I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: The Way Life Is

  • 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.

  • Suzanne (Part I)


    Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river

    You can hear the boats go by, you can stay the night beside her

    And you know that she’s half-crazy, but that’s why you want to be there.

    And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her,

    She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China

    Then she gets you on her wave-length and lets the river answer

    that you’ve always been her lover.

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

    And you know that you can trust her,

    for you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.

    ————- Leonard Cohen

    Alrighty then.  Why Suzanne?  Why Leonard Cohen?  All I can tell you is that my friend Donna and her partner Jenn served delicious fruit as a healthy dessert choice to go with the German chocolate cake unhealthy choice at their home two nights ago.  The fruit was partially seasoned by fresh-squeezed orange juice, they told us, and it was delicious.

    The mind is a mysterious meandering maze of memories.  Somehow from that offhand reference to oranges, I have been singing the first lines of Leonard Cohen’s poem turned song that I heard Judy Collins sing at a UT concert in Austin in 1966.  Luckily, I have confined my singing to myself in my mind and haven’t annoyed Teresa with the repetitious melody in our shower or elsewhere. No matter how haunting I might feel it to be, I fear the possibility of getting on her last nerve.

    The singer in my head is as good as I think it was in 1966 when I memorized those lines to Suzanne and strummed along on my tenor guitar, but the out-loud singer today has a strange vibrato and erratic cracking sound so I rarely use it.

    Anyhow, I immersed myself this morning with the life and loves of Leonard Cohen.  It’s taken a while because he began writing poetry in his teens and is still giving concerts at the age of 79.  He is a prolific musician, singer-songwriter, poet and novelist who was born in Canada in 1934.  His personal life mirrors the life of most of us lesser mortals.  His financial fortunes have been won – and lost through a crooked trusted agent whom he sued and from whom he never recovered his money – and then changed for the better in his later life.

    Mr. Cohen apparently never suffered from a lack of female companions.  As the decades of his life came and went, so did the women he loved and lived with.  Despite his successes in the music world and the realm of literature and his long-term relationships, he struggled all of his life with depression.  Many of my favorite songs written by Leonard Cohen reflect that struggle.

    In 1994 he began a five-year seclusion at the Mt. Baldy Zen Monastery outside of Los Angeles, and he was ordained as a monk two years later.  He credited that time as a tremendous healing experience but never renounced his Judaism by becoming a Buddhist.

    That must’ve been a long, long way from his touring Europe and Israel in 1972 with Charlie Daniels in a band nicknamed “The Army” and an even LONGER distance from his Beat Poet days in Montreal in the early 60s when he met the young woman who would inspire the poem that transformed his life.

    Suzanne Verdal was something else.

    I’ll save her for next time.

  • Chances Are…


    When I woke up early this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, I lay in bed and thought about the million tasks we have to accomplish next month to get moved out of our Texas house that we recently sold – somewhat out of the blue.  This stream of consciousness led me down the memory lane to a post I’d written here about Second Chances.

    I found it in the archives for September, 2012 and  re-read it and decided it was a little over the top because I devoted so much time talking about the “epistemology” of second chances.  Seriously, what was that about?  Clearly no one gives a hoot or a holler about that word anymore.

    However, I hit the “re-blog” button and planned to edit the re-blog but alas, apparently this isn’t possible.  Second Chances was in cyberspace once again – quite in keeping with its title.

    For those of you who are my best followers and who read it before I could figure out how to retrieve and edit, thank you very much for indulging my Big Word Fantasies.  For those of you who just tuned in and have a burning interest in epistemology, please do take the time to visit the archives and the post.

    What I intended to say is that I have been extraordinarily lucky to have had second chances to reconnect with my family and friends in Texas since we bought our home on Worsham Street in March, 2010.  I’ve shared more holidays, birthdays, domino-playing days and nights, barbecue brisket, bourbon, Tex-Mex, margaritas, Lone Star First Saturdays, wine festivals, bluebonnet pastures, cookie walks, cemetery crawls, country music, front-porch rocking and visiting, bird watching and driving back country roads in the past four years with cousins and old friends than in the previous forty years.  Yee Haw – I even got used to wearing cowboy boots and hats again.

    I also found that taking these second chances gave me new first ones, too.  Living on Worsham Street in the little town of Montgomery was a slice of American life I’d lost faith in somewhere along the way.  My neighbors in the 600 block of Worsham became dear friends who reminded me that community and family are not abstract concepts but people who love and support each other in good and bad times.  I find that a message of hope for our country and our world.

    I’ve added Rule Number Six to the five rules I made up in that September, 2012 post:  Don’t confuse your second chances with your first choices or your first choices may become your second chances.

    Life is tricky, ain’t it?

  • I’m a Believer


    Valentine’s Day…love…flowers…love songs…long walks holding hands…movies with happy endings…lingering looks…Hallmark cards…chocolates…romance.

    I’m a believer – not a trace of doubt in my mind. I’m in love…and I couldn’t leave her if I tried.

    Neil Diamond wrote and recorded the song I’m a Believer in 1966 but The Monkees version is the one I sometimes hum and occasionally even remember the words to actually sing it out loud by myself.  It’s also the finale number for the first Shrek movie and I like to think of DonKEY singing it with such gusto and True Love victorious in the hearts of Shrek and Fiona.  I thought for sure they lived happily ever after until I saw Shrek movie #2 followed by Shrek movie #3.  That was a couple with relationship issues.

    Alas, all relationships have issues because life moves around and through us like the plight of the Prince who longed to make Fiona his bride so he could rule the Kingdom.  He tried and he tried but Fiona’s True Love for Shrek ruled instead.

    Teresa treated me to a Burlesque Show at a local theater for Valentine’s night, and it turned out to be an eventful evening.  The show was entertaining with a great emcee and talented performances and, well, lots of Burlesque complete with colorful feathers and other cleverly placed teasers on the scantily clad actors.  Oh, my.

    If we had just gone home after the show, we would have missed the drama that was even more fun.  Think about our truck keys locked in the ignition in a dark parking lot and then think no cell phones because each of us thought the other brought one.  Now picture the kindness of a stranger who drove me home to get a spare truck key while he dropped Teresa at the car of the friends we were meeting for dessert after the Burlesque show – the friends who had almost given up hope on us since we had no way to call them.

    Then imagine my driving in Teresa’s car to meet all of them at a restaurant which was still serving at that hour of the night and feeling relieved to have resolved the locked key dilemma only to get a text message from our Canterbury Road neighbor on the newly retrieved cell phone that says: Did you feel the earthquake?  The TV news says it was 5.4 on the scale.  Sounded like the roar of a plane falling from the sky.

    Seriously?  Yes, and we must have been the only four people in South Carolina who didn’t feel the earth move.  Not even our dogs were wigged at the earthquake by the time we made it home on Valentine’s night.

    Life often interferes with our plans, but True Love learns to roll with it and laugh at the follies we create for ourselves.  If we believe, not even an earthquake can shake us.