I'll Call It Like I See It

Barbie, Beyonce, Taylor? Yeah, but my vote goes to Ruby and Shaye for 2023 women of the year

I’ve gone through a tough time this last year with political current events under the Republican control of the House of Representatives where they were more obsessed with finding and keeping a Speaker than confronting America’s dilemmas at home and abroad in 2023. The refugees at our borders desperately seeking safety and security while citizens in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California struggle under the weight of thousands of immigrants crossing their southern borders every day; blocking international aid packages for the people of Ukraine and Israel who are waging desperate wars to protect democracies against terrorism; embracing the Big Lie of the 2020 presidential election – the People’s House no longer represents the majority of the people in this country. They do, however, manage to scare me to death.

I’ve had several moments of hope in the past year but no personal giddiness until a jury in New York awarded $148 million to Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman on December 15, 2023 in a decision against former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani for his targeted destruction of their lives through defamation of their characters following their service as election workers in Georgia for the 2020 election. Joy to the world, I thought in keeping with the season, accountability reigns. These courageous Black women have persistently sought justice for the loss of their identities for the past three years, and a jury of their peers rewarded these sacrifices in a tangible manner.

CNN December 20, 2023

Shaye Moss speaks while her mother Ruby Freeman listens

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But Giuliani refuses to keep his mouth shut about the two women who defeated him. All is still not calm nor particularly bright in the former mayor’s mind.

“On the heels of winning a $148 million defamation judgment Friday against Rudy Giuliani, former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss have again sued the former New York City mayor seeking to “permanent bar” him from making additional defamatory comments about them…

In a 134-page complaint filed Monday, attorneys for the two women wrote that Giuliani “continues to spread the very same lies for which he has already been held liable,” citing comments made last week to ABC News’ Terry Moran outside of court, in which Giuliani insisted that Freeman and Moss were “changing votes.”

The two women asked the court to prevent Giuliani from “making or publishing … further statements repeating any and all false claims that plaintiffs engaged in election fraud, illegal activity, or misconduct of any kind during or related to the 2020 presidential election.” (ABC News, Lucien Bruggeman, December 18, 2023)

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I congratulate the Barbie financial empire creators, Beyonce and Taylor Swift for their amazing accomplishments and recognitions in 2023 – feminist has returned to favor in a world that needs a woman’s touch. But remember Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, too, for their historic win against a man who picked the wrong battle and lost.

Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa la la la la, fa la la la. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la, la la la la. I’m in the mood to deck a few halls.

December 21, 2023

Ma, please tell the three eggs story again

Bring a child up with the gift of laughter, and when she is old she will not depart from it. The three eggs story always made me laugh when my grandmother told it, and it still makes me smile. Enjoy.

My paternal grandmother was called Ma by me and her four other grandchildren. We called her that so much even my grandfather changed from her given name Betha to calling her Ma. Ma was a wonderful storyteller who saved her best material for the small round table in her kitchen. Her audience usually consisted of me and my grandfather who, of course, became known as Pa.

One of my favorite “Ma” stories involved my grandfather’s brother Ebb and his wife Carrie. They lived in Hearne, Texas which was roughly 50 miles from our little town of Richards where my grandfather had a barbershop with one chair. Ma wasn’t very fond of Ebb because he drove all the way from Hearne to have Pa cut his hair for free, and he usually brought his mischievous little twin boys Phil and Bill. Phil and Bill also received the family discount rate of “free,” and this irritated Ma.

They’re nothing but freeloaders, George, Ma would say to my grandfather after every visit. But that’s not the story. This is.

The Methodist preacher asked Ebb and Carrie late Saturday afternoon if they would mind to put up Sunday morning’s visiting preacher at their house that Saturday night. Well this put them into a tizzy because Carrie told Ebb the house wasn’t straight and they didn’t have anything for breakfast on Sunday morning. But being the good Methodists they were, they determined to welcome the preacher and give him a place to stay.

Before the preacher came to the house, Carrie called the bad little four-year-old twins Phil and Bill to the kitchen to tell them they were having company and she didn’t have enough food for breakfast the next morning.. They only had three eggs left so she wanted them to be sure they said no when she asked them if they wanted an egg for breakfast.

Ebb had them practice the routine Saturday afternoon. Phil, do you want an egg for breakfast? No, Daddy. Bill, do you want an egg for breakfast? No, Daddy.

The next morning came, and the preacher sat at the kitchen table for breakfast with Ebb and the twins while Carrie was making the food. Phil, do you want an egg for breakfast? Carrie asked. No, Mama, Phil replied.

Bill, do you want an egg for breakfast? Carrie asked to which Bill answered “me bweve me want fwee eggs.”

And then Ma would laugh uproariously at the thought of the expression on Ebb and Carrie’s face when Bill asked for three eggs. Ma loved nothing better than capitalizing on the misfortune of others – especially if they were the part of Pa’s family that didn’t pay for their haircuts.

Honestly, Ma told the three eggs story on Ebb and Carrie for many years, and I laughed appropriately at the punch line every time she told it. So did my grandfather because he thought Ma was the funniest person who ever walked the face of the earth. I think the secret to their 65 years together was the laughter they shared at the little round kitchen table every day. He would tell who came to the barbershop that day, and Ma would be off and running on her monologue. Ma was a sit-down comic as opposed to a stand-up one.

As for me, I miss those lunches – both the food and the conversations, the love and humor. What I wouldn’t give to hear Ma tell the three eggs story again today.

Ma and Pa

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Slava Ukraini. For all the children everywhere.

December 20, 2023

visions of sugar plums dancing in my head

I know I posted this piece earlier in the year,

but the story belongs in my holiday musings.

Enjoy.

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills – oops, no that wasn’t me; that was Meryl Streep saying the first line from one of my favorite movies Out of Africa.

I meant to say once upon a time I had a plum tree in the far southwest corner of our back yard on Worsham Street in Montgomery. The first year we were there that plum tree rained plums like pecans off a pecan tree in San Saba, the pecan capital of Texas. For reinforcements to help with the harvest, I first asked my next-door neighbor Jon who brought a ladder to pick the ones higher than I could reach on a tree that was twenty feet tall. He also was the first to suggest we should make plum jelly, an idea I rejected as ludicrous because I didn’t cook anything anymore. Enter my cousin James Paul, my mother’s brother’s son, who lived nearby and volunteered to help make plum jelly because he had my Aunt Mildred’s recipe. Hm. He had a secret family recipe for plum jelly so maybe this was a sign I couldn’t ignore.

Okay, what’s next, I repeated to James who stood beside me in the kitchen but appeared lost in a trance for what seemed to me to be an inordinate amount of time. His eyes were closed so long I began to wonder if he’d drifted off to sleep. James, what’s next, I said louder with more than a bit of impatience.

Well Cuz, I think we need to put a bunch of these plums in some water and boil them for a while. That’s what we maybe need to do first, he finally said.

What? I asked. You think we maybe need to start by boiling some plums in water for a while? What kind of recipe is that?

Yeah, I seem to be having a little problem remembering the exact order Mother did things in, he replied. It’s been more than fifty years ago since I was a kid watching her, you know. I figured it would all come back to me, and I think it probably will. Besides, I thought you’d be more help. He stared at me – I stared back.

Then the lunacy of what we were doing hit us both, and we started laughing together. We were having a good time. It was fun to try to re-create a simpler period in our lives when our people made some of the food we ate in our home kitchens, to reconnect to the lost sense of that family we’d had in those earlier days since we basically were apart our entire adult lives except for an occasional Christmas when our paths crossed in random moments under one roof. We shared the same family roots that gave us joy in our early childhood days, the family that gave us our hopes and dreams for the future. For James and me on a Sunday afternoon in my Worsham Street kitchen in the third act of our lives making plum jelly was an act of faith.

But what we needed at the moment was a recipe.

James Paul called his older sister Charlotte who matter-of-factly reminded him their mother always used the recipe enclosed in the SureJell box. So much for secret family recipes, I thought. I could feel the wheels coming off my Colonel Sanders vision for a plum jelly empire. We opened one of the dozen SureJell boxes I bought the night before at the Brookshire Brothers grocery store and followed the directions that were indeed included with purchase. Charlotte was always the practical one and had a better memory than her brother and her cousin put together when it came to her mother’s cooking.

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Four hours later, eleven pints of plum jelly jars formed a line like red soldiers on the white kitchen counter. Each lid popped as it sealed to salute us for a job well done. James held a single jar to the light from the window over the kitchen sink and declared it to have the perfect clear plum color. We were happy cousins that afternoon and talked about how good the jelly would be on toast at breakfast. I wanted to taste the final product as soon as we finished, of course, but James told me it should set for a couple of days first. Naturally, he would remember that. We promised to call each other as soon as we took the first bite.

The taste of the jelly James and I made from plums on a tree in my own yard in 2010 defied description. I called him two days later after the jelly had time to set and asked him what he thought. Cuz, that jelly is about the best I ever had in my life, he said. I’ve eaten it on two pieces of toast this morning. It’s sweet, but still has a little perfect tart taste to it, too. And what did I tell you about the color? Prettiest reddish pink color I ever saw on jelly. I can’t believe we really did make it, can you? I had the most fun I’ve had in a long time. We’ve got a fig tree over here at our house in Navasota that’ll be producing before long. We ought to try making fig preserves, don’t you think?

Yes, that sounds good. I’ll have to bring your mother’s pots and pans back to you. Fig preserves should be a cinch for us now that we’re experts in the jelly business. I don’t know about you, but I think it’ll be tough for me to buy Smucker’s or Welch’s jelly again with any enthusiasm. Couldn’t agree more, he said. We just have to make what we have last through the winter. That could be a problem, I told him, and we both laughed.

I’m not sure if the taste improved with the intensity of the labor or the love James and I shared that Sunday afternoon in our hot Texas kitchen, but I know I ate peanut butter and plum jelly sandwiches for the rest of the summer. My neighbor Jon and I also had a great time together when we made his version of plum jelly from a cyberspace recipe he Googled which was much quicker to make than the SureJell one, or maybe I was just getting the hang of it… or maybe Jon did all the work.

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Slava Ukraini. For all the children everywhere.

December 19, 2023

the provenance of my mid-century modern Christmas letter

In days of yore before Pretty introduced me to her antique empire vernacular, I couldn’t distinguish vintage from antique from retro to mid-century modern. Provenance was a self-discovery word from watching countless episodes of Antiques Roadshows with her on Monday nights after I gave up on the NFL when Plan B free agency ruined the game for me. TMI.

My mother loved her Christmas cantatas at the church, decorating for the holidays, wrapping gifts, baking her homemade fudge, divinity and specialty Osgood pies – baking was her therapy during the two weeks away from her second grade classrooms once she could relax from the stress of the musical performance. My mother often told me “practice makes perfect” when she sat for hours at her piano working on a particularly difficult section of a piece. She was pursued by her passion for perfection.

But her signature holiday delights were the Christmas cards our family received every year from friends and family members who were separated from us by distances in a world before Instagram, Facebook, Linked In and X. The address book Pretty and I found when we closed her house in 2007 was in tatters from decades of use – addresses scratched out, crammed with new ones on the same line. She never let go of her Christmas card list.

My dad, on the other hand, barely glanced at the cards when they came in with the exception of the Christmas card letters which he felt were far superior to cards sent and received. I can hear Daddy saying to my mother, Jimmy and Maggie Jones have the right idea – they always take the time to write a letter even though they are as busy as we are. (Remember my dad loved to write letters.)

In December, 1964 my thirty-seven year old mother must have been particularly wigged and frustrated by her inability to “get everything done” including her holiday cards mailed on time so she and my thirty-nine year old father agreed to jointly construct their first and, as far as I know, only mid-century antique family Christmas letter. Daddy had a secretary at his new position as Assistant Superintendent of Instruction at Lamar Consolidated in Rosenberg, Texas – clearly he enlisted her to set up and type the letter to save time for Mama’s mailings. I know this because my name is misspelled in every block.

Ho, ho, ho – that was just the provenance. Here’s the letter. Enjoy.

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Unbelievably it is Christmas again. Pretty and I enjoy this season greatly because it’s a special time of sharing. We know of no one we’d rather share our happy highlights with than you all year long right here in cyberspace. Our wish to you is, of course, for a Merry Christmas, but more than that, we pray that God will bless your lives richly in the coming year.