I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

storytelling for truth lovers

  • if it weren’t for second chances, we’d all be alone (2)

    if it weren’t for second chances, we’d all be alone (2)


    When I woke up early this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, I lay in bed and thought about the million tasks we had to accomplish next month to get moved out of our Texas house that we recently sold out of the blue. This stream of consciousness led me down the memory lane to a post I’d written here about Second Chances two years ago.

    I found it in the archives for September, 2012 and  re-read it, decided it was a little over the top because I devoted so much time talking about the “epistemology” of second chances.  Seriously, what was that about?  Clearly no one gives a hoot or a holler about that word anymore.

    For those of you who are my most loyal followers and who read the epistemology piece before I could figure out how to edit, thank you very much for indulging my big word fantasies. For those of you who just tuned in and have a burning interest in epistemology, please do take the time to visit the archives for the post.

    What I intended to say is I have been extraordinarily lucky to have had second chances to reconnect with my family and friends in Texas since Pretty and I bought our home on Worsham Street in March, 2010.  I’ve shared more holidays, birthdays, domino-playing days and nights, barbecue brisket, bourbon, Tex-Mex, margaritas, Lone Star First Saturdays, wine festivals, bluebonnet pastures, cookie walks, cemetery crawls, country music, front-porch rocking and visiting, bird watching and driving back country roads in the past four years than in the previous forty years. Yee haw – I even got used to wearing cowboy boots and hats again.

    I also found that taking these second chances gave me new first ones, too.  Living on Worsham Street in the little town of Montgomery was a slice of American life I’d lost faith in somewhere along the way.  My neighbors in the 600 block of Worsham became dear friends who reminded me that community and family are not abstract concepts but people who love and support each other through it all. I find that a message of hope for our country and our world.

    I’ve added Rule Number Six to the five rules I made up in that September, 2012 post:  Don’t confuse your second chances with your first choices or your first choices may become your second chances.

    Life is tricky, ain’t it?

    ***************

    I can’t believe I published this piece ten years ago in February, 2014 which means I left Texas, friends, and family then for a second time; but some of my mixed memories from that four-year sabbatical follow me today.  Regardless of the longing in my heart for the Texas of my childhood, a time and place I no longer recognize, I treasure the second chance I had to appreciate new relationships, a renewed kinship with my native land. I believe my dad would have been proud because he told me too many times “you can take the girl out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the girl.”

  • if it weren’t for second chances, we’d all be alone

    if it weren’t for second chances, we’d all be alone


    Our lecture for today, o cyberspace class, is the epistemology of the second chance. (Sometimes I just throw in a big word to see if anybody’s paying attention.)  Frankly, I don’t remember  much about epistemology from my scholarly life except I heard it used in my undergraduate philosophy classes and my graduate studies in theology.

    To refresh my memory, I looked up the definition and found the word epistemology involves knowledge and the justification of knowledge; but then the dictionary wandered off into a question of what is knowledge, how can it be justified and I immediately remembered why I dropped out of seminary. Way too much digression and grey areas for a 23-year-old CPA who dealt in absolute numbers before answering a “call” to the ministry that was surely a wrong number.

    During the forty years I wandered in the wilderness of numbers I grew accustomed to vague responses and  half-truths. I tried to blend in with a landscape camouflaged by degrees of knowledge that were justified with competing strident voices blasting away at each other from polarized positions of territorial absolutes.

    Yep, nothing like trying to convince people you own a piece of knowledge when they don’t agree with you. You can’t justify it to them no matter how hard you try and how loud you get because they own a piece of knowledge, too, which happens to be totally different from yours. That’s how it all goes downhill and the histrionics aren’t far behind. If only knowledge depended on the wisdom of golfers, epistemology would include the concept of Mulligans.  Mulligans are second chances.

    If someone hits a shot with a driver off the tee on the first hole and the little white golf ball vanishes mysteriously in deep woods closer to the fairway for the third hole than it is to the first hole, the golfer can say Mulligan and have a second chance to locate her own fairway again. She may hit a beautiful shot for her Mulligan or she may not, but the important thing is to have a new opportunity.

    In our personal lives second chances are sometimes painfully obvious and at other times so subtle we may miss them. As an old numbers person, I couldn’t resist creating a list of five lessons for successful second chances.

    Lesson Number One: Be open, available, alert to identify second chances; don’t think you won’t ever need one. You will.

    Lesson Number Two:  When you get a second chance, try not to think of it as an opportunity to repeat mistakes. Mistakes are hard to take back so don’t blow your Mulligan.

    Lesson Number Three: Be sure to tell your friends about your second chance. It may give them hope and inspire them to offer one or accept one. Honestly, can there be too many second chances going around?

    Lesson Number Four:  Your second chance may be your last chance.   Really?  100%.

    Lesson Number Five: Never be afraid to take a second chance when you have one. As Franklin Roosevelt famously said when the Hounds of the Baskervilles were closing in around him, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

    Finally o cyberspace class, the lecture concludes with a little bit of knowledge mixed with a bunch of justification that adds up to the epistemology of the second chance as seen from the eyes of a 66-year-old who has had her own share of second chances; and has at various times in her life blown them, needed a third or fourth chance, and had some of them bring incredible happiness.

    Be generous to those you love and even to those whose knowledge is different from yours. Ouch. Is that really necessary?  Absolutely.

    *************

    This piece is one I originally published in September, 2012 following the death of my mother which had been a long time coming but given me a wonderful second chance for a more honest relationship with her in the final two years of her life – it was a second chance I embraced. Another second chance was on the horizon, but I had broken all of my own rules which made me oblivious to a second chance that came perilously close to being disastrous. I was reminded of this time in my life recently when I heard Gregory Alan Isakof’s song Second Chances that included the lyrics which became the new title for this post.

  • Molly’s Big Birthday Weekend

    Molly’s Big Birthday Weekend


    Her family and friends celebrated Molly’s January 26th. second birthday with vigor, an occasion she seemed content to embrace while managing to control her focus. The festivities began Friday afternoon after school on the playground when her Nana (Pretty) and Naynay (me) came to pick her up – her great Aunt Darlene and Dawne had driven down from the upstate to get the weekend started. They took great pictures!

    Molly going full speed ahead with Ella close beside her

    Molly all smiles when Ella is near

    Ella and her best buddy Thomas made it to the top,

    sharing a moment

    Molly takes a playground break –

    turning two years old wears me out

    Birthday dinner at Mexican restaurant – where else?

    left hand? right hand? both work fine to eat Mexican food by myself

    Ella and Naynay study chips, salsa and queso – they’re wasting time

    The Party

    Ella and Molly tackle the Bounce House in the back yard

    I think my school friends found my toy box

    oh well, they make me say sharing is caring…but she has my doll

    my teacher Miss Stefanie came to my party – she brought her son Cole

    my mom Caroline and dad Drew love me to the moon and back

    Mama and her friends worked so hard for my birthday party –

    I had the best time

    my Nana and Naynay love me, too –

    they let me do whatever I want to do

    BIRTHDAY CAKE!

    Happy Birthday to me!

    ******************

    Molly was oblivious to another birthday gift she received when a woman named E. Jean Carroll received an $83.3 million dollar settlement on Molly’s birthday against a former president of the United States for his years of bullying her in public. Carroll’s stand was a ray of hope that will help Molly and all little girls have the courage to be brave when they are confronted with behavior designed to make them feel lesser than. Thank you for that gift, Ms. Carroll.

  • the times they are a-changin’

    the times they are a-changin’


    Queen Elizabeth II wasn’t feeling jubilant for her Silver Jubilee in the trailer for Season 3 of the Netflix series The Crown as she rode in the parade inside the royal golden carriage pulled by six white horses. Rather, the fifty-one year old Defender of the Faith was portrayed briefly as a middle-aged woman sitting alone in a coach, focused more on her failures than hope for the future as the ominous percussion of Fort Nowhere grew louder when the lyrics to the music began: Come gather ’round people wherever you roam, for the times they are a’changing...The enormity of the changes that would take place before the Queen’s death during her Platinum Jubilee year in 2022, forty-five years following the Silver Jubilee in 1977, made Bob Dylan’s classic song from 1964 more prophecy than poetry.

    Meanwhile, on another popular Netflix series a Canadian woman in her twenties who was sometimes known as the Miracle Girl from Hudson, Alberta because of her unique relationship with horses was suddenly forced to confront unimaginable loss by tragic circumstances that left Amy the Miracle Girl with similar feelings of hopelessness and dread of the future in Heartland‘s 14th. season as Queen Elizabeth II had faced in the third season of The Crown. Episode 7 (Courage) of that season ended with Fort Nowhere again framing the background music while Amy began her lengthy journey from despair to hope: Come gather ’round people wherever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown. And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone if your time to you is worth saving. And you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changing…As the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fading. And the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changing.

    Now you may be thinking I watch too much Netflix when I can connect random dots from Queen Elizabeth II to a Miracle Girl from Alberta, Canada; but it is the music of Bob Dylan through the voices of Fort Nowhere, a person (group?) I didn’t know, that inspired me to reconsider the lyrics to the times, they are a-changing. When I did look at Dylan’s words, I found a powerful personal message which is, after all, the secret to his musical legacy.

    Come writers and critics
    Who prophesize with your pen
    And keep your eyes wide
    The chance won’t come again
    And don’t speak too soon
    For the wheel’s still in spin
    And there’s no tellin’ who
    That it’s namin’
    For the loser now
    Will be later to win
    For the times they are a-changin’

    The older I get, the faster the wheel spins.

    *******************

    Slava Ukraini. For the Ukrainian tennis players in the 2024 Australian Open.