I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

storytelling for truth lovers

  • Closer to the End Than the Beginning


    During his interview with the ESPN team following a four-set victory over Kei Nishikori in the men’s semi-finals of the 2016 US Open tennis tournament, Stan Wawrinka was asked if he had an explanation for his winning ways in recent years – a victory over Rafael Nadal to win the 2014 Australian Open, a win over Novak Djokovic in the 2015 French Open final and now another opportunity as a finalist in this year’s US Open against Djokovic who is also the number one player on the tour.

    “I believe I am closer to the end than I am to the beginning,” the 31-year-old Wawrinka responded and implied that he understood the limits of playing professional tennis into his thirties like the Williams sisters and Roger Federer who are apparently the equivalent of the proverbial Energizer bunny in their tennis careers.  The reality of the finite nature of his capabilities had inspired him to prepare to play his very best on the biggest stages at the Grand Slam venues in Melbourne, Paris, London and New York City. Stan played to win.

    I resemble that remark, I thought, when I heard the Swiss player make it.  Closer to the end than the beginning – part of the largest generation ever, a generation gradually passing into what? The twilight years, the golden years, the days of wine and roses? The days of fixed incomes and variable costs of living…the days of eye floaters and arthritis…of grandchildren that bring joy and hope… and parents with special needs…the days of loss of friends and family…the days of disbelief in news headlines…you know he didn’t, but he did.

    We are living on the short side of time and if we share Stan’s spirit, we also have an opportunity to play our best games in the championship matches that challenge us to reach beyond what we can see and hear and touch in our everyday lives – a call to dig deeper and continue to contribute our abilities that will make a positive difference in a world we helped to create, in the families we choose to love.

    And so Stan Wawrinka will play tomorrow in the final with an outcome to be determined on the Arthur Ashe Court of the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. He will bring his best game and when he needs encouragement, it won’t come from the fans who watch but from within himself. He has a tattoo on his left arm in Italic script by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett:

    “Ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again, fail again, fail better.” 

    Good luck to Stan and to Novak, too – and to all of us a good night.

     

     

  • Happy Pride Day! Observations from a Street Corner


    Happy Pride Day! Today was an unbelievably gorgeous South Carolina day following the drenching rains from Hurricane Hermine yesterday…only white clouds floating in the sky above us and lots of sunshine for the 2016 Pride Parade in downtown Columbia.  Teresa is able to navigate with a walker now so we packed up two chairs and drove to a perfect spot to watch the parade at the corner of Sumter and Washington Streets.Splendid! Enjoy the parade with us…

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    Cap, scarf, phone, walker – and that fabulous smile

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    Early arrivals on the opposite side of Sumter St Corner

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    Two Moms with little girls dressed in Pride colors

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    A picture of diversity walking across Sumter St

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    Looking up from our corner in downtown Columbia

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    Girls waiting to cross at our corner of Washington and Sumter Streets

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    Lighting up and hanging in

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    Famously Hot South Carolina Pride!

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    Local ballet legend William Starrett –

    looking festive in  red as he waves to the crowd

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    Mother of Pride Harriet Hancock with daughter 

    Jennifer Tague and Grand Marshall Tony Snell

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    Diversity is always in style at TJ Maxx

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    Amen, Brothers and Sisters

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    Nothing says Pride like feathers

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    These clergy have been with us since the beginning

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    Happy faces of Pride

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    Our friend Saskia and her son Finn join us

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    South Carolina Pedal Parlor – I had no idea what this was – our neighbor Mark explained it to me.

    Mark and his wife Debbie had joined us on our side of Sumter Street

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    Finn brought his personal mask

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    Girls Rock followed by hula hoopers

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    What are they doing with those hoops??

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    Love wins

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    What a sight!

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    Love has no labels

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    When Finn grows up, he will love the gays

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    So much happiness as the Parade passed by

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    My personal favorite the Prime Timers remember Stonewall – where the Revolution began

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    Our corner – lots of friends joined us

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    Finn has seen enough

    (photo courtesy of Nekki Shutt079

    T and me with our friend Jack

    The day was really fun for us, but when the Parade was over, we had to pack up our chairs to go home to Casa de Canterbury. As we said goodbye to our friends in the bank parking lot, I turned to see two girls at the ATM machine. This really said it all for me. Happy Pride!

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  • I’m Thinking of a 4-Letter Word that Rhymes with Fall…


    Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
    Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
    The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
    “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
    With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

    This poem New Colossus was written by Emma Lazarus for a fundraiser to complete the construction of the  Statue of Liberty on Bedloe Island in New York Harbor in 1886. The people of France gave the copper sculpture to Americans to celebrate the emancipation of slaves and the survival of the democracy in the United States following the Civil War that ended in 1865. It had been shipped in 350 pieces, however, and was no small task to assemble – not to mention the additional $120,000 of expenses that would be necessary for the project.

    Emma Lazarus initially declined to participate in the Libertas construction fundraising efforts because she was very much involved in the movement to relocate Jews fleeing anti-Semitic persecution in eastern Europe and relocating them in the United States. Luckily, she reconsidered and found a way to express her own activist feelings in a poem with powerful words that have  become almost as famous as the iconic statue itself in welcoming the brave people who cross oceans and continents to find a home in the land of the free. The last lines of New Colossus are on a plaque in the museum at the base of the monument.

    Last night in Phoenix, Arizona – a city that is 2,400 miles from New York Harbor –  a brazen giant of the very small screen rewrote New Colossus as he talked once more about building a Great Wall along the US/Mexican border to keep the huddled masses yearning to breathe free south of the border down Mexico way where they belong.  Don’t send your tired…and certainly not your poor…northward. We don’t want them. As a matter of fact, we are deporting 12 million Latinos who live in this country through a hole in the Great Wall back to you. See how you like them apples,  my new BFF President Nieto.

    And don’t think we want any wretched refuse from your teeming shores in eastern Europe or the Mid East, either.  A hundred thirty years ago in 1886 the problem  we were worried about bringing over to America was the Jewish refugees – now it’s the Muslims. Sometimes it’s hard to keep straight exactly who we want and who we don’t want. But I’m pretty sure now it’s Muslims and Mexicans in the don’t want category. Hm…something about the M words…gosh, next it might be the Morrises that we need to deport. They’ve always been a suspect family group.

    Innnnyhowww, as my friend Libby Levinson used to say to me, I’m thinking of a four-letter word that rhymes with Fall and it turns out to be Wall, a wall that has become a talking point in the 2016 presidential campaign in these United States by he who shall remain nameless. A wall meant to separate, to divide, to exclude – a wall that has captured the imagination of millions of potential voters in November.

    When T and I drove to Sioux Falls, South Dakota in March to watch our Lady Gamecocks play basketball, we took a small detour through downtown Sioux Falls on a sleepy Sunday morning after an early spring snowfall. We were looking for the park where the actual Sioux Falls were located. I never will forget the three people, two men and one woman, who were standing on a corner of the main street in town holding a homemade sign which read: Build The Wall.

    If people in the Midwest were worried about the border between my home state of Texas and neighboring Mexico, the light from the lamp of the lady in the harbor in New York City was surely gradually dimming and in danger of going out. But of course the Mother of Exiles will overcome the doubters and naysayers and continue to glow her world-wide welcome to those who need her and the Great Wall will remain where it belongs – in China.

    At least, that’s what I’m counting on.

     

     

     

  • O say can you TELL by the dawn’s early light?


    I find I have been quick to judge our American swimmer Ryan Lochte for his behavior away from the pool in Rio de Janeiro during the Olympic games, and I had a few minutes to sit in my favorite chair this morning to ponder his trials and tribulations while I was waiting for T’s physical therapist to arrive. I love to ponder – particularly when the house is quiet, and today was no exception.

    I read moments ago that Speedo and Ralph Lauren  severed their endorsement relationships with Mr. Lochte which led me down the meandering  pondering  quite smug path of See there, I told you so. When you play, you pay…an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Why didn’t you stick to pool parties…I went on and on with this conversation in my mind because it’s a replay of how I’ve felt since the bizarre incident occurred in Rio. Really, Ryan, how stupid could you be. You’re thirty-two years old, for crying out loud. You’re old enough to know better.

    Whoa, Nellie…hold your horses. Old enough to know better – that stopped me in my instant replay.  Hm.  Now what was I doing when I was thirty-two years old…that would have been 1978. Hm….meander, meander some more… I was living in Columbia by then and had met the person that would become my lifelong friend but was at the time my best drinking buddy Millie Miller who was happy to spend many evenings with me at local bars until they closed in the wee hours of the morning.  We weren’t always in the best shape when they closed, either. Really, then, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones, although admittedly my glass house wasn’t part of an international Olympic Games and I wasn’t representing my country at the time. Not to split hairs, of course. The two similarities of this story were thirty-two years old and intoxicated, as I rambled along in my mind. Don’t try to make more of it than that.

    So it wasn’t the drunken public exhibition by a member of Team USA in a foreign country that continued to nag at me in the Lochte saga although that would have been enough to keep the story churning. I could finagle that around in my mind to somehow relate to his wanting to celebrate with his teammates after the medals were handed out. Something to be ashamed of when he sobered up, but mistakes are surely made by us all – usually not in front of a gazillion people but hey, nobody’s perfect.

    No, that wasn’t the nagging current flowing through my stream of consciousness this morning. It was the lying – an amazingly creative lie to be sure – but a lie nonetheless… followed by his inability to say Hey, I lied about it, and I’m sorry.  Instead, the lie became his “over-exaggeration” of the truth which sounds strangely similar to the acceptable “little white lie.” Ding, ding, ding goes the alarm bell. Don’t tell that to the Brazilians.

    Somewhere in my mind there is a disconnect between what used to be known as the truth and what now has become an inability on a grand scale to define. Lying is a way of life in our family relationships, business dealings, political discourse, religious institutions, collegiate locker rooms, football weights, beauty pageants and just about anything else you can think of. You name it – we can lie about it with gusto and embellishment.

    I am beyond weary of lies and liars.

    But this is clearly not a new problem of the 21st. century.  The major religions of today have all weighed in against lying thousands of years ago via stone tablets and whatever else they could find to write on plus probably on cave walls before that. The universal consensus was that lying is fundamentally wrong but truth is subject to interpretation. My truth might not be your truth, and vice versa.  Clearly Ryan Lochte subscribed to that theory when he invented his own elaborate version of the truth and then tried to redefine it.

    I should never have gotten started on this mind meandering today. I feel like I’m digging myself deeper and deeper into a meaningless hole and I hear the voices of my Texas heroines Molly Ivins and Ann Richards hollering from their graves to admonish me that when I find myself in a hole this big, I need to stop digging.

    And so I shall. Team USA won forty-seven gold medals at the 2016 Olympics in Rio;T and I heard the Star-Spangled Banner played for many of those medal ceremonies from her hospital room following her successful knee replacement surgery last week and from our bedroom where she continues to recover this week.  Each time we heard it was special with the expressions of the champions ranging from smiles of happiness to tears of joy to thoughtful reflections of awe and wonder…they were moments of truth we shared with them. At least, that’s how my mind meanderings like to think about it. Somebody stop me.

  • And the Answer is: What is Old People


    Every night I take three 500-mg Extra Strength Tylenol tablets from a bottle in my bedside stand – the tablets which my doctor assures me will provide added ammunition against the arthritis in my knees that aims to make it impossible for me to get the bed off my back the following morning.  I’m not crystal clear when I realized I needed to also place a walking cane next to my bed to help me keep my balance when I get up to  let the dogs out in the early hours of the morning, but I’m pretty sure it was sometime this year. Part of the perks of turning seventy.

    The same bedside stand is the home for my orange-flavored 81 mg. Bayer Aspirin that my doctor urges me to take every night to help reduce the risks of strokes, heart attacks and other Night Stalkers out and about who threaten to fulfill the part of the “If I should die before I wake” prayer.  And at the risk of too much information, I wouldn’t even have to worry about waking at all if it weren’t for the ambien I take to go to sleep. Sleep was apparently a privileged activity reserved for “pre-menopausal” years and insomnia has punished me for my giddiness at no longer needing to purchase feminine products on a monthly basis.

    At any rate, waking up is a big deal every day now. Even when I wake up before the dogs are ready to go out, I feel like it’s a good sign to be able to know where I am, what day it is and who’s in the bed with me. Today I was also filled with optimism for the week because I didn’t have to watch another national political convention; T’s favorite restaurant the Mediterranean Tea Room was opening today after their annual ten-day summer break and that meant delicious leftovers in the refrigerator. We are playing cards with friends on Tuesday and watching the Lady Gamecocks basketball team in a Pro-Am Wednesday night so the week was full of promise for fun.

    When I turned on my computer, I began my morning ritual of scanning the AOL news that long ago replaced the local newspaper. Most of the time, I click and click and click with a few stops along the way to read a story with a headline that interests me. This morning was no exception.

    Click. Click. Click. And then I saw it: Old People are Holding the Economy Back read the headline of an article written by Andrew Soergel for the U.S. News and World Report online magazine. Oh, my goodness, I thought. Seriously?

    Yes. The National Bureau of Economic Research has determined that “a 10% increase in the fraction of Americans at least 60 years old slashes national economic output per capita by 5.5%.” In other words, our country’s aging population is a drag on the economy as a whole. Hiss…I could hear the sounds of the air leaving my happiness bubble as I read the entire article. If the Jeopardy question is what is the cause of economic woes for our country, then the answer is “what is old people.”

    Please, please, please don’t show this to the Trump campaign which will add a plank to their platform calling for the deportation of all people over 60 years of age to Russia and/or the Ukraine  to go along with the deportation of all undocumented Latinos and Mexicans to Mexico. I am trying to visualize the process. You old white person – get on the bus to Russia. You suspicious-looking brown person – get on the bus to Mexico. And don’t ever come back – either one of you. Just think of the possibility of confusion in the process, however, if the old white person takes the wrong bus – which I have to say from personal experience is a real possibility.

    Thanks to this bit of news, I must guard against my old nemesis Negativity that tries to remind me on a daily basis that my becoming a senior citizen renders my contributions no longer welcome or necessary even to the point that I have become invisible to the eyes of the people I encounter as I walk through my world. Now I must also bear the responsibility for the woes of the national economy.

    Hm. Get thee behind me, Negativity. I have a pill for you, too, and I will now hit the Delete button for the AOL news. Click.

    I feel better already.