I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

storytelling for truth lovers

  • forty days milestone


    When Pretty, the gay boys basketball buddies and I were making the trip from Greenville home to Columbia after watching our Gamecock women’s basketball team win the SEC tournament on Sunday, March 8th. we all were happy, thrilled, excited, chatty, laughing – exhausted after making the trip three days in a row to watch every game our team played in the tournament – but totally jazzed for the NCAA post season play scheduled to start at our own Colonial Life Arena on the 20th. of March.

    Daylight savings time had “sprung” ahead at 2:00 a.m. that Sunday morning which was always welcome at our house every year. Seven hours later the basketball boys picked us up at our house to drive back to Greenville where on the day before we met three other friends for brunch at the Lazy Goat, a restaurant close to the Bon Secours Wellness Arena, the venue for the tournament. The seven of us had a delicious brunch that Saturday in a small bistro packed with people having fun, talking loudly about basketball or the gorgeous day, ordering cocktails, a typical festive atmosphere before a major sporting event in the Palmetto State.

    Bon Secours has a seating capacity of 16,000 and while the final game wasn’t totally a full house, the crowd was huge and noisy. Our opponents,  the Mississippi State Bulldogs, brought a large following from Starksville but the Gamecocks were in home territory with thousands of fans to cheer them on since the University of South Carolina in Columbia was fewer than two hours from Greenville. Both schools brought bands, cheerleaders, mascots and tons of enthusiasm reserved for major college athletic championships in the south. We had a fabulous time – my mother would have called it a memory maker.

    I had no way of knowing that was the last time I would leave my house for any social experience for 40 days, no way of knowing the NCAA post season play I was looking forward to would be cancelled, no way of knowing a pandemic called the coronavirus or Covid-19 was about to change not only my life but the lives of everyone I knew, indeed, the lives of everyone around the world. I almost added statistics here but they were edited out because I am too horrified to put them in. When the number of cases rises above 2 million in 210 countries, well, I’d rather not go there this early in the morning.

    I vaguely recalled from my Bible School days in Miss Mary Foster’s class at the First Baptist Church of Richards, Texas a few stories that referenced the number 40: a great flood was caused by rain for 40 days and nights, the Hebrew  people wandered in the wilderness for 40 years before reaching the promised land, Jesus fasted 40 days and nights in the desert. Beyond the scope of my Bible class and through the omniscience of the great storyteller Wiki, I discovered the number 40 has significance in many traditions without any universal explanation. “In Jewish, Christian, Islamic and other Middle Eastern religious traditions it is taken to represent a large approximate number similar to ‘umpteen.’” Umpteen? Come on, man.

    Wiki went on to remind me of other “40s” I’d forgotten. For example, the number 40 is important in tennis, also. I knew that. It’s the third point of a game – don’t get me started on tennis scoring – again, too early in the morning. Life begins at 40, right? Not exactly but that’s what at least one person believed. Forty is everywhere: The number of thieves running with Ali Baba, the number of acres (plus a mule) freed slaves were supposed to be given after the Civil War, the number of quarters of work required to qualify for Social Security benefits in the US. Across the pond forty-shilling freeholders was a nickname given to those who had the right to vote based on their interest in land or property with an annual rental of 40 shillings, or something like that. I’ll leave that to my friend Ellen to explain properly in her blog on facts about the U.K.

    Regardless, I can tell you the past 40 days have both flown by and stood still. I have learned how to navigate my relatively new Brilliant TV between Netflix and Amazon Prime with a swiftness in my click which surprises Pretty who knows the TV is far smarter than I am. I take showers every day, well, almost every day. I have washed my hands more in the past 40 days than when I used to eat at my grandmother’s who was a stickler for washing hands before meals, after meals, and random times in between meals. I now think of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as my new BFF although I wouldn’t want to sit next to him at a dinner party for fear of nodding off.  My worst fears about Agent Orange and his administration have been realized. Remember in November.

    Since Pretty’s antique empire is considered nonessential, she has been our hunter-gatherer for food and the inspiration for our fun. I’ve loved having Pretty here with me – yes, she’s been busy with projects around the house, but I can almost always persuade her to take a break to watch something onTV with me or to take a joint nap in the afternoon. We now have Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy on speed dial at night. Antiques Road Show on PBS is a must.

    I miss my friends and family, though. Pretty continues our babysitting duties alone for two days every week and sends me videos of our granddaughter’s ever-changing accomplishments. She brought her to our house for the first time ever in her baby life of six months this past Monday, and we had the best time sitting outside with her on the screened porch. But I miss Ella’s parents, her Aunt Chloe and her dogs, too. We haven’t been able to have lunch with them or Pretty’s father or sister for 40 days.

    I miss going out to restaurants with friends, playing cards with friends, playing dominoes with friends, going to movies in real theaters with friends, going to basketball games with friends – things I had just started enjoying after my knee surgeries last year. Mostly I miss visiting with my friends. I love having a good visit with people who have something to say, and I can assure you all our friends have plenty to say. Texting or phone chats are poor substitutes for sharing a cocktail and meal together. I miss that.

    I am consoled by my playlist on Alexa and my friends in cyberspace who, although we aren’t physically visiting on my screened porch, do visit regularly to share our reflections on the mad world we inhabit. I am grateful to my readers for allowing me to share my feelings, to express my angst, to add to our universal hope for better days. Bless your hearts.

    Pretty and I send wishes for your strength to endure and courage to overcome this weekend and beyond.

    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.

    “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.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

     

     

     

     

     

  • learning new tricks from old dogs


    I first published this post in August, 2015 but I still love it. My dogs have always been my best teachers about what truly matters. I learned that from my daddy.

    From the time I was five or six years old growing up in rural southeast Texas in the 1950s, my daddy used to take me with him to hunt quail during what I remember as a relatively short season in the late fall and winter months. Quail lived in coveys in fields in the countryside around us and were excellent at hiding from their enemies in the tall grasses that would become hay when baled. You could walk and walk and walk some more until you felt like your legs were going to fall off if you had to put one foot ahead of the other again, but the quail were always one step ahead of you unless you had help locating them.

    Enter the hunter’s best friend: the German short-haired pointer a/k/a in Grimes County, Texas as the bird dog. A good bird dog could run through a field sniffing and sniffing, sometimes whining, until he caught a whiff of a covey of quail; then he would stop, raise his right front leg to a ninety-degree angle,  curl his medium-length tail over his back and point his nose exactly in the direction of the covey. He remained in this precise position until the hunter walked up beside the dog which would cause the quail to take flight with the sound of their fluttering wings making a whoosh noise as they left the ground.

    Whoosh! Bam! It was over that quick. The covey rose from the ground cover, and my daddy would shoot his twelve-gauge shotgun. Occasionally a bird would fall, and I would run to retrieve it and put it in my jacket to take home to my grandmother who would be happy to fix it for our supper. We rarely got our  legal limit, but we would usually have enough for a meal.

    The problem my daddy had was he never had a “good” bird dog.  He got the puppies from different people  in the area who always assured him their dogs were the best in the field, but invariably the pointer he got didn’t respond well to training. A common trait Daddy’s dogs had was rather than stopping to point and hold their position, they would  stop to point for a split second and then run as fast as they could to try to catch the birds by themselves. Of course, the quail would take flight when they heard the dogs and be long gone out of  shooting range by the time we caught up with the dogs. Daddy would halfheartedly fuss – but the dogs rarely improved.

    As I think back on this now, I believe our dogs had an identity issue which caused their lackluster performance in the field. Whether they did well or not in the hunting arena, they were fed regularly with  delicious scraps from our table (dog food wasn’t on Daddy’s radar screen), petted and hugged on an equally regular basis. They came indoors for their pets and Daddy often scooped the big dogs up to hold them on his lap while he talked to them about their shortcomings. My daddy was a very diminutive man – about five feet six inches tall – and those dogs weighed almost as much as he did. They looked at him with adoring eyes and absolute trust…and seemed to be saying I promise I’ll do better next time…but they wouldn’t.

    Daddy with what he loved most – his dog and his Bible

    My daddy loved his bird dogs. We always had at least one dog in our family for as long as I can remember and at one time when I was in high school, we had three.  I know that for sure because I still have the original oil paintings he commissioned  at that time from an artist friend of his.

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    Daddy’s Bird Dogs: Rex, Seth and Dab (circa 1966)

    No wonder I love my dogs. I’ve never personally owned a bird dog, but I’ve been on the receiving end of the adoring eyes and plaintive expressions of more than a few dogs of my own throughout my adult life. I confess to holding them on my lap if I can scoop them up, but even if I can’t do that, I will give them lots of love and kisses whenever and wherever they will stand  or sit or lie down to be so smothered.

    Loving dogs – or any animal for that matter – is the gift that keeps on giving to us mere humans, but the gift comes with a high price tag because their lives are relatively short. Indeed,  it seems the older we are, the faster we lose them.

    Two of our three remaining dogs that have given us much more loyalty and adoration than we deserve over the past decade have now been diagnosed with cancers that will ultimately take them from us. What I have learned from them is that they both keep their pain to themselves without complaints. They are not troubled by wondering why they are in their particular situations, and I think this allows them to try to keep changes in their routines to a minimum. They like to roll the way they’ve always rolled if they possibly can.

    I am a contemplative person – I can’t help myself. I find I can spend a great deal of time trying to figure out “why” this happened or that took place. Unfortunately, discovering “why” doesn’t necessarily lead to productive change. As a matter of fact, the opposite is likely to occur. So when I find myself in a position similar to the ones my dogs are facing today, I hope I have learned my lessons from the examples they have set for me and focus less on “why” and more on “so what.”

    That’s the way I’d like to roll.

    P.S. My daddy never asked anyone to make an oil painting of me.

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    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.

  • your so-called social security


    When I looked at our bank account last night for the umpteenth time before going to bed, I was ecstatic to see the Covid-19 recovery money had been deposited by the guvmint. Ecstatic for us – and for the guvmint as well. I told Pretty yesterday if we didn’t get the money by today, someone was going to hear from me. (As if the guvmint would be very afraid of a call from me.) Since her nonessential antique empire is shut down without any protest from us, we really are very thankful to have unexpected deposits. I remembered a post about other guvmint checks I published here in January, 2015.  

    One of the most popular country singers and songwriters, Merle Haggard, wrote one of my favorite songs, Big City, with lyrics that are much more meaningful to me in 2015 than they were in 1981 when I first heard it. “Gimme all I’ve got coming to me…and keep your retirement and your so-called Social Security.  Big City, turn me loose and set me free.”

    Yep, in 1981 I was thirty-five years old and the owner of a very small CPA firm that had a growing clientele with low overhead.  How small was very small? That would be one person: me. I had been working full-time since 1967, was in robust health – full of piss and vinegar – with visions of acquiring great wealth through hard work and perseverance in America, the land of equal opportunity.  Retirement?  Social Security?  Bah, humbug.  Irrelevant and unimportant, but I paid my Social Security taxes along with everyone else.

    Fast forward to 2008, the year I turned sixty-two years old. My robust health became more of a pisser than vinegar, which forced me to retire much earlier than I had planned,  long before acquiring great wealth. I had worked for forty-one years in a variety of jobs with numbers as their primary common denominator; I had made both good and bad career moves in those years but was moderately successful in the good years while being financially challenged in the lean ones.

    Regardless of the triumphs and tragedies in my working life, I continued to pay my income taxes plus Social Security taxes every year along with everyone else in America. When I became disabled at age sixty-two, I began to receive my retirement benefits from the Social Security Administration. Because my prospects for acquiring great wealth looked slimmer than my prospects for acquiring great weight, I’m afraid I couldn’t sing along with Merle who apparently didn’t want his Social Security.

    I’m happy to have mine – happy to be on the receiving end of what I paid into for more than forty years. Thanks Merle, but gimme all I got coming to me including my so-called Social Security, and then Big City, turn me loose and set me free.

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    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned. Seriously, my friends. Please do.

  • i is flawed, you is flawed, we is all flawed


    When someone asks me what I write, I see a slight look of disappointment when I say nonfiction. Fiction writers must have all the fun, right? Well, I have a logical explanation for my shortcomings: I is flawed, you is flawed, we is all flawed.

    Hello. My name is Sheila and I’m a name-a-holic. That’s right. For years I’ve been convinced the only reason I can’t write fiction is my inability to think of interesting names for my characters. So I collect names like some people collect stamps or coins or antiques.  If I think about my favorite novels or short stories, I always remember the names of the characters. For example, my favorite short story of all time, How I Came to Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty, is chock full of great names. PapaDaddy. Uncle Rondo. Stella Rondo. Mama. I could’ve written that story if I’d had those names to work with.

    Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Harper Lee’s Boo Radley and Scout.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March. Laurie the boy next door. Papa. Mama. Or, lest you fear I haven’t read a book in the last twenty years, Amir and his friend Hassan in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Then of course, the Texas names Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, Llewellyn Moss, the evil Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy are equally terrific.

    Well, somebody slap me….I see the problem. In order to think up great character names you have to be an author with a fabulous name yourself. Eudora Welty. Mark Twain.  Arthur Conan Doyle. Louisa May Alcott. Khaled Hosseini. Cormac McCarthy. Harper Lee.  Sheila Rae Morris. Aha, that explains it! My name is so blah my imagination follows suit.  My only hope is Margaret Mitchell.

    Oh well.  If I ever do get my fiction in gear, here are a few of the names you can look for in my novel:  Colt, Chance, and Charlie Cantrell. (Three Texas brothers for sure.) My twins’ collection so far:  Leon and Lon Lane. Madell and Adell Tolliver. Winnie and Minnie McCune. If the novel includes horses, the mare’s name will be Nacho. Her foals will be Frito and Dorito. Possible shero names: Sequoia Potter. Ethel Lorraine Wilson. Maurice Sawyer. Carolyn Briggs. Willie Joe Boaz. Possible hero names:  Cotton Lyles, Harvey Wilson, Forest J. Hutchinson, Lester “Gene” Archer, Vannoy Stewart, Elvis.

    As for plot to go along with this potpourri of  names, I plan to start with the fact that Whitney Houston’s mother Cissy Houston was once one of Elvis Presley’s backup singers.   Now, that’s a story just waiting to be made up. I’ll get right on it. I predict Mama will be one of the principal characters, but how will I ever come up with a title? Sigh.

    On a more positive note, Pretty surprised me yesterday afternoon by bringing our grandbaby Ella to visit me outside in our backyard for an hour. Since yesterday was Day 36 of my self isolation due to Covid-19, Pretty figured I would be one of the safest people for our six month old granddaughter to see. I was overjoyed when Pretty opened our back gate and came walking up the brick path holding Ella plus her big travel bag. Pretty and I had the best time playing with her, watching her take in her new surroundings, telling each other how brilliant she is, wondering what she will be like when she’s older. And when that girl baby looks at me with her smiles, I feel like life is good again.

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    Ella and her mother Pretty Too on Easter Sunday

    I is definitely flawed, you is flawed, we is almost all flawed. Ella is not flawed.

    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

  • between hell and hackeydam


    As if the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t enough, apparently the weather has also turned against us. I hear the wind howling in the trees tonight outside my window – with the possibility of tornadoes on the way according to the weather forecasters. I feel like we are caught between hell and hackeydam, a place most undesirable. I first introduced the phrase and the man who shared it with me to my followers eight years ago, but the story will be new for some. Whether you remember him or not, Bubba Sage should give you a smile. 

    Once upon a time not long ago and certainly not far away a great Texas storyteller held forth on a Sunday afternoon as his audience gathered around a small dining room table, and it  was my good luck to be there for the performance. He was the last guest to arrive for the barbecue luncheon but proved to be quite the addition to a little band of friends and family who gathered for a traditional birthday celebration for my cousin Martin at his brother Dennis’s home outside Navasota.

    I should’ve known I was in for a treat when Carroll “Bubba” Sage announced his presence with an entrance worthy of royalty. This very large man with a closely trimmed grey beard moved into the kitchen as the screen door slammed behind him. He balanced a homemade German chocolate cake in a single layer aluminum cake  pan as he came in, and I felt the energy in the little house went up a notch. When he retrieved a package of coffee he’d also brought and declared he never went anywhere without his own Dunkin’ Donuts coffee because he couldn’t possibly drink anything else with his cake, my antenna was up and ready for the ride.

    What a ride it was. Bubba grew up as the younger child of parents who owned and operated what was affectionately known by its patrons in the 1950s as a beer joint. He was born and raised in Navasota which was, and is sixty years later, a small town in Grimes County, Texas, a county that was dry back in those days so his folks opened their establishment across the Brazos River in Washington County which was wet. Dry county equals no adult beverages allowed. Wet county means go for it.

    In addition to serving beer, the best barbecue and hamburgers in the state made the place standing room only for a long time, according to Bubba’s stories. I know barbecue like that from years of chasing brisket in Texas hole-in-the-wall restaurants and could visualize the scene as Bubba’s daddy cooked the barbecue outside behind the tavern on a long open pit built out of bricks with a crusty black grill to put the meat on. I swear I could smell the aroma, or maybe that was my cousin’s chickens and sausage cooking outside in a smoker for our lunch.

    And my, oh my, talk about entertainment. The Sage Place had music on the weekends when Bubba’s daddy played the fiddle in the band. As Alabama sings, if you’re gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddler in the band. The women’s petticoats swirled to the fast music and then swayed to the slow tunes as they danced the Two-Step. The female patrons particularly liked the little boy who was always there and let him wear their costume jewelry sometimes when they saw him eyeing it with lust in his eyes. He was in heaven.

    The young boy grew up to become one of the teenagers that puffed the magic dragon in the middle of the Brazos River at a place he and his friends appropriately dubbed Smokey Point. They also created a theater of sorts at Smokey Point where Bubba developed a reputation as the Star of the Brazos. I was mesmerized by this big man’s recitations at our dining table. He took me totally by surprise when he began quoting a section of Young Goodman Brown, an obscure short story by the nineteenth century novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. I could picture him standing on the rocks at Smokey Point as the Brazos River flowed past the theatrics this young teenager performed.

    As all good storytellers do, Bubba threw in a few words to grab his listeners’ attention and he grabbed mine when he said, “I’ve had  close calls – been caught between hell and hackeydam more times than I like to remember.” Excuse me I said as I interrupted him.  But what does that mean and how do you spell it? Bubba laughed and said it was like being between a rock and a hard place but for some reason his family used this phrase instead.  (He added he had no idea how to spell it so I’ve spelled it phonetically here and will now use it as if I created it.)

    The lunch was delicious. Bubba’s German chocolate cake was the best I ever tasted which  includes both of my grandmothers’ efforts so that’s high praise. I stayed to play dominoes after we ate and then began to say my goodbyes when the game was over. As I cut a piece of cake to take with me, Bubba made one final rendition in the kitchen. He recited portions of “The Hill”  from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology which ends with the line, “… all, all are sleeping on the hill…”

    Honestly, does it get any better than that?

    view from my cousins Dennis and Martin’s place 

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    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.