I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

storytelling for truth lovers

  • Matthew Moves Our Way – Casa de Canterbury Hunkers Down


    My, oh, my. Hurricane Matthew has brought just enough moisture to our back yard to ensure our little dog Charly  refuses to step outside. Barely a drizzle. A wisp of a breeze. But Charly has stood several times at the kitchen door we left open wide for her today, lifted her head for a sniff of the air pressure, turned around and returned to her place on the sofa to watch the TV for more news on Matthew’s path which is apparently to get closest to land in Charleston, South Carolina during the night tonight. The little dog clearly knows Casa de Canterbury is only a hop, skip and jump away from Charleston and obviously has a lot of free-floating anxiety, as do the rest of us.

    Thanks to our good friend Ann in Pennsylvania for the portable charger idea yesterday. We went right out to the Office Depot and bought one this morning, and I am delighted  to report there are picture illustrations of how to use it since the font of the instructional brochure is Thumbelina size and impossible for my eyes to decipher.

    Speaking of eyes, Pretty took me to a new eye doctor today because my regular eye doctor referred me to someone else for a possible surgery to re-attach a muscle in each eye that holds up my eyelids and has separated from its proper place due to guess what? Old age. Another hit for the home team known as Sheila’s Senior Fall – Aparts; the hits just keep on coming. Now drooping eyelids…hm…so many drooping body parts.

    The good news is Medicare will cover the procedure – the bad news is the surgery has the potential to activate the sleeping shingles nerve in my right eye and that would be a huge nightmare so now to do or not to do the surgery is the question. Sigh. Time to consult the old crystal ball if we can find it.

    Thanks also to my cousin Anne in Texas for the advice on the rocking chairs on the front porch. I have taken precautions and battened down those hatches to keep them safe. I have one Mounds bar remaining and am fighting the impulse to risk another run to the CVS drug store for the Buy One – Get the Second One for – a – Quarter Sale. The rockers should be safe, but the candy supply is already iffy.

    OMG, we came home to this sight at our neighbor’s house this afternoon.

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    The little girl who lives next door turns eight today and is having a birthday party. Lots of little girls in dresses being brave and ignoring Hurricane Matthew. Charly should take a lesson from them.

    Pretty continues the battle with her knee recovery regardless of Hurricane Matthew’s path. The City of Columbia continued trash collection today. The US Postal Service delivered the usual bills to Casa de Canterbury, and Spike sounded the alarm that the Evil Postman had arrived this afternoon. The South Carolina Electric and Gas spokesman advised that extra crews are on the way to help our state with restoring power that may be lost. The Governor called out the National Guard, the President declared we are a national disaster waiting to happen, and I am about to eat the one remaining Mounds candy bar. That about sums it up, don’t you think?

    Stay tuned.

     

     

  • Hurricane Matthew – Shake, Rattle and Roll


    Yesterday I had three unexpected phone calls from Texas  – one from my cousin Gaylen who lives in Houston, one from my sister Leora who lives in Rosenberg and one from my cousin Frances who lives in Willis. I also had a rare text from my good friend Carol who is one of the Little Women of Worsham Street in Montgomery and another text from a close  childhood friend Tinabeth who still lives in Richards where I grew up plus an email from another of my oldest Richards friends, Warren, who now lives in Arkansas.  All of them were worried about our safety at Casa de Canterbury as weather channels across the country focused on the path of Hurricane Matthew which was churning up the Caribbean wreaking destruction in Haiti and moving north toward the USA with projections for a path that would put it along our South Carolina coast Friday and Saturday. I imagine we weren’t the only ones contacted by family and friends.

    Our local TV news channels echoed the national weather bureaus with their models of Matthew’s trajectory and our governor declared a state of emergency with evacuation of the low-lying coastal areas. Interstate 26, the main highway leading out of Charleston, became so congested traffic crawled and stood still for hours. At 3:00 o’clock yesterday afternoon, the I-26 lanes moving into Charleston were re-routed so that they became outbound lanes to accommodate the heavy flow. An estimated 1.1 million people will leave the coastal areas headed north to Columbia and beyond to ride out the storm on higher ground.

    Early yesterday morning – early being a relative term – let’s say about 9 o’clock, I went to the grocery store to get our necessities: sweet ‘n low, bread, water, chips and toilet paper. The parking lot of the Kroger was packed. The carts were scarce so I knew the race was on. No problem finding sweet ‘n low. Evidently we were the only household requiring artificial sweeteners in an emergency. Bread, chips and toilet paper were more difficult but still available – water OUT. That ship had sailed. Shelves empty. Case closed.

    Not to be outdone I left the Kroger and drove down to the CVS drug store on the corner and saw more cars in the parking lot than usual but luckily they still had a dwindling supply of water. I bought two packs of bottled water but while I was waiting to be checked out, I spied the candy bar sale of buy one, get second one for a quarter. I picked up four Mounds bars and told Shirley the counter check-out lady I was now prepared for whatever the hurricane brought.

    I replaced the batteries in our four flashlights and have a lighter at the ready for our candles. I surveyed our front porch and brought in the cushions from the rocking chairs. I feel I have forgotten to do something major here at the casa, but I can’t remember what it is at the moment. If anyone has a recommendation, please comment.

    Hurricane season for us on the Atlantic Coast is from June 1st – November 30th., but don’t hold us to that schedule. Hurricanes are like babies – they can be later or earlier than planned. Most of them are harmless, but sometimes we have a Big One, a real Doozie, and then an estimated 12 million people along the Atlantic Coast are at risk for loss of life and possessions. That is apparently our situation this week as Hurricane Matthew is bearing down; and the elements are ready to shake, rattle and roll over us.

    Thanks to our family and friends for checking in with us. It makes us feel loved and reminds me that storms occur in all of our lives every day  – often we have our own personal hurricanes that have nothing to do with the weather. A phone call, a text, an email or God forbid – an actual visit – just might be the kindness that helps someone weather their storm. Be prepared.

    And stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Race is On – And the Winner Loses All


    Well the race is on and here comes Pride at the backstretch,

    Heartaches are going to the inside.

    My tears are holding back, they’re trying not to fall…

    The race is on and it looks like Heartaches.

    And the winner loses all.

    written by Don Rollins 

    immortalized by George Jones

    In May, 1964 I graduated from Columbia High School in West Columbia, Texas. There were eighty-seven other seniors in my graduating class that year. Two weeks later I was standing in registration lines in a gymnasium at the University of Texas in Austin to enroll for summer school as a freshman along with 19,000 other students. The dorm I moved into had seven floors – with elevators, thank goodness – and was huge to me. No wonder – I looked up the size today and it had 69,754 sq ft. The home I came from was a tiny cottage of maybe 1,200 sq. ft. that my parents rented from the people who owned the grocery story we lived behind. To paraphrase one of my grandmother’s favorite sayings, I was country come to town when I moved to Austin, and I felt it.

    Three months later in September, 1964,  a fellow Texan named George Jones released his hit single The Race is On. Supposedly the song was one of his personal favorites and one that he usually sang in concerts. He definitely tried to sing it at a concert I attended on the UT campus in the spring of my first full year (1965) but as I recall George was under the influence of alcohol and forgot the lyrics of that song and several others before making an early exit. No Show Jones was an appropriate nickname for him that night, but I really didn’t care because I was also under the influence for the first time ever in my nineteen years.

    The two friends who invited me to go with them to the concert had brought a bottle of scotch to mix with Seven-up. They poured my drinks with a heavy hand, and No Show Sheila walked back to her room on the third floor of the 69, 754 sq. ft. – dormitory…and threw up. I never drank scotch again.

    Thirty-six days from today until the election of 2016 on November 8th.; I heard that on the news this morning, and I have to say that seems like a long, long time to me. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait until I turned twenty-one. I thought that day would never get there. Starting on my sixteenth birthday, I counted each birthday in relation to that twenty-first. The wait was painfully slow. After the momentous twenty-first birthday, however, the years picked up speed; and the race has been on toward an unknown finish line at the speed of light…

    Until this election year when time has apparently stood still. The race has been on to the White House and the houses of Congress for the past two years with primary debates, billboards running rampant throughout the landscape of our cities and interstates, thousands of television and radio and cyberspace commercials approved by the people who are promoting themselves and unending polarization of the country that has a divided view of its direction. Yes, my friends, the race is on.

    Please forgive me, spirit of George Jones, for my transgression of making your love song into a political one. In this 2016 race for the White House I have seen Pride at the backstretch and Heartaches going to the inside and have had to hold back my own tears. I could weep for the absurdity of this race with its personal punches and counter-punches. I could weep for a nation so divided that I wonder if our house will stand. The race is on alright, and I feel Heartaches as it heads into the last days. My fear is that the winner loses all.

    It’s old Blue Monday for me, and I’m thinking about one of my favorite country music artists and his songs. George may be gone, but the race is still on.

    I’m voting early and often, as Lyndon Johnson used to ask us to do in Texas. I urge you to join me.

     

  • Texas Beer Joints – and the Undecided


    When I was a little tomboy growing up in southeast Texas, I had dreams of one day – sometime somewhere – being able to go to a beer joint. My family was Southern Baptist and the very mention of an adult alcoholic beverage would send my mother into horrible face contortions and very loud condemnations of beer and beer drinkers. Beer joints were the epitome of evil. Naturally her hyperbole aroused my curiosity.

    My mother’s aunts, my grandmother’s German sisters, worshiped at the Church of the Blessed Beer Joint, however, and I loved to listen to their tales when they came from Bright Lights, Big City Houston to visit us in No Lights, Tiny Town Richards. They were a personal trip for me…and a glimpse of possibilities for me down the road.

    The road did bring me to my share of beer joints in my adult life, although I confess I never shared the same enthusiasm for them as my Aunt Dessie and Aunt Selma did. Most of the ones I went to when I got old enough were drab, dingy, smoke-filled rooms with a jukebox, a few old tables and a bar with stools too tall for me to belly up to easily. I loved the jukebox more than the taste of the Lone Star beer.

    As the fickle finger of fate would have it, Teresa and I moved back to Texas in 2010 and bought a home on Worsham Street in Montgomery, Texas – only 18 miles from Richards. We drove many times to visit my family in the Fairview Cemetery outside of Richards and on one of those drives up Highway 105  I discovered the Texas beer joint of my childhood dreams in the little town of Dobbin. Some dreams really do come true!

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    We stopped for the burgers and bbq

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    Best burgers EVER

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    We waited in the bar which the owner Bobby Holder built himself – took him three years to finish – perfection

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    A little something for everyone

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    Thirst quencher

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    Old family pictures on ancient organ

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    Bobby as a little boy

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    All in all, Holder’s had delicious food, and had I been younger, I would have come back for the night life…or maybe not. My Texas beer joint dreams had come true without the first sip of a Lone Star.

    And finally, here’s a wall hanging at Holder’s that I thought of yesterday after the presidential debate on Monday night. I talked to my friend Carmen about the debate, and she said many of her friends weren’t going to vote this year…or were undecided…

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    And there you have it.

     

  • The 400-Pound Hacker in the Room


    Donald Trump on our national security in the debate tonight:

    “Hackers could be anybody sitting on their beds weighing 400 pounds.”

    Whaaaaaaat? What did you say? What does that even mean?

    Donald Trump on foreign affairs:

    “I haven’t given lots of thought to NATO…I just know we have to knock the hell out of ISIS.”

    Really? Not much thought to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? You might want to add that to your debate prep topics for next time.

    Donald Trump on the war in Iraq:

    “I was against the war in Iraq…all you have to do is call Sean Hannity and ask him. He knows I was against the war in Iraq.”

    Somebody please call Sean Hannity… and restore a little sanity.

    Donald Trump on deal-making in the Obama administration:

    “You almost can’t name a good deal they’ve made.”

    I can name that deal in three notes…or was that tune…deal, tune…whatever.

    Donald Trump on what it takes to be President:

    “To be President of the United States, you have to have the stamina.”

    It also helps to have an understanding of the job description.

    Hillary Clinton on preparation:

    “Yes, I prepared for this debate. I’ve also prepared to be President.”

    And with that I say to all good night and good luck.