I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

storytelling for truth lovers

  • Down a Rabbit Hole Through the Looking Glass

    Down a Rabbit Hole Through the Looking Glass


    Found your pilot. Died in 1956. Earl Matthew Quigg of Hokenbaqua, Pennsylvania. Born in 1930. Air force. Married. Died on Sept. 17 at 3:15 pm of crushing injuries and conflagration, .7 miles south of Richards, Texas in open pasture.

    Thanks to my first cousin Melissa on my daddy’s side who sent me this text message after our conversation earlier in the week, a conversation that went down a rabbit hole and somehow circled to a memory of school children playing softball one afternoon behind the little red brick public school building in Richards – play interrupted by the roar of a jet plane engine as the airplane careened crazily out of the sky.

    Melissa is the real journalist in our family; she wore many hats working for Texas newspapers during her career and that background makes her a wonderful sleuth/researcher on all subjects great and small. Naturally she was able to retrieve the information for me about a mysterious plane crash in Richards, Texas that remained a vivid memory for me 65 years later.

    I was ten years old at the time, but I still remembered our small group of boys and girls standing frozen together on the playground in the few moments the jet screamed past us to hit the ground in a field just beyond where we played, bursting into flames with thick black smoke billowing from the explosion, causing us to look at each other with horrified disbelief.

    For the tiny town of Richards, Texas (pop. 500+) this was the equivalent of the Hindenburg disaster. The theory of 2nd Lieutenant Earl M Quigg’s heroism discussed at great length by my grandparents at their kitchen table was that he refused to safely eject during his spiral in order to save the lives of the children he saw on the playground below. I never forgot the name of this pilot who I believed saved my ten year old life.

    As a teenager when I began writing my version of “poetry,” one of my poems celebrated the bravery of Lieutenant Quigg. I mentioned this to Melissa when we chatted earlier, and she made the mistake of asking me if I’d saved the poem. That would be from 65 years ago, in case anyone is counting. She suggested I write a blog about the plane crash and include my poem. Great idea, I said.

    While Pretty keeps everything she’s ever had in her entire life, I save almost nothing except words and pictures but that means decades upon decades of words and pictures which have made their journeys with me from the Pacific Northwest to the Atlantic Southeast, zigzagging back and forth to Texas in between. Surely I kept my first poetry attempts. Alas, as of this writing I have had no luck in my search.

    However, my digging around through boxes in my office encouraged me to step through the looking glass of another rabbit hole which allowed me to avoid the pandemic and politics (both equally disturbing) of today, transporting me to a time long ago and far away.

     

    my grandfather in his barber shop cutting 

     Melissa’s daughter Nikki’s hair: a Morris family tradition

    Maybe this picture of my grandfather in his single chair barber shop was taken Father’s Day weekend in June, 1984, the year I got this letter from my granddaddy. I did have the good common sense to save these words from him. He was born in 1898 and died in October, 1987, three years after this picture was taken. My paternal grandmother wrote me faithfully every week from the time I moved away from Richards at the age of 13 in 1959 to the year she died in 1983, but my grandfather was embarrassed about his lack of schooling and never wrote me until after my grandmother passed. In June, 1984 I was living in South Carolina, a thousand miles from Texas  and my grandpa.

    My Dear Sheila, I just came in from church out at Pool’s or Dark Corner as Tom Grissom called it. Bro. W.A. Curtis is doing the preaching not a Bad Preacher Tells a few Tales kinder mixas them up keeps you awake. Sheila, I have something to pass the time with now 15 quail 10 little ones & 5 grown I liked to make a miss count. Had a real good Father’s Day will give you a run down on that later.

    Tomatoes have just started to get ripe and the vines are loaded lots of string beans & baby lima looks like they are going to do good I have two rows about as long as a hoe handle. Now for the Father’s day. Your mother came first brought lunch & watermillon & a pretty shirt we had a real good visit enjoyed her so much. We discussed the Sheads at length not too bad. Ray came Fri. Lucille Sat. Sun. Mike, Melissa, Nikki. Ray a radio & Lucille a hat from London she had given me pr.pants Mike & Melissa shirt

    Gaylen card & face lotion Gene & Patti card and last but not least was a very pretty sweet card from my Dear Grand Daughter I can’t tell you how much I love you and always have. You ment so much to Ma & me, ole bald headed Pa

         ***********************

    Pa, I can’t tell you how much I loved you and Ma and always will. I hope Pretty and I can give our granddaughter the same unwavering love you always gave me.

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned, my friends.

  • MLK Day in 2021

    MLK Day in 2021


    “As I began doing the research for this email and was reading the speeches of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I had no idea that the events – the breach of our national Capitol building on January 6th  would occur.  As the news broke on January 6th I was shaken and I was horrified.  There are multiple reasons that we. as a nation, got to this terrible moment. My question to myself and to you is “what do we do next”?  As I turned back to Dr. King, I read about his vision of building a Beloved Community and found some hope.”

    These words were written by a friend of mine and found their way to me via another friend. I identified with these feelings of being shaken and horrified, and I was sure I needed a good dose of hope. What better way to honor Dr. King on MLK Day in 2021 than returning to his own words. For example, he wrote the following in his Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom essay on May 4, 1966.

    “I must continue by faith or it is too great a burden to bear and violence, even in self-defense, creates more problems than it solves. Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear. Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives…The American racial revolution has been a revolution to “get in” rather than to overthrow. We want to share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. The goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent.

    If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down the factory. If one needs more adequate education, shooting the principal will not help, or if housing is the goal, only building and construction will produce that end. To destroy anything, person or property, can’t bring us closer to the goal that we seek. The nonviolent strategy has been to dramatize the evils of our society in such a way that pressure is brought to bear against those evils by the forces of good will in the community and change is produced…”

    To me, as my mother used to say when she was about to make a proclamation on a controversial topic, the people involved in the attack on our nation’s Capitol weren’t interested in a beloved community. I’m not sure if the insurrectionists who participated in this violent revolution had a vision of any community.

    How long had it been since I read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous letter penned from a Birmingham jail on April 16, 1963, five days before my seventeenth birthday – finishing my junior year in a totally white high school in a still very much segregated Texas Gulf Coast town, vaguely aware of the Civil Rights Movement and one of its principal leaders – probably consumed by my hormones that created crushes on girls unaware of my attention as I was unaware of a black minister imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama who would change the course of American history, a minister now recognized with a National Holiday every third Monday in January since 1983.

    “But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the
    outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”

    My thanks to my friend whose words encouraged me to take a fresh look at the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize for Peace winner at the age of 35 in October, 1964 – four years before he was assassinated while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 04, 1968 by a man described as a white supporter of segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace.

    Reading Dr. King’s essays bring me comfort and hope, too. I encourage each of my cyberspace friends to google his essays and read them in their entirety.

    In May, 2018 Pretty and I met our Texas sisters Leora and Carmen in Louisiana to spend a few days on Pretty’s guided tour of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. In addition to great barbecue and fun times playing cards at night, we went to the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery.

    We squeezed in under the wire for the last tour of the day for the church following our visit to The Legacy Museum that morning. The church was rich in history but was usually identified by its connection to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who was its pastor from 1954 – 1960. The meeting to launch the Montgomery Bus Boycott was held in the basement of the church on December 2, 1956.

    What an incredible experience we all had with our tour guide Wanda – her joy in sharing the history of the church was infectious…her storytelling made the history come alive. She provided opportunities for our personal interactions within the sacred surroundings. One moment from the church basement tour stood out to me as I settled into my thoughts on a riverboat ride later in the afternoon.

    The original lectern Dr. King used in his meetings was still standing in the basement of the church. Wanda allowed each of our small group of six (another married couple from Kansas had joined us) to stand behind that lectern and repeat his words: “How long? Not long.” I put both my hands on the lectern as I repeated the short phrases, how long? not long. I felt a crack in the veil of shame for an entire race that I had worn since The Legacy Museum visit earlier that day. If Dr. King could say “not long,” then surely time was meaningless; redemption was still possible for all who repented. How long? Not long.

    I wanted to add “too long.”

    This week on January 20, 2021 we will inaugurate a new President Joe Biden and a new Vice President Kamala Harris. I was in the camp advocating a small private ceremony in a basement bunker somewhere – maybe I was the only one in that camp. Pretty being Pretty said ah, ah, no way. We can’t let domestic terrorists steal our celebration, our joy. My Texas sister Leora agreed with Pretty and also reminded me of Dr. King’s Mountaintop speech.

    “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.”

    The Covid pandemic has changed all of our lives in the past year. The political unrest is unnerving, but our struggles are small in comparison to those of a young African American minister who refused to surrender to fear.

    Happy Birthday, Dr. King! I will be thinking of you and your legacy of hope for a beloved community in the days to come.

    Stay safe, stay sane, and please stay tuned.

  • yep – this is who we are

    yep – this is who we are


    The images flashing across the television screen this week were appalling but compelling. I couldn’t look away, even when I didn’t want to see, much less believe, what was happening in my nation’s capitol. An estimated 10,000 of mostly white people who looked like me stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC where the Senate and House of Representatives were in session to count the votes the 50 states’ electors had sent to the two bodies for a ceremony that was usually a pro forma final recognition of the results of the previous November election.

    Not so much this year. Donald Trump, not unlike Humpty Dumpty, had sat on the largest wall of power in the world as president of the United States and had suffered a great fall when he lost his position in a free and fair election on November 03, 2020. Since that loss, apparently all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Donald Trump together again.

    The king’s men ran around the country challenging election results in scores of courts ranging from state and federal courts to the Supreme Court of the United States with the same decisions. Humpty Dumpty lost fair and square; please stop bothering us with baseless complaints. But Mr. Trump, who had spent most of his adult life in court battles long ago learned to believe the courts were fallible – even unreliable. He thought his appointment of not one, not two, but three Supreme Court justices during his term of office would finally give him the wins he so desperately craved through the legal system. Shockingly, to him and me, the courts held fast and repeatedly ruled against him.

    Meanwhile, back at the ranch or the White House if you prefer, the Covid pandemic raged on with more ferocity than a Category 5 hurricane. Ignoring the warnings of our medicine men, millions of Americans traveled throughout the country by plane, train, bus and automobile during the holiday season to visit friends and family who either unknowingly carried the coronavirus to the travelers or caught it from them. Rates of infections in the past two weeks have skyrocketed while hospitals and their staffs have been stressed to breaking points. Deaths stand at nearly 370,000 individuals today. Mr. Trumpty hasn’t noticed, or if he has noticed, he hasn’t commented on the losses.

    He did, however, promise that the king’s horses would deliver a hundred million doses of new vaccines by the end of 2020 when in fact Newsweek reported on December 28th. that the actual number of vaccines administered on that date was closer to 2.1 million. Another loss to absorb and ignore.

    Was it really just one week ago today that Mr. Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State to ask him to find 11,780 votes to reverse the results of the November election in Georgia? Gosh, that bullying phone call, which accomplished nothing more than another revelation of his delusion, seems tame now compared to the events I witnessed four days later on January 6th.

    All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. Mr. Trump’s big lie that he won re-election in November, a lie that he tweeted incessantly over social media, a lie that he used to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from his more than 74 million faithful followers who voted to re-elect him was the lie that led to the images of destruction and deaths in our nation’s Capitol this week.

    Many of the king’s men and women reported for duty at a large rally in which the king and his surrogates urged them to storm the Capitol to bring an end once and for all to the transition of power to anyone other than himself on January 20th. Mr. Trump promised to march with them to accomplish the coup that would guarantee Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would not replace him. It was Humpty Dumpty and Custer’s last stand. By the way, he retreated to the safety of the White House to revel in the dangerous mission instead of keeping his word to join the march.

    The painful images keep coming – new ones every day – the wonder of cell phone cameras recording the faces and horrific actions of mob violence in my country. I feel overwhelmed, depressed, shamed, sickened at the sights of the attack on our democracy displayed for the world to see.

    President-Elect Biden and I grew up in the same generation, and from his words of hope and his insistence that what happened this week was not what America really was, I knew he and I were on the same page. The man carrying the Confederate flag in the rotunda of the Capitol, the man sitting with his legs propped up on a desk in Speaker Pelosi’s office, the men and women shattering glass, breaking historic relics, vandalizing individual offices, in general disrespecting the building that represented the legislative branch of our government – those people whose actions resulted in the deaths of five others – they weren’t the Americans Joe Biden and I remembered.

    Nonetheless, we are the Americans who immigrated from faraway places, spread disease and killed the population living on this land in order to take the land from them. We are the Americans who used slavery to build on this land, to work the crops on the land, to be the backbone of our agrarian economy. White equaled might for us and when the colors of our nation became more colorful, we are the Americans who feared for our destiny.

    When Joe Biden and I celebrated putting a man on the moon, we are the Americans who refused to guarantee health care for everyone. While he and I celebrated rugged individualism, bringing ourselves up by our bootstraps, we forgot some people didn’t have boots. More recently, we looked past the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay, brown children separated from their families living in cages at our borders, black children denied access to quality education which placed them at higher risk for quality jobs, poor people of all races who live today in food insecurity also known as hunger. Gun violence, police brutality toward people of color, denial of climate change, homelessness – the list goes on. We are all of these Americans.

    But Mr. Trump and his white nationalist friends are losers. He lost the presidency, he lost the Senate, and he lost the House of Representatives for his Trumpty Party. His attempt at overthrowing our democracy failed. His white nationalist friends are scattering to the winds as quickly as the planes can fly them home. The reality show is over for now.

    I believe Joe Biden and I can listen and learn to be better Americans. I think Kamala Harris will help raise the consciousness of what the next generation of Americans can be. That thought gives me hope for my granddaughter’s future.

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

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

  • comments closed…including my own

    comments closed…including my own


  • the final new year

    the final new year


     

    She sat in her large recliner covered with worn blankets for extra warmth.  She was shrunken with age and her spine was so curved by scoliosis she slumped down into the bowels of the chair. It seemed to swallow her tiny body.

    She lost weight since she went to this place three months ago.   She didn’t eat. Her meals were pureed in a blender and fed through a large syringe. Open, please. Thank you.

    She wore bright blue flowered pajamas which I knew didn’t belong to her. She was covered by a Christmas blanket and looked like an incongruous mixture of Hawaii with the North Pole.

    Her beautiful white hair was uncombed, and she periodically raised her right hand to carefully brush a few strands from her forehead. There, that’s better.

    Two other women sat in similar recliners in the dark den lit only by the reflected light of a massive television screen which was the focal point of the room.

    The sitcom How I Met Your Mother was playing that afternoon.  No one watched this episode about misadventures on New Year’s Eve. I found the irony in the sitcom’s name since the woman in chair number one was my mother.

    She needed care for the past four years, and I regularly sat with her as her dementia progressed in medical jargon from mild to moderate to severe. Severe was where we were on that first day of 2012.

    I tried to talk to her about visiting my aunt, her sister-in-law, over the weekend.  No response. Mom had adored my Aunt Lucille so I thought she might be able to find her somewhere. Instead, she gazed at her black leather shoes on the floor in front of her. Slowly, very deliberately, she bent over and painstakingly reached for her left shoe. I moved to help her because I was afraid she’d fall out of the chair.

    Do you want to put on your shoes, Mom? She stared vacantly at me and shook her head. Ok, I said and returned to my seat on the large overstuffed sofa next to her chair.

    I made conversation with one of two sisters who cared for my mother and the two other mothers who sat in the recliners.   Mothers and daughters and sisters. We were all connected in the little den with the big tv.

    My mother ignored me as she continued her ritual of laboriously picking up her black shoes one by one, tugging on the tongue to ready it for her foot, fiddling with the shoelaces as if to adjust them and then lowering the shoe to the floor in front of her to the same place it was before. She did that over and over again. Ad infinitum.

    During one of her attempts, she dropped a shoe beyond her reach, and I put it in front of her chair with the other one. Do you need help to put on your shoes?  I asked again. No. I have to keep on this road, she answered.  She was on a mission.

    The mother in chair number two told me she tried to help my mother with her shoes earlier. She told me to get away from them so I did, the woman said with a note of exasperation.

    I’m sorry, I said.  That wasn’t really who she was. But I was wrong. That was who she was now.

    I talked and tried to avoid watching my mother and her little black shoes for an eternity that was only an hour. Mom, I have to go, I said.  She looked at me with some level of recognition and said Don’t leave me.

    I’ll be back in a day or two, I said, hugged her and kissed her on the cheek and told her I loved her.

    I love you too, she said.  I really do.

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

    I didn’t know on New Year’s Day in 2012 that my mother would be gone in April after years of waging war against an unknown enemy who robbed her not only of her body but also her mind, her memories. It was a losing battle, but I expected the loss.

    Estimates place 1.6 million homes around the world in 2020 hadn’t known its mothers, sisters, wives, daughters as well as its fathers, brothers, husbands and sons wouldn’t live to see the first day of 2021. Shocked, dazed, saddened by the unexpected deaths of family members and friends, the fight against another unknown enemy called Covid-19 was briefer than my mother’s war but just as deadly.

    Vaccines discovered at “warp speed” offered hope of victory over the Covid-19 devil in 2020 although the roll out at the end of the year has been poorly managed in the US in keeping with the tradition of pandemic mismanagement established at the federal level in previous months. Agent Orange is so busy trying to keep the presidency through wacky shenanigans since the November election that he has no time to participate in governing. The president is AWOL, and time has stood still during the political transition while members of the current administration remain persistently unconcerned about preserving either our national security, our democracy or our sense of compassion for the people whose lives will be forever changed by the events of 2020.

    Blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted, according to the gospel of Matthew. Garth Brooks sang of “taking any comfort that I can.” I’m hoping 2021 will be known as the year of comfort for mourners everywhere.

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.