I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: sports

  • forty days milestone


    When Pretty, the gay boys basketball buddies and I were making the trip from Greenville home to Columbia after watching our Gamecock women’s basketball team win the SEC tournament on Sunday, March 8th. we all were happy, thrilled, excited, chatty, laughing – exhausted after making the trip three days in a row to watch every game our team played in the tournament – but totally jazzed for the NCAA post season play scheduled to start at our own Colonial Life Arena on the 20th. of March.

    Daylight savings time had “sprung” ahead at 2:00 a.m. that Sunday morning which was always welcome at our house every year. Seven hours later the basketball boys picked us up at our house to drive back to Greenville where on the day before we met three other friends for brunch at the Lazy Goat, a restaurant close to the Bon Secours Wellness Arena, the venue for the tournament. The seven of us had a delicious brunch that Saturday in a small bistro packed with people having fun, talking loudly about basketball or the gorgeous day, ordering cocktails, a typical festive atmosphere before a major sporting event in the Palmetto State.

    Bon Secours has a seating capacity of 16,000 and while the final game wasn’t totally a full house, the crowd was huge and noisy. Our opponents,  the Mississippi State Bulldogs, brought a large following from Starksville but the Gamecocks were in home territory with thousands of fans to cheer them on since the University of South Carolina in Columbia was fewer than two hours from Greenville. Both schools brought bands, cheerleaders, mascots and tons of enthusiasm reserved for major college athletic championships in the south. We had a fabulous time – my mother would have called it a memory maker.

    I had no way of knowing that was the last time I would leave my house for any social experience for 40 days, no way of knowing the NCAA post season play I was looking forward to would be cancelled, no way of knowing a pandemic called the coronavirus or Covid-19 was about to change not only my life but the lives of everyone I knew, indeed, the lives of everyone around the world. I almost added statistics here but they were edited out because I am too horrified to put them in. When the number of cases rises above 2 million in 210 countries, well, I’d rather not go there this early in the morning.

    I vaguely recalled from my Bible School days in Miss Mary Foster’s class at the First Baptist Church of Richards, Texas a few stories that referenced the number 40: a great flood was caused by rain for 40 days and nights, the Hebrew  people wandered in the wilderness for 40 years before reaching the promised land, Jesus fasted 40 days and nights in the desert. Beyond the scope of my Bible class and through the omniscience of the great storyteller Wiki, I discovered the number 40 has significance in many traditions without any universal explanation. “In Jewish, Christian, Islamic and other Middle Eastern religious traditions it is taken to represent a large approximate number similar to ‘umpteen.’” Umpteen? Come on, man.

    Wiki went on to remind me of other “40s” I’d forgotten. For example, the number 40 is important in tennis, also. I knew that. It’s the third point of a game – don’t get me started on tennis scoring – again, too early in the morning. Life begins at 40, right? Not exactly but that’s what at least one person believed. Forty is everywhere: The number of thieves running with Ali Baba, the number of acres (plus a mule) freed slaves were supposed to be given after the Civil War, the number of quarters of work required to qualify for Social Security benefits in the US. Across the pond forty-shilling freeholders was a nickname given to those who had the right to vote based on their interest in land or property with an annual rental of 40 shillings, or something like that. I’ll leave that to my friend Ellen to explain properly in her blog on facts about the U.K.

    Regardless, I can tell you the past 40 days have both flown by and stood still. I have learned how to navigate my relatively new Brilliant TV between Netflix and Amazon Prime with a swiftness in my click which surprises Pretty who knows the TV is far smarter than I am. I take showers every day, well, almost every day. I have washed my hands more in the past 40 days than when I used to eat at my grandmother’s who was a stickler for washing hands before meals, after meals, and random times in between meals. I now think of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as my new BFF although I wouldn’t want to sit next to him at a dinner party for fear of nodding off.  My worst fears about Agent Orange and his administration have been realized. Remember in November.

    Since Pretty’s antique empire is considered nonessential, she has been our hunter-gatherer for food and the inspiration for our fun. I’ve loved having Pretty here with me – yes, she’s been busy with projects around the house, but I can almost always persuade her to take a break to watch something onTV with me or to take a joint nap in the afternoon. We now have Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy on speed dial at night. Antiques Road Show on PBS is a must.

    I miss my friends and family, though. Pretty continues our babysitting duties alone for two days every week and sends me videos of our granddaughter’s ever-changing accomplishments. She brought her to our house for the first time ever in her baby life of six months this past Monday, and we had the best time sitting outside with her on the screened porch. But I miss Ella’s parents, her Aunt Chloe and her dogs, too. We haven’t been able to have lunch with them or Pretty’s father or sister for 40 days.

    I miss going out to restaurants with friends, playing cards with friends, playing dominoes with friends, going to movies in real theaters with friends, going to basketball games with friends – things I had just started enjoying after my knee surgeries last year. Mostly I miss visiting with my friends. I love having a good visit with people who have something to say, and I can assure you all our friends have plenty to say. Texting or phone chats are poor substitutes for sharing a cocktail and meal together. I miss that.

    I am consoled by my playlist on Alexa and my friends in cyberspace who, although we aren’t physically visiting on my screened porch, do visit regularly to share our reflections on the mad world we inhabit. I am grateful to my readers for allowing me to share my feelings, to express my angst, to add to our universal hope for better days. Bless your hearts.

    Pretty and I send wishes for your strength to endure and courage to overcome this weekend and beyond.

    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.

    “Well, I don’t know what will happen now.  We’ve got some difficult days ahead.  But it doesn’t matter with me now.  Because I’ve been to the mountaintop.  And I don’t mind.  Like any man I would like to live a long life.  Longevity has its place.  But I’m not concerned about that now…God’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know today that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.  And I’m happy, today,  I’m not worried about anything.  I’m not fearing any man.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

     

     

     

     

     

  • learning new tricks from old dogs


    I first published this post in August, 2015 but I still love it. My dogs have always been my best teachers about what truly matters. I learned that from my daddy.

    From the time I was five or six years old growing up in rural southeast Texas in the 1950s, my daddy used to take me with him to hunt quail during what I remember as a relatively short season in the late fall and winter months. Quail lived in coveys in fields in the countryside around us and were excellent at hiding from their enemies in the tall grasses that would become hay when baled. You could walk and walk and walk some more until you felt like your legs were going to fall off if you had to put one foot ahead of the other again, but the quail were always one step ahead of you unless you had help locating them.

    Enter the hunter’s best friend: the German short-haired pointer a/k/a in Grimes County, Texas as the bird dog. A good bird dog could run through a field sniffing and sniffing, sometimes whining, until he caught a whiff of a covey of quail; then he would stop, raise his right front leg to a ninety-degree angle,  curl his medium-length tail over his back and point his nose exactly in the direction of the covey. He remained in this precise position until the hunter walked up beside the dog which would cause the quail to take flight with the sound of their fluttering wings making a whoosh noise as they left the ground.

    Whoosh! Bam! It was over that quick. The covey rose from the ground cover, and my daddy would shoot his twelve-gauge shotgun. Occasionally a bird would fall, and I would run to retrieve it and put it in my jacket to take home to my grandmother who would be happy to fix it for our supper. We rarely got our  legal limit, but we would usually have enough for a meal.

    The problem my daddy had was he never had a “good” bird dog.  He got the puppies from different people  in the area who always assured him their dogs were the best in the field, but invariably the pointer he got didn’t respond well to training. A common trait Daddy’s dogs had was rather than stopping to point and hold their position, they would  stop to point for a split second and then run as fast as they could to try to catch the birds by themselves. Of course, the quail would take flight when they heard the dogs and be long gone out of  shooting range by the time we caught up with the dogs. Daddy would halfheartedly fuss – but the dogs rarely improved.

    As I think back on this now, I believe our dogs had an identity issue which caused their lackluster performance in the field. Whether they did well or not in the hunting arena, they were fed regularly with  delicious scraps from our table (dog food wasn’t on Daddy’s radar screen), petted and hugged on an equally regular basis. They came indoors for their pets and Daddy often scooped the big dogs up to hold them on his lap while he talked to them about their shortcomings. My daddy was a very diminutive man – about five feet six inches tall – and those dogs weighed almost as much as he did. They looked at him with adoring eyes and absolute trust…and seemed to be saying I promise I’ll do better next time…but they wouldn’t.

    Daddy with what he loved most – his dog and his Bible

    My daddy loved his bird dogs. We always had at least one dog in our family for as long as I can remember and at one time when I was in high school, we had three.  I know that for sure because I still have the original oil paintings he commissioned  at that time from an artist friend of his.

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    Daddy’s Bird Dogs: Rex, Seth and Dab (circa 1966)

    No wonder I love my dogs. I’ve never personally owned a bird dog, but I’ve been on the receiving end of the adoring eyes and plaintive expressions of more than a few dogs of my own throughout my adult life. I confess to holding them on my lap if I can scoop them up, but even if I can’t do that, I will give them lots of love and kisses whenever and wherever they will stand  or sit or lie down to be so smothered.

    Loving dogs – or any animal for that matter – is the gift that keeps on giving to us mere humans, but the gift comes with a high price tag because their lives are relatively short. Indeed,  it seems the older we are, the faster we lose them.

    Two of our three remaining dogs that have given us much more loyalty and adoration than we deserve over the past decade have now been diagnosed with cancers that will ultimately take them from us. What I have learned from them is that they both keep their pain to themselves without complaints. They are not troubled by wondering why they are in their particular situations, and I think this allows them to try to keep changes in their routines to a minimum. They like to roll the way they’ve always rolled if they possibly can.

    I am a contemplative person – I can’t help myself. I find I can spend a great deal of time trying to figure out “why” this happened or that took place. Unfortunately, discovering “why” doesn’t necessarily lead to productive change. As a matter of fact, the opposite is likely to occur. So when I find myself in a position similar to the ones my dogs are facing today, I hope I have learned my lessons from the examples they have set for me and focus less on “why” and more on “so what.”

    That’s the way I’d like to roll.

    P.S. My daddy never asked anyone to make an oil painting of me.

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    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.

  • your so-called social security


    When I looked at our bank account last night for the umpteenth time before going to bed, I was ecstatic to see the Covid-19 recovery money had been deposited by the guvmint. Ecstatic for us – and for the guvmint as well. I told Pretty yesterday if we didn’t get the money by today, someone was going to hear from me. (As if the guvmint would be very afraid of a call from me.) Since her nonessential antique empire is shut down without any protest from us, we really are very thankful to have unexpected deposits. I remembered a post about other guvmint checks I published here in January, 2015.  

    One of the most popular country singers and songwriters, Merle Haggard, wrote one of my favorite songs, Big City, with lyrics that are much more meaningful to me in 2015 than they were in 1981 when I first heard it. “Gimme all I’ve got coming to me…and keep your retirement and your so-called Social Security.  Big City, turn me loose and set me free.”

    Yep, in 1981 I was thirty-five years old and the owner of a very small CPA firm that had a growing clientele with low overhead.  How small was very small? That would be one person: me. I had been working full-time since 1967, was in robust health – full of piss and vinegar – with visions of acquiring great wealth through hard work and perseverance in America, the land of equal opportunity.  Retirement?  Social Security?  Bah, humbug.  Irrelevant and unimportant, but I paid my Social Security taxes along with everyone else.

    Fast forward to 2008, the year I turned sixty-two years old. My robust health became more of a pisser than vinegar, which forced me to retire much earlier than I had planned,  long before acquiring great wealth. I had worked for forty-one years in a variety of jobs with numbers as their primary common denominator; I had made both good and bad career moves in those years but was moderately successful in the good years while being financially challenged in the lean ones.

    Regardless of the triumphs and tragedies in my working life, I continued to pay my income taxes plus Social Security taxes every year along with everyone else in America. When I became disabled at age sixty-two, I began to receive my retirement benefits from the Social Security Administration. Because my prospects for acquiring great wealth looked slimmer than my prospects for acquiring great weight, I’m afraid I couldn’t sing along with Merle who apparently didn’t want his Social Security.

    I’m happy to have mine – happy to be on the receiving end of what I paid into for more than forty years. Thanks Merle, but gimme all I got coming to me including my so-called Social Security, and then Big City, turn me loose and set me free.

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    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned. Seriously, my friends. Please do.

  • not what we’d hoped she would be


    In June, 2014 Pretty, Spike and I took one of our famous family weekend road trips through our neighboring state of Georgia that began with Finnster Fest in Summerville, continued to Berry College near Rome, with a final stop in Milledgeville before turning east toward South Carolina and home. Milledgeville was the home of Flannery O’Connor, an American author (1925 – 1964) born in Savannah, Georgia who wrote fiction set in the rural south. Her thirty-two short stories are considered by many to be some of the best published in the 20th century. In November, 2014 I reflected on that trip.

    This past summer we visited Flannery O’Connor’s home at Andalusia Farms outside of Milledgeville, Georgia.  It was my kind of place – her mother’s old dairy barn, Flannery’s peacock coop, a small frame house where their caretakers lived, and a bigger white farmhouse with a screened front porch that overlooked the pine tree lined road leading up to the farm from the highway.  Rural, agrarian, somewhat secluded.

    The author and her mother lived on the farm together until Flannery died at the age of  thirty-nine from lupus. The illness limited her activities in her last years but according to our docent Flannery loved to sit on the screened front porch in the afternoon to entertain and be entertained by visitors who came from places around the country for an opportunity to meet her. Often Flannery’s relatives who lived in the local area “dropped by” to meet the O’Connor’s guests. On one of these occasions several people were chatting while they sat in the rocking chairs on the porch and one of Flannery’s cousins was relaying a particularly boring story that did not entertain Ms. O’Connor.

    Flannery leaned over to a person sitting next to her and said in a voice loud enough for everyone on the porch to hear, “She’s just not what we’d hoped she would be.”

    Pretty and I laughed to think of Flannery O’Connor  making that remark from her rocking chair on the front porch. We laughed again after we left Andalusia Farms on the ride home to Columbia. We still laugh at the line months later and have now appropriated it when we share an inside joke – something or someone is just not what we’d hoped they would be, are they?

    Actually, though, I believe there’s more truth than poetry in the remark.  Disappointment is a universal experience that strikes when we least expect it and lingers longer than we’d prefer.  When disappointment comes from a person, the feeling generally comes from a person we love, trust or admire.  When the letdown comes from a place, well then, politics or organized religion is usually involved; when it comes from a football team, losing is the culprit.

    Here’s my remedy for most disappointments: lower your expectations.  Forget lofty idol worshipping – it didn’t work well for the followers of Baal in the Old Testament, and it’s likely to run into trouble with people we put on pedestals today.  Pedestals topple like the walls of Jericho with just as much noise, confusion, pain and suffering. None of us live in a glass house with the luxury of casting the first stone at a fallen pedestal so if a particular pedestal falls, add a dash of forgiveness…seventy times seven is about right. Where little has been forgiven, little love is shown. How do I know? The Bible tells me so.

    Politics and organized religion, on the other hand,  tend to merge in disappointing convergence with neither being what we’d originally hoped they would be. They’re so far gone we’ve forgotten what we’d hope they would be. That’s disappointment of epic proportions. I got nothing.

    Finally, as for football teams, losing occurs in the midst of much noise, confusion, pain and suffering but don’t lower your expectations.  Simply fire the coach.

    He’s probably not what we’d hoped he would be.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

  • Happy Birthday Ms. Magazine, Title IX And The Lady


    These posts were first published here on June 20, 2012 and June 21, 2012. I hope you agree they make an appropriate addition to our Women’s History Month collection in 2020.

    Ms. Magazine is 40 years old this year according to a headline I saw yesterday that startled me because I remember very well when the magazine began and sheepishly admit I wasn’t sure it was still in publication. I don’t read as much as I once did, and I attribute that pathetic revelation to a love affair I have with the sight of my own words on a computer screen which is as powerful a narcotic as my nightly sleeping pill.  Happy Birthday, Ms.! You gave narratives and images  to a feminist movement that sputtered its way under protest from lone voices crying in the wilderness to the American mainstream political landscape. I thank you for the hopes, the dreams you gave me and my generation. Gloria Steinem, bless you for the vision of the potential societal impact of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.   I.O.U.

    Title IX is 40 years old Saturday, June 23rd. I found this interesting fact when I actually looked up Ms. Magazine online tonight. Did I remember Richard Nixon was the President who signed this bill into law? I did not but am relieved to have one positive piece of history attributed to the man who got my first-ever vote for president in the 1968 election. Title IX is to public education and related school activities for girls and women what hot fudge and nuts are to vanilla ice cream on a sundae. Necessary. Rewarding. Sweet. If education provides the foundation for equal opportunites in a democracy, Title IX makes sure the base doesn’t tilt due to the randomness of being born female.

    I also learned about another birthday from Ms. online tonight. She’s called The Lady from Burma and is the recipient of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. She’s 67 years old today, June 19th. and finally delivered her acceptance speech three days ago, 21 years after she won. I’ll save her story for our next time. Happy Birthday, Aung San Suu Kyi!

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    Aung San Suu Kyi was 67 years old Tuesday, June 19th. She was sworn in earlier this year to serve in the Parliament of Burma, where she has devoted her life to human rights and democracy.  For 15 years – almost a fourth of her life – she was under house arrest for her political opposition to the military regime that imprisoned her and other members of her party in their country.  She was ultimately released in November, 2010.  She is the recipient of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and numerous other awards in recognition of her commitment to human rights. Because of her arrest she was unable to deliver an acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize until this past Saturday, June 16th.   Msmagazine.com reprinted the full transcript of Suu Kyi’s speech; and her moving words of hope for world peace, the importance of inclusion and her plea for kindness resonate across time beyond geographic boundaries. Her understanding that the cause of human rights transcends specific dictatorships coupled with her commitment to alleviating forms of suffering wherever they exist make her a worthy Nobel winner.

    “…our aim should be to create a world free from the displaced, the homeless and the hopeless, a world of which each and every corner is a true sanctuary where the inhabitants will have the freedom and the capacity to live in peace.  Every thought, every word, and every action that adds to the positive and the wholesome is a contribution to peace.  Each and every one of us is capable of making such a contribution.  Let us join hands to try to create a peaceful world where we can sleep in security and wake in happiness…”    ——Aung San Suu Kyi

    (Editor’s Note: What a difference eight years can make. Aung San Suu Kyi became the political leader of Myanmar formerly known as Burma in 2016. Her party was supposedly elected to move the country toward democracy but  according to a BBC News report in January, 2020 has done nothing to stop her military from the purge of Rohingya Muslims through rape, murder and possible genocide in their removal from Myanmar to Bangdalesh.  A United Nations court has ordered the government of Myanmar to intervene in the persecution of the Rohingya Muslims, but the military continues to oppose a democratic process at this time.)

    Stay tuned.