I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

For any who want more, complete list of all posts by month since 2011
  • not one, but TWO HUGE nights in Hotlanta this week!

    not one, but TWO HUGE nights in Hotlanta this week!


    Las Vegas Aces star A’ja Wilson had a history-making career-high game Tuesday night in Atlanta, Georgia during one of the best player outings ever in the 27-year history of the Women’s National Basketball Association. Her 53 points matched the WNBA single-game scoring record set in 2018 and was only the third time in league history that a player had a 50+ point game. Wilson also had seven rebounds and four blocks during the game which saw the Aces bounce back from a loss to the Los Angeles Sparks on the previous Saturday to defeat the Dream 112 – 100. The only thing hotter than A’ja Wilson was the temperature which was also breaking records across the southern part of the country.

    As the crow flies west the distance from our home in West Columbia, South Carolina to Atlanta, Georgia is approximately 200 miles. Traveling by grannymobile on Interstate 20 West the exact mile count is 214 and travel time is a little over three hours, while making that same trip with Pretty who prefers to avoid the interstates in favor of back roads like she did this past Tuesday the 22nd., the trip stretched closer to 300 miles and five hours in the grannymobile because she stopped along the way to search in remote antique malls for treasures to bring back with her to sell in her own empire. I don’t know how long that crow would take from our house to Atlanta, but I’m sure there would be fewer stops.

    Pretty and our good friend Susan took their own sweet time on their drive Tuesday – they left at 9 a.m. with their only deadline destination the Gateway Center Arena @ College Park for a 7:00 p.m. WNBA tip between the Atlanta Dream and the Las Vegas Aces. Susan, one of our favorite Gamecock basketball buddies, was celebrating her birthday that day and invited Pretty to go to the game with her at the last minute when her husband Chris had to work. Whenever A’ja Wilson was anywhere in the neighborhood of her former alma mater, a huge University of South Carolina Gamecock nation travelled to see her play. Not even her most avid supporters, though, could have imagined her performance they would witness that night at the Gateway Center Arena.

    Pretty was on Cloud 9 when she got home in the wee hours of Wednesday morning – I had kept up with the game on TV so I celebrated with her the next day. We talked about the joy Coach Dawn Staley must have felt not only when A’ja had the monster night but also to see three other Gamecock players (Laeticia Amihere and Allisha Gray for the Dream, Alaina Coates rejoining Wilson and the Aces) on the WNBA rosters. It was a great night to be a Gamecock.

    Oh, yes. I almost forgot the other huge event. Two nights later the Trump airplane landed in Atlanta to drop off the former president so that he could drive to Fulton County to surrender for arrest for his alleged participation in RICO violations involving the Big Lie. As my favorite writer Eudora Welty said once upon a time, to know the truth I also had to recognize a lie.

    Go Gamecock Women’s Basketball! Go Fulton County DA Fani Willis!

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

    Slava Ukraini. For all the children.

  • longing for Happily Ever After

    longing for Happily Ever After


    A benefit of having written 869 posts over the past fourteen years is the luxury of searching for subjects I’m certain I must have written about at some point in time. As I prepared for the onslaught of news surrounding the surrender of a former president of the United States to the state of Georgia tomorrow for issues concerning the election of 2020, an ex-president who was well acquainted with the concept of human frailty, in addition to the circus atmosphere already evident in preparation for the first debate in the 2024 presidential election by the Republican candidates tonight, I searched for a piece I wrote in 2016. Sure enough, as my mother would say, I found my opinions on human frailty haven’t changed.

    Full disclosure to avoid any semblance of plagiarism – I stole this idea from my current favorite BBC series Lark Rise to Candleford. (Current to me but originally aired in 2008 – 2011.) Dorcas Lane was the postmistress caught in a wave of changes to her small town of Candleford in Oxfordshire at the end of the 19th. century. Her notoriety extended beyond the walls of the post office due to her persistent meddling in everyone’s affairs.

    Her maid Minnie was a wonderful addition to the cast in the second season with her penchant for asking questions that were “extraordinary.” In the episode I watched today, Minnie was a-twitter with questions about just what does Happily Ever After really mean in affairs of the heart. Dorcas was prepared to answer with wisdom to share and spare.

    “We all want life to be simple and our relationships to be enchanted, and then along comes human frailty. Before we know it, all will be lost.”

    Human frailty. I have seen a ton of that going around in the world lately. So much so that it seems like an epidemic. Waves of it. Oceans of it. Human frailty runs rampant from Orlando to Dallas to Minnesota to Baton Rouge. It zigzags through a packed crowd in a huge commercial truck in Nice, France before striking again in a failed military coup in Turkey. It shouts angry hate-filled  rhetoric in a large convention hall in Cleveland, Ohio before skipping across the Atlantic again  with gunfire in a shopping mall in Munich. Behind every evil stands the specter of human frailty.

    Thank goodness for the relief of Lark Rise, a break from the onslaught of bad news on my favorite 24-hour news channels with their 24-hour news cycles. Yes, give me a good conversation with Twister Terrell, another of my favorite friends from Lark Rise, who sums up what happens when human frailty runs rampant.

    “Some folks got neither logic nor reason nor sense nor sanity.”

    Here’s hoping somewhere… sometime… somebody unravels the key to human kindness and compassion for each other that will not only change the news cycles but enable us to rediscover the logic, reason, sense and sanity that our human frailty disguises.

    Like Minnie, I long for Happily Ever After.

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

    Slava Ukraini. For the children.

  • the power of the written word

    the power of the written word


    I never fully understood the power of writing until I heard other people read what I wrote.  My stories were safe.  They would be remembered and told by these women and others like them.  Although I thought the night revolved around me, I was wrong.  They inspired me. These women treasured words and ideas that created bonds among them.  My words were now a little part of their wealth of knowledge that lived beyond the pages. I was elated and honored to be the first author invited to attend their book club meeting, the eleventh anniversary of the diverse group of ten members. The club had chosen my second book Not Quite the Same as their book of the month in August, 2011. The night was not only great fun but also inspirational.

    Dame Daphne du Maurier, the English author and playwright, decries our infatuation with literary public readings by writers, noting that “writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.” She makes a good point, although I have to admit I love to read my own words aloud.  Maybe it’s because I often read audibly as I write. Therefore it makes sense I like to read to other people. I was so taken with the sound of my own voice I made an audio version of my first book, Deep in the Heart:A Memoir of Love and Longing. My thanks to the three people who actually bought that CD, wherever you are. 

    I believe all of us have stories to tell, that storytelling is a primal need. I’ve seen stones in New Mexico that are hundreds of thousands of years old, and you know what’s on them?  Narratives of tales someone wanted to tell. They’re told in drawings on the rock faces, but they were someone’s disciplined efforts to communicate, and I felt I was there with the storyteller when I stood next to their work. I never sat down to write a book. I wanted to save my stories of the people and places in them. They became a book because I couldn’t quit writing.  Now, it’s like not being able to turn off a faucet.

    *********************** 

    Flannery O’Connor, the noted Southern Gothic writer, answered the question for me of why I write: I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I write.

    Tell it, Sister Girl.

           

               

  • You Can’t Paint a Sunset (from The Short Side of Time)

    You Can’t Paint a Sunset (from The Short Side of Time)


    I took a late evening walk down Old Plantersville Road tonight just as the sun was setting. I rounded the curve by the trailer park and walked past the wide open pastures on both sides of the road where the view of a Texas sunset was spectacular. Tonight’s colors of pinks, blues and reds were particularly beautiful; I picked a good spot about halfway to the railroad track to behold the sight.

    As I watched the light colors quickly deepen into darker hues, I was reminded of my mom’s favorite saying about sunsets: “Well, you can’t paint a sunset.  It changes too fast.”  I couldn’t count the times I heard her repeat the sunset quote – and this was before her memory care days. I can only imagine a teacher must have made that remark in the one art class my mother took in her entire life. I wonder if her teacher would be stunned to know what an indelible impression she made on one of her students. If Mom found a phrase she liked, she clung to it.

    The next thought that came to me was we couldn’t walk off into sunsets either, and you can quote me.

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

    When I lived in Texas on Worsham Street from 2010 – 2014, I loved late afternoons as the sun began to signal day’s end while it slowly sank toward the western horizon. I often took a walk on a road one street behind our home called Old Plantersville Road because the best views of sunset were from the wide open spaces of the pastures along the road. This particular walk was in July, 2013 – I can still smile at my mother’s phrase, and I can still see those sunsets that took my breath away.

  • something old, something new – something special

    something old, something new – something special


    I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I doubt I deserved my friends. –Walt Whitman. This is a story about a friendship that lasted more than sixty years. My Aunt Lucille passed away ten years ago on March 21, 2013 – eight days after I  originally posted this piece about her and her friend Jan. 

    Yesterday I visited with my favorite Aunt Lucille who lives in Beaumont which is ninety-nine miles east of Montgomery on Texas Highway 105. I always look forward to my visits with her. Lucy refuses to give up her independent living apartment in a retirement community that offers assisted living and other higher levels of care for which she would qualify. Instead, she keeps her mind active with crossword puzzles and other word games in the daily newspaper. Her knowledge of current events acquired through the TV and conversations is as good as it gets. She pushes herself out of bed, showers, dresses and puts on makeup every day.

    My aunt Lucy will be ninety-three years old in May and has a list of ailments plus a personal pharmacy to treat them. A recent setback makes movement even more difficult for her, but she makes a determined effort to rejoin her friends at their reserved dinner table downstairs almost every evening. It’s a long walk from her apartment on the third floor to the lobby of the next building for meals. Trust me.

    Yesterday she told me one of her friends was coming by this afternoon for a visit. I recognized the name because she had talked about Jan for as long as I could remember so I decided to crash the party. She told me Jan was recovering from a stroke and her caregiver would be bringing her by. When Jan arrived promptly at two o’clock, Lucy got up from the sofa in the living room and pushed her walker toward Jan’s. When they met in the middle of the room, they both smiled and hugged each other with genuine joy on their faces. After introductions all round, we sat down to talk.

    Lucy and Jan met in 1953 when they both lived with their husbands in an apartment complex in Beaumont. They first talked when they were outdoors hanging clothes on the clothesline behind their apartment building. Both women were new to Beaumont – Jan’s daughter was born in the spring before Lucy’s was born in October that year. They were new mothers who quickly became new friends. Their husbands luckily liked each other, too which meant the couples got together often. Lucy’s husband Jay died in 1979 while Jan and her husband Otis shared a sixty-fifth wedding anniversary before his recent death.

    What struck me as I listened to them talk about their families, about what was going on in their lives now was how remarkable it must be to have a friendship that stretches across sixty years of change and challenges. Their bond survived everything life threw at them. Hot and cold seasons came and went for six decades, but their loyalty to each other never got too hot to go up in flames or too cold to freeze and wither away.

    In a separate happening this week I was reminded of friendships I’ve lost in the past years along with the pain that accompanies losing them. We are a mobile society; our moving parts rarely stay in the same place for very long. We change our homes, our jobs and the people in our lives that go with them. Sometimes we just change the people in our lives. For Lucy and Jan, however, the new became old over sixty years – but always remained special. Their story of friendship is a remarkable one I continue to salute today.

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

    Ten years after her death, I still miss my Aunt Lucille. Thankfully her daughter Melissa and I continue to maintain a family connection I cherish.