I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: The Way Life Was

  • for Pretty on our twenty-third anniversary


    (1) There once was a woman named Teresa

    Who loved a good shrimp quesadilla.

    To Cancun she did roam in two thousand one,

    And when she came home still red from the sun,

    She’d found new love with her best friend named Sheila.

    (2) There once was a woman named Sheila

    Who loved a good shot of tequila.

    To Cancun she did roam in two thousand one,

    And when she came home her journey was done,

    She’d found true love with her best friend Teresa.

    (3) An anniversary of love in twenty twenty-three

    The best of the best has been you and me.

    Wherever we’ve roamed

    We’ve always come home

    Together, believing the best was yet to be.

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

    Happy Anniversary, Pretty. To quote Tina Turner, you’re simply the best – better than anyone could ever have been for me. I am forever grateful that you were the little girl who said yes.

  • In Memoriam: Dianne Barrett


    RECORD THE PAST, INSPIRE THE FUTURE

    Two lesbians who believed in the power of oral history through the preservation of our stories, Dianne Barrett and her wife Marge Elfering, had a vision for a project which became the B-E Collection. In June, 2022 I participated in the first of three interviews with her for that project. I learned yesterday of Dianne’s passing on December 17, 2023 and wanted to celebrate her life well lived with a piece I originally published in the summer of 2022 following that first interview.

    I recently had the privilege of being interviewed by Dianne Barrett who is a co-founder of the B-E Collection. As a personal historian who identifies as lesbian I am, of course, drawn to projects that celebrate oral histories of lesbians and our lives. This is the Mission Statement of the B-E Collection:

    My spouse, Margaret Elfering, and myself, in conjunction with archives such as the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives and the Gerth Archives and Special Collection at California State University Dominguez Hills, will contribute an ongoing series of interviews of lesbians and their careers.  The collection will be known as the B-E Collection: Lesbians and Their Careers.

    The “B-E” of the collection is a shorthand for our last names (Barrett – Elfering).  However, there is a second meaning to our collection’s name:   the verb “be” is also defined as “to exist” or “to occur or take place”.  Our collection is a means of bearing witness to the stories of lesbians of different generations, from different walks of life.

    The mission of this collection is to dignify the accomplishments, pride, and effort lesbians put forth in their careers on their journey in life.  We make oral histories to document our existence then and now.  Many of us had the “don’t talk – say nothing – you are wrong” experience.  Now we are talking.

    We would appreciate a referral of lesbians who might be interested in participating in our project.  We would be more than delighted to speak with anyone who you think would be interested in participating in the B-E Collection.

    Your support is always a gift.

    https://www.b-ecollection.org

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

    Dianne Barrett (December 13, 1941 – December 17, 2023)

    Rest in peace, Dianne, but we will remain restless as a result of your inspiration.

    Onward.

    ​

    ​

  • 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.

  • say it plain, say it loud

    say it plain, say it loud


    Benjamin Mays was the child of former slaves,. He was born on an isolated cotton farm near Ninety Six, South Carolina in 1894. His parents were sharecroppers. The darkest years of Jim Crow segregation were just descending on the South; humiliation, mob violence and lynching by whites were common threats for African Americans. Mays learned at an early age the searing lessons of racial inferiority. He had a vivid memory of being stopped with his father by a group of armed, white men on horseback. “I remember starting to cry,” Mays wrote. “They cursed my father, drew their guns and made him salute, made him take off his hat and bow down to them several times. Then they rode away. I was not yet five years old, but I have never forgotten them.”2 (American RadioWorks: A Century of Great African American Speeches)

    In 1940 following a fascinating journey from this inauspicious beginning Mays became the President of Morehouse College, a respected black school for men in Atlanta; Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Morehouse graduate in 1948 and considered Mays to be his “spiritual mentor and intellectual father.” On April 9, 1968 five days following the assassination of King, Mays delivered his eulogy in an open-air memorial service on the Morehouse campus where a crowd estimated at over 150,000 people attended.

    As we celebrate the actual birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929) with a federal holiday in the United States in 2024, the words of the Mays eulogy still speak plain and loud.

    “God called the grandson of a slave on his father’s side, and the grandson of a man born during the Civil War on his mother’s side, and said to him, ‘Martin Luther, speak to America about war and peace. Speak to America about social justice and racial discrimination. Speak to America about its obligation to the war. And speak to America about nonviolence.‘

    Let it be thoroughly understood that our deceased brother did not embrace nonviolence out of fear or cowardice. Moral courage was one of his noblest virtues. As Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British Empire without a sword and won, Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the interracial injustice of his country without a gun. And he had faith to believe that he would win the battle for social justice. I make bold to assert that it took more courage for Martin Luther to practice nonviolence than it took his assassin to fire the fatal shot. The assassin is a coward. He committed his dastardly deed and fled. When Martin Luther disobeyed an unjust law, he accepted the consequences of his actions. He never ran away and he never begged for mercy. He returned to the Birmingham jail to serve his time...

    Morehouse will never be the same, because Martin Luther came by here. And the nation and the world will be indebted to him for centuries to come… 

     I close by saying to you what Martin Luther King Jr. believed. If physical death was the price he had to pay to rid America of prejudice and injustice, nothing could be more redemptive. And, to paraphrase the words of the immortal John Fitzgerald Kennedy, permit me to say that Martin Luther King Jr.’s unfinished work on earth must truly be our own.”

    Say it plain; say it loud. America remains indebted to Martin Luther King, Jr. on what would have been his 95th. birthday in a new century, and his unfinished work on earth must truly be our own. We have much to do.

    Onward.