my grandmother’s door chime pouring over me like the hot water that rinsed my hair. Dude was the first woman to love me unconditionally with all her heart. I hope wherever she is today her gang is there, too because I want her to be surrounded with the love she gave each of us in the little Sears Roebuck home in Richards.

    Dude (1898 -1972)

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

    Slava Ukraini. For the children.