I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: sports

  • and on the flip side…


    Canada has a new 19-year-old super star, Bianca Andreescu, who won the 2019 U.S. Open Women’s Championship in New York City this past Saturday. With that victory she became the first Canadian to win a grand slam singles title…ever. #SheTheNorth. Congratulations to Bianca and to a rebirth of professional tennis in our neighbors to the north. Although I was disappointed that Serena Williams had another missed opportunity to win major title #24, I had to be happy for the young woman who beat Serena at her own power game that was virtually unbeatable for the past 20 years. #SerenaTheQueen.

    And let me also add my best wishes to Rafael Nadal who won the Men’s Championship on Sunday in a 5-set match that was packed with everything a tennis fan could ever dream of in a U.S. Open final. Daniil Medvedev, the young 23-year-old Russian, was fearless in his pursuit of the title – fearless, tireless, an ingenius combination of drop shots intermingled with ground strokes of nearly 100 miles an hour. This young man had all the weapons to beat Nadal, and yet Nadal somehow brought the tenacity and focus to play every shot as if it were his last. At 33 years of age, Nadal is the first man to win 5 majors after reaching the age of 30. He is one win closer to Roger Federer’s record pace of 20 total grand slam titles. Fed Fans probably weren’t happy with Nadal’s 19th, but I don’t think any tennis fan could deny Nadal’s counterpunching every shot in the grinding 5 hour match. Vamos Rafa!! My heart still belongs to you.

    I was so happy to have the U. S. Open to lift me out of my post-operative fog following my surgery on August 28th.  So happy with tennis that I rarely clicked on the news. I missed the headlines of the Taliban leaders’ invitation to Camp David to sit down with the American President. Seriously? Inviting the Taliban to Camp David for a little chat on the weekend before the 18th anniversary of 09-11. Even wild-eyed National Security Advisor John Bolton couldn’t go along with such madness. So before I came totally out of my fog, John Bolton was gone. Oh my. That would be four national security advisors in three years. Quite a record.

    The fog has finally lifted after two weeks of post-operative rehab and the ongoing care of Pretty who continues to add stars to her crown in this world and the next. She does love me and wants me to recover fully by the time our first grandbaby Ella arrives. Fingers crossed! Thanks to our friends here who show up with food and foolishness to help sustain and entertain me – you will always be on my good side and I will never forget your kindnesses.

    Thanks to everyone around the world who sent me encouraging words, complete sentences, and short paragraphs designed to make my second knee surgery less stressful and my recovery speedy. I really appreciated your support from places I have never seen but would love to visit now that I’m a bit more mobile.

    Finally, I am truly grateful to have only two knees.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

  • FOG ALERT!


    For all my friends who heard the sad story of my throwing away 20 years of mine and Pretty’s movie ticket stubs when I came home from my knee replacement surgery in May, I have good news. I found the box of missing ticket stubs last week in my office in the same place I thought they should be – except that they were hidden under a decorative gift bag I had been saving since our 10th anniversary celebration ten years ago. I swear I have been looking for that box of memories everywhere and nowhere apparently but was thrilled to find them before tomorrow.

    Tomorrow is the day for my second knee replacement surgery which is proving to be as fun as the first one was.

    I have instructed Pretty to keep me away from the computer for the next couple of weeks since I clearly am not responsible for the fog that anaesthesia brings. Thank goodness for the US Open – so far my favorites, the Williams Sisters and Rafael Nadal, are through to the second round. Life is good.

    Catch you on the flip side.

    Stay tuned.

     

  • saltgrass tales (by GP Morris)


    GP Morris is the son of my father’s brother Ray. He is a graduate of the University of Texas in Austin. He has lived in or around Houston, Texas all of his life but has a son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter living in Seattle, Washington;  a daughter, son-in-law and another granddaughter live in Tyler, Texas.  He recently began a journal of stories for his grandchildren and sent several to me. This is my favorite to date.

    milky way
    Lying on my back, I could see him through the slats.
    He was doing the same. A smile on his face.
    It was bright inside and out. He got up and
    grabbed the top rail with both hands. He rocked
    back ’n forth. He was laughing.
    He bent down and picked up his bottle. Holdin’ it
    above his head…rockin’ on his feet. Something was
    about to happen. I quickly drug my bottle to the far
    corner and started drinkin’.
    His crib was four feet away. He flung his bottle
    across the room. It clipped the top rail of my crib,
    spun and shattered. He was still laughing.
    My mouth clenched a nipple attached to 1/2 a
    bottle. Milky shards of glass strewn about my crib.
    Hot and sticky…all shapes and sizes. Sparkly wet in
    the sunlight I put one in my mouth.
    At that moment she opened the door. She calmly
    took the glass from my mouth, gently inspected my
    mouth and said, “No blood”. In one motion she
    scooped me up, held me close and quietly sobbed.
    The salt of her tears mixed with the milk on my
    face. She turned around. He was crying.
    She picked him up and we were three. She did not
    put us down for an hour.

    Gene and his twin brother Dean surrounded by their Morris cousins

    Stay tuned.

  • nobody says it better than Serena


    This past Tuesday night I spoke at Chris Maw’s monthly social Words and Wine which brings authors and readers together in an informal setting for food, wine, and friendly interaction. My thanks to a friend of many moons, Fred Quattlebaum of Modern Family Asset Management, for sponsoring the event and to musicians Marty Lopez and Julien Kaprino for providing great entertainment. I was invited to talk about my newest book, Four Ticket Ride, but whenever I speak about my writing, my thoughts turn to truth and equality.

    I read while…

     

    …Pretty’s smile sells books!

    At her press conference this past Saturday following her loss in the finals at Wimbledon, Serena Williams was questioned about why she lost. Although she tried to say her opponent played a brilliant match, the members of the press wouldn’t let it go. They asked her if she thought her lack of match play in 2019 had hurt her, whether her role as a mother took too much time away from her tennis, and finally someone said they heard Billie Jean King wondered if she spent too much time supporting equal rights or other political issues.

    Serena’s quick response to that question was “The day I stop supporting equality is the day I die.” I can identify with her answer because I’d like to believe my actions to support equality and social justice are two of the dominant forces of my life.

    My first understanding of how it teels to be treated as a second class person came at an early age and became the impetus for my lifetime support of equality, too. My dad gave me the vision of looking at the whole world as my territory. Nothing should be impossible if I set goals and then worked hard to achieve them.  There were no limits, according to him. When I entered the work force at the age of 21 in 1967, I learned very quickly that there were, indeed, limits.

    Limits were imposed by powerful men in positions of leadership in the places I worked from Houston, Texas to Seattle, Washington to Columbia, South Carolina – men with tanned skins and silver hair who sat behind large impressive oak desks, men who saw me despite my impeccable credentials as lesser than my co-workers whose singular good fortune was that their gender and the color of their skin made them superior to me in the eyes of my bosses.

    It was a rude awakening for me to find out that my dad had been wrong. But that rude awakening changed my life as I took part in the battleground for ratification of the equal rights amendment here in South Carolina in the 1970s, my involvement in the civil rights movement in Columbia in the 1980s and eventually coming to the most passionate cause of my life: the LGBTQ movement for equality in the 1990s. I want to be able to say with Serena that the day I stop supporting equality is the day I die.

    For me, writing has been my platform for supporting equal rights during the past 13 years. For ten of those years, I have had the most fun as a blogger on my wordpress blog I’ll Call It Like I See It. When I finish a blog, usually after many re-writes, all I have to do is click on the word publish and my words fly through cyberspace to readers who either choose to follow me or randomly read my posts whenever a topic interests them. One observation I’ve made about my readers is that you all are far more interested in Pretty than you are in my political commentaries.

    I saw a segment about the author, vlogger and you tube super star John Green on Sixty Minutes this past Sunday night. John Green, the author of the Fault in our Stars and a ton of other titles has a Twitter following of more than 5 million. My blog, I’ll Call it Like I see It, on the other hand, has 1,700 followers. Thank goodness my daddy also offered me the good advice of never comparing myself to others. Some people will be better off and some people will not, but that’s not how we are measured.  In spite of that advice, I will do a small comparison.

    I am thrilled that in the first 6 months of 2019, I’ve reached people in more than 60 countries from Argentina to Vietnam through 36 posts with nearly 5,000 hits. My top five countries for followers are the US, the UK, India, Canada and France. Small potatoes to John Green, but quite an amazing audience for a little girl from deep in the piney woods of Grimes County, Texas who grew up in a time where her family’s only communication device was a two party telephone line that her grandmother on her daddy’s side used for spying on her neighbors.

    Truth telling is a lost art.  Honesty is no longer a virtue nor is it admired by everyone we come in contact with.  Nonfiction writing lacks the pop and sizzle of fiction, although I like to think sometimes it’s a close second.

    One of my favorite scenes in the movie Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the scene where the tortured son Brick played by Paul Newman discussed his problems with his father Big Daddy played by Burl Ives. Brick blamed his alcoholism on mendacity which he claimed affected everything in the universe but especially the family he came from.  Big Daddy wasn’t so sure about that claim, but I have to say Brick just might have been on to something powerful. I was so impressed with this idea that I devoted a chapter I call Human Frailty and Mendacity in my latest book Four Ticket Ride to the concept.

    Ideas for writing come to me in random places, but what I can promise you is that I try to bring truth telling to every piece I write.

    Stay tuned.

    P.S. Thanks so much to everyone who bought my books from Pretty Tuesday night – we almost sold out! I loved meeting you all and look forward to seeing you again in November.

    P.S.P.S. Thanks to our friend Saskia for taking pictures.

     

     

     

  • one woman’s bucket list is another woman’s good life


    me and my best friend Charly enjoy Pretty’s bucket list

    Pretty’ s bucket list got one wish lighter this summer with the nearly completed screened in porch in our backyard. We had a screened porch with a wonderful squeaky wooden swing in the first house we bought and lived in together. During the first nine years of our marriage we were way too busy for swinging though.

    Fast forward ten years, another four houses, and now too tired for swinging we are one door short of another screened in porch. Pretty is ecstatic to have her pool and porch waiting for her whenever she takes tiny amounts of time away from managing her antique empire to enjoy them.

    I, on the other hand, have only the Evil PT sessions to interrupt my porch sitting and playing in the cool pool this summer. Poor me.

    I thought about making a bucket list of my own but then decided why bother when Pretty’s list is working fine for me.

    Charly advises when the heat gets to be too much,  head for the porch

    Stay tuned and stay cool.