I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

storytelling for truth lovers

  • Sister Act (2015)


    Lord help the mister who comes between  me and my sister,

    And Lord help the sister who comes between me and my  (slam).

    Actually, Irving Berlin’s lyrics in the 1954 romantic musical White Christmas ended that second line with “man” because Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen played sisters in love with the same man, Bing Crosby. In my 2015 version the two sisters are in love with the same dream: winning major tennis tournaments like the US Open in New York City this week so I took poetic license and inserted “slam.” My apologies to you, Mr. Berlin.

    For Serena Williams the stakes couldn’t be higher since she is now three matches away from a Calendar Grand Slam, something which hasn’t been done since 1988.  She’s also chasing Steffi Graf’s record of winning 22 majors in the Open Era. She’s at 21 and counting, which already secures her place in tennis history but 22 would place her in the conversation of being the best ever.

    The tennis gods have aligned the Open draws with their usual good sense of humor and placed a familiar obstacle in Serena’s quarterfinal match. She will face her older sister Venus for the 27th. time in their professional careers. Serena has won 15 of those matches and Venus has won 11. Venus has won seven Major titles herself and at the ripe old age of 35 appears to be playing up to her personal best tennis again in 2015.

    Both sisters have said the one thing they know for sure is that a Williams will be playing in the US Open semi-finals but neither claims to know for sure which sister it will be.

    How many times have these women taken to the practice courts in their lifetimes? How many tennis balls have they hit together as a team and separately as the solo act on those courts…they have won 13 Grand Slam titles in their doubles career together, too. Extra kudos to them for these wins.

    I have mixed emotions about this quarterfinal match. I wonder about the tension at the Williams family dinner table when everyone tries not to talk about their match or whether they kid each other about who has the better chance of winning. As an only child, I have no point of reference in winning or losing to a sister; but my sense is that Venus and Serena both want to win very badly whenever they step onto the court and this ultimately trumps any potential guilt one might have for standing in the way of the other.

    Lord help the sister who comes between me and my Slam.

    To be continued.

  • Dancing with Destiny


    In 1999 the paths of two of the most recognized women athletes in the world crossed twice in different stages of their tennis careers.  Steffi Graf was twenty-nine years old and was about to retire from a career she began in 1982, and Serena Williams was seventeen years old  at the very beginning of her career that continues to the present day.

    They played each other twice in 1999. Steffi Graf won their first meeting in Australia several months before she won her 22nd. major tournament at the French Open that year.  Graf had won a Golden Slam in 1988 when she won all four of the major tournaments plus an Olympic Gold Medal in the same calendar year. No tennis player has won a calendar year Grand Slam since 1988.

    The second time Graf and Serena Williams met in 1999 was in California at the Indian Wells tournament where Serena won in three sets.  Two months after that match Graf retired, and three months after that contest Serena won the US Open which was the first of her current total of 21 majors in her sport.

    Tonight, in just a few minutes, Serena Williams will begin her third round match in the 2015 US Open in New York City. She has won the Australian Open, the French Open and Wimbledon already this year. If she wins the US Open, she will have accomplished a calendar year Grand Slam and will be the first woman since Graf in 1988 to make that happen. Somewhat appropriately and coincidentally, it would be her 22nd. major title that would tie Graf’s record.

    Serena is truly dancing with destiny, as one of the TV commentators for the Open said earlier this week. She is thirty-three years old but not the oldest gladiator in the Williams family in  the Open this year.  That honor belongs to her thirty-five year-old sister Venus who moves on to the Round of 16 next week following her victory today over eighteen-year-old Belinda Bencic from Switzerland, who is one of only two players to defeat younger sister Serena this year. Don’t mess with my sister, girl.

    Win or lose at the Open this year, Serena Williams has already secured her place in history that allows her to be mentioned in the same breath with Steffi Graf, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert and Billy Jean King. The Williams sisters have been the face of American tennis for the many years the male American players have wandered in a wilderness of mediocrity.  Whether you are fans of theirs or not, they have earned our respect for their longevity in a sport that is physically demanding and mentally challenging.

    To be continued.

     

     

     

     

  • In this Case, Fiction is Stranger than Truth


    Usually whenever I do a reading from one of my nonfiction books, someone raises a hand during the q & a to ask, “Yes, but why don’t you write fiction?” or “Have you ever thought about writing fiction?”  My response is fiction is too hard for me to write.  Nonfiction is no piece of cake for me, but at least it begins with the truth as I know it which makes it grounded in something and somehow that is important for a Taurus. I like to have a starting point – it creates less anxiety for me in writing.

    Fiction is like flailing around in emptiness and space where I am responsible for creating something out of nothing, and that makes me incredibly anxious before I even begin to sit down at the computer to write. So many hurdles for me to overcome in writing fiction.

    The first problem I have is character names. I can’t think up good names for my characters and it’s not for lack of a reservoir to draw from. I collect names like I collect sayings – I have literally folders of names that I’ve saved through the years, but when it comes to putting them in a story, I can’t find the right ones. None of the names belong  with my plot, which is my second problem. What are these nameless characters going to do? And how can I possibly keep them doing it for more than a chapter?

    The short story has been my salvation, although not a soul realized my redemption except  me. I have submitted a number of short stories for various literary contests, anthology collections, and magazines over the past ten years. One of them, Honky Tonk Cowboy, was published in the storyteller magazine in 2013  and another one, Dear Auntie O, recently appeared in a local magazine Fun after Fifty.net.  If I were a major league baseball player with this batting average, I wouldn’t be on a team roster anywhere.

    With that record, why in the world would I take on a serialized fiction project? Good question. I believe the answer is timing. As Teresa reminded me today as we were driving through town after lunch, timing is everything. And so it is.

    Channillo came along at a time when I was in the process of writing a novel or novella or a very long short story – I’m not sure which – a story I started before Brokeback Mountain was a major motion picture hit. It’s a story I take out periodically, dust it off and proclaim I can write fiction. The jury is out on that.

    However, Channillo is a venue that offers serialized literature for a very nominal monthly fee much like Netflix does for the small screen, and  I decided to give my fiction one last ride. Chapter One of my story Cowgirls at the Roundup is available now on Channillo in the Historical Romance genre. Yikes! I must be fifty shades of red.

    Click on the link in my blogroll to the right between Books I Buy and Don.

    Saddle up.

  • Learning New Tricks from Old Dogs


    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 and 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 – and 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) and petted and hugged on an equally regular basis. They came indoors for their pets and Daddy often scooped the big dogs up and held 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.

    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.

  • The Good, the Bad and the Ugly


    The Good:

    This past Thursday evening a small group of LGBT activists met at a local restaurant in Columbia, South Carolina to celebrate with Jim Obergefell, one of the plaintiffs in the  recent historical SCOTUS decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all fifty states in the USA. We were a jubilant group – full of laughter, chatting happily, enjoying the fruits of many years of hard labors, toasting with champagne given to us by the delightful wait staff who wanted to recognize our group for our “contributions to the state of South Carolina.” An amazing evening. Unimaginable in 1984 when our organization of the movement began in earnest in the state.

    The Bad:

    On that same Thursday last week on a different continent a world away six people were stabbed as they marched in the Jerusalem annual gay pride parade – stabbed by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who had just been released from serving ten years in prison for stabbing a gay man in another march  those years before. Two of the people were taken to the hospital, and yesterday Shira Banki, a sixteen-year-old activist, died. An amazing event – unfortunately,  still not unimaginable in any country today – but a tragic loss for the entire LGBT community which shares the sorrow of her family and friends in Israel.

    More Good:

    Jim Obergefell and local activist Nekki Shutt served as co-Grand Marshalls of the Charleston Pride Parade two days later on a rainy Saturday in the low-country capitol of the state- but the rain didn’t dampen the spirits of the  hundreds of marchers who had waited for the opportunity to step out for equality with pride. The music was loud, the floats were festive – and the entire atmosphere was electric with the possibilities ahead for the LGBT movement toward full equality.

    More Bad:

    That same weekend a Russian Military Holiday was observed in St. Petersburg, Russia. Several gay activists staged individual protests  during the festivities because of recent government anti-gay measures and were taunted by the Russian Airborne Services who tore up the protesters’ posters. Russian police intervened in the confrontation and took the activists away, although the law permits one-person protests. One of the paratroopers had this to say: “We’re in Russia and not in America. Let them do what they want in America, but not in Russia.”

    The Ugly:

    And finally, a report released  today by an independent project called Airwars alleges that U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria in the past year targeting the Islamic State group may have killed more than 450 civilians. The U.S. denies these numbers but said there are four ongoing military investigations into allegations regarding the deaths of civilians during airstrikes.

    I understand why…no, I don’t. Not really. Life is so much better for me when I don’t read or listen to the news. Just let me drink my champagne in peace, but no…

    How can one man love another man so much that he will try to change the attitudes of an entire country so that their love will have the same status  in that country as  those who love members of the opposite sex? And then how can one man hate this same love so much that he will stab a teenage girl to death simply because she chose to get out of her bed one Thursday morning and look in the mirror and say, Today I will be myself. I will be who I really am, and I want the world to see me as I am.

    Life isn’t always filled with days that are good and bad or even ugly. Most of our days are just opportunities to go one way or the other – to choose to make a difference right where we are in this moment – or to let that chance slip away with a shrug of indifference. Jim  Obergefell chose a path that led him on a long journey to the highest court in the United States. Shira Banki’s choice led to a much shorter journey – but one that was no less important.   As for the civilians allegedly lost in Iraq and Syria, well, they had no choice.

    My investigation is ongoing, but the preliminary findings indicate good and bad are always in a tight race for our best selves and some of us win or lose depending on the day of the race. Blessed are those that win more days than they lose, for they shall drag the rest of us to the finish line and we will be grateful.