I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

storytelling for truth lovers

  • The Words She Didn’t Say


    She wanted to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.

    They stuck in her mind like pavement to gum.

    Release me, release me the words cried today.

    I’m afraid, she said, as she held them at bay.

    We will be heard, they told her with force.

    She shook her head to quiet their source.

    They rattled around in the core of her brain,

    But got up again and began to raise Cain.

    Leave me alone, she shouted out loud.

    They mocked her and told her they came in a crowd.

    So even if caught and turned  out to sea,

    Others would come and one day be free.

    It must be the holidays because I’ve just written a poem with the same meter as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Good Lord.

    My usually introspective self typically becomes more reflective during the holiday season, and I believe this poem officially crosses the line to brooding.  However, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year, and Teresa and I once again look forward to making the trip to the Upstate to spend an evening with her family in the recreation hall of the First Baptist Church of Fingerville, South Carolina.  Even if I didn’t love her family, I’d go to a Baptist Church with that name.

    To everything there is a season, and this is the season for being thankful before the madness that is Christmas and New Year’s Day overwhelms us.  My wish for each of you is the familiar admonition to count your blessings and name them one by one. And if there are words you want or need to say to someone, set them free.

    From our family to yours – have a safe and Happy Thanksgiving!

  • My New BFF Ellen


    I have a new relationship with a younger lesbian who shares my core values and is wicked smart and witty, too – a huge plus in my list of desirable qualities for long-term hooking up.  We get together every afternoon at 3 o’clock and laugh at silly jokes she makes and dance to the music played by her favorite DJ for the day.  This girl puts me to shame on the dance floor, but she never makes fun of my moves.

    We only meet for an hour, but that hour is jam-packed with top entertainers from all over the world who are thrilled to visit with my BFF.  Of course, you know who my new girlfriend is because she’s probably one of your BFFs too.  Ellen.  As in De Generes.

    Oh yeah.  Ellen and I go WAY back, but we’ve had a kind of off-again / on again relationship since we first discovered each other in the mid 1990s.  I let her do her TV shows and helped her find Nemo back in the day and we saw each other briefly backstage at the Oscars and Emmys she hosted.  But I have to admit I put her on the back burner when she started her own talk show eleven seasons ago.

    I mean I didn’t TOTALLY forget her, but I was in a relatively new relationship with another woman who required my full attention and also involved in one of those high-pressure careers that kept me in an office during my usual Ellen liaisons.  So we languished…

    Until this year.  The unlikely year of 2013.  Why unlikely, you ask?  Well first of all, it’s an odd-numbered year and if you’ve been with me for a long time, you know I never think anything good takes place in an odd-numbered year.  Unless there’s an exceptional turn around in the last two months, I have to say my instincts of foreboding have been spot on.

    That’s what I love about my getting back together again with Ellen.  I swear the girl lifts me up.  As Reba McEntire would sing,

         You lift me up, up, up, up to heaven…

              Yes, you make my world go round.

    Ellen is a rare commodity in the world these days.  She’s an optimist who wants to spread the spirit of love and hope to a people who need to look at life with renewed faith in the kindness of each other.  Her generosity touches the hearts of the hardened and encourages them to try again.  Give each other a chance.

    So for the naysayers who shake their heads and mutter Oh well, anybody can be nice for an hour, I say shame on you.  My BFF Ellen rocks and you’ll agree if you take the time to get to know her – which is kind of like what we should be doing with everybody else we meet.  For an hour or even longer.

  • She Was Hotter than a Two Dollar Pistol


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    Maggie the Cat in famous lingerie

    The stuff that dreams are made of

    My love affair with Elizabeth Taylor has lasted longer than any of my real-life relationships and all of her eight marriages.  Liz and I go way back.

    We started in 1956 with Giant which I got to see because my mother heard it was a historical movie about West Texas oil.  I was ten years old at the time she took me to see it at the Miller’s Theater in Navasota, and I decided right then and there if this was how history looked, I was all about yesterday.  I fell in love with the heroine who was married to Rock Hudson but wild for James Dean.  She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

    The following year Raintree County was released, and it was then and is today my most favorite silver screen experience with this Golden Age of Hollywood icon.  She was “hotter than a two dollar pistol and the fastest thing around…” as George Jones sang twenty years later.  For two and a half hours, I lusted after Liz who played Susanna the Hottie southern belle who stole Johnny Shawnessy from boring whiny Nell.  I never understood why two women would be in love with Montgomery Clift anyway, but I certainly knew why he was taken with Liz.

    001

    “Look at the birdie, look at the tree…my gal’s the prettiest in the whole county.”

    from Raintree County

    I’ve seen that movie countless times with its Gone With the Wind wannabes and celebrated flaws, but I truly don’t care.  For some of her fans, Liz will be remembered as Maggie the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the sexy slip or Catherine in the white bathing suit in Suddenly, Last Summer or the scandalous affairs with co-stars Eddie Fisher and Richard Burton on the sets of Butterfield 8 and Cleopatra, respectively.  Others will see her as the child star in National Velvet and the Lassie movies or the deranged middle-aged Martha in 1966 in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  for which she won her second Oscar.

    She will be remembered by many for her notorious marriages and divorces – all eight of them – think Debbie Reynolds, for example.  Then think Richard Burton and Cleopatra.  If you remember the hullabaloo from those torrid days, you must also remember the  Voting Rights Act of 1965…an act that the Supremes struck down this year.  But don’t get me started on that.

    Why Liz?  Why now, you ask?

    I visited a friend this week and saw the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof poster  (a poster he bought from me at one of our downsizing yard sales!) and was reminded of the time fifty years ago when I fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor and wrote her a fan letter and received a glossy 5 x 7 “autographed” photo of her from MGM.  Love, Liz, she signed.

    And I do.

  • Where Do I Put Those Memories?


    Country music legend Charley Pride sang about a lost love many years ago and asked a question that haunts me today as I gaze at the signs of autumn around me:

    Where do I put her memory?

         I can’t chase it, erase it, I just have to face it…It’s gonna be there a long, long time.

    The days grow shorter, the pinestraw falls freely from the ancient tall pines that surround our house in Columbia, the red and gold and brown leaves from the dogwood trees mingle with each other in the straw on the ground in the back yard, the magnificent oak that hovers over the patio pummels the bricks with acorns that make Chelsea sick when she eats them, the temperature drops fifteen degrees from the scorching summer highs and the humidity decreases to a reasonable level.  Football fever takes over the weekends and wins and losses affect moods in our home.

    Autumn has arrived.  There’s no doubt about it.  The days will now be a blur through the end of the year.  Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.  The holidays propel us to another year faster than a speeding bullet.  Hide and watch.

    The losses in this year have been enormous for my family both here and in Texas, and it’s the second year in a row for these life altering events.  So many are gone that I feel like The Rapture occurred and I was left while all the good ones were taken.   I’m looking for a place to put those memories – those reminiscences of  my times with the lost ones.  I’m grateful to have them, but I’d like to have a box to put them in so that I could control when I wanted to release them into my mind.  Today the memories control me instead.

    I can’t chase them, erase them, I just have to face them.  They’re gonna be with me for a long, long time.

  • Shadows of the Evening Steal Across the Sky


    The sun was a gigantic circle of intense bright light as I walked on Old Plantersville Road tonight and the colors in the sky surrounding it took my breath away.  They were all that – and then some.  No camera this evening.  Just me and the sunset.  It’s as close as I come to a spiritual moment and not surprising that the words of a hymn I sang over and over again during my Southern Baptist days played in my head while I walked.

    Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh.

    Shadows of the evening steal across the sky.

    Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose;

    With thy tenderest blessing may mine eyelids close.

    —-Sabine Baring-Gould, published 1865

    A few raindrops fell on me as I turned toward home from the railroad track which is my usual turnaround spot.  I didn’t even care.  The colors changed quickly in the sky as the sun went down behind the trees across the pasture.  I slowed my pace to catch as many of them as I could, and the rain stopped for me so I wouldn’t have to hurry.

    The day was over, and shadows of the evening stole across the sky right in front of me.  Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose.  My Random House Dictionary defines repose as, among other things, a dignified calmness…composure.  Yes, give the weary a sweet repose.  Let all who work hard and all who are tired of fighting the same battles or any whose pain leaves them exhausted – give them a sweet repose at the end of this day.

    And may our eyelids close.