I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

storytelling for truth lovers

  • in case you missed it

    in case you missed it


    On Thursday, August 03, 2023 ABC News (and every other news organization in the world) reported that former President Donald J. Trump has been indicted in the special counsel’s investigation into his alleged plot to overthrow the 2020 election. Trump has been charged by Special Counsel Jack Smith with four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.

    “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false,” the indictment said.

    I’m no mathematician, but my count is two years and nearly seven months for the indictment to be filed against Trump since the Insurrection on January 06, 2021. What have those busy bees at the Justice Department been up to during that considerable amount of time for this indictment to be issued? Hm. Let’s see. For one thing they’ve been tallying the actual losses to the buildings and grounds as well as costs to the City of Washington Police as of October 14, 2022: $2,881,360.20 per the 30-month report filed by the US Department of Justice.

    This report goes on to say “More than 1,069 defendants have been charged across all 50 states and the District of Columbia… Approximately 561 federal defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences for their criminal activity on Jan. 6. Approximately 335 have been sentenced to periods of incarceration. Approximately 119 defendants have been sentenced to a period of home detention, including approximately 19 who also were sentenced to a period of incarceration.”

    And yet, the person who was in my mind the instigator of the coup attempt to overthrow our democracy on January 06, 2021 has been playing golf and allegedly showing classified documents from his presidency to random guests at his estate in Mar-a-lago in Palm Beach, Florida for the past thirty months. The level of difficulty to indict a former president must be mind-boggling while charging social media influencer Kai Cenat with inciting a riot and unlawful assembly in Union Square in New York City on Friday August 4th., just one day after Trump’s arraignment on criminal charges, took fewer than twenty-four hours. Apples to oranges, you say? Most assuredly, but the wheels of justice moved at warp speed against Cenat while similar wheels must have spun out of control for Trump’s criminal behavior to be charged.

    I feel a sense of relief for Trump’s day of reckoning, his own judgment day to be on somebody’s calendar somewhere. Big wheel of justice keep on turning, please, but kick it into high gear. This guy is running for re-election in 2024.

  • You Can’t Paint a Sunset (from The Short Side of Time)

    You Can’t Paint a Sunset (from The Short Side of Time)


    I took a late evening walk down Old Plantersville Road tonight just as the sun was setting. I rounded the curve by the trailer park and walked past the wide open pastures on both sides of the road where the view of a Texas sunset was spectacular. Tonight’s colors of pinks, blues and reds were particularly beautiful; I picked a good spot about halfway to the railroad track to behold the sight.

    As I watched the light colors quickly deepen into darker hues, I was reminded of my mom’s favorite saying about sunsets: “Well, you can’t paint a sunset.  It changes too fast.”  I couldn’t count the times I heard her repeat the sunset quote – and this was before her memory care days. I can only imagine a teacher must have made that remark in the one art class my mother took in her entire life. I wonder if her teacher would be stunned to know what an indelible impression she made on one of her students. If Mom found a phrase she liked, she clung to it.

    The next thought that came to me was we couldn’t walk off into sunsets either, and you can quote me.

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

    When I lived in Texas on Worsham Street from 2010 – 2014, I loved late afternoons as the sun began to signal day’s end while it slowly sank toward the western horizon. I often took a walk on a road one street behind our home called Old Plantersville Road because the best views of sunset were from the wide open spaces of the pastures along the road. This particular walk was in July, 2013 – I can still smile at my mother’s phrase, and I can still see those sunsets that took my breath away.

  • something old, something new – something special

    something old, something new – something special


    I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I doubt I deserved my friends. –Walt Whitman. This is a story about a friendship that lasted more than sixty years. My Aunt Lucille passed away ten years ago on March 21, 2013 – eight days after I  originally posted this piece about her and her friend Jan. 

    Yesterday I visited with my favorite Aunt Lucille who lives in Beaumont which is ninety-nine miles east of Montgomery on Texas Highway 105. I always look forward to my visits with her. Lucy refuses to give up her independent living apartment in a retirement community that offers assisted living and other higher levels of care for which she would qualify. Instead, she keeps her mind active with crossword puzzles and other word games in the daily newspaper. Her knowledge of current events acquired through the TV and conversations is as good as it gets. She pushes herself out of bed, showers, dresses and puts on makeup every day.

    My aunt Lucy will be ninety-three years old in May and has a list of ailments plus a personal pharmacy to treat them. A recent setback makes movement even more difficult for her, but she makes a determined effort to rejoin her friends at their reserved dinner table downstairs almost every evening. It’s a long walk from her apartment on the third floor to the lobby of the next building for meals. Trust me.

    Yesterday she told me one of her friends was coming by this afternoon for a visit. I recognized the name because she had talked about Jan for as long as I could remember so I decided to crash the party. She told me Jan was recovering from a stroke and her caregiver would be bringing her by. When Jan arrived promptly at two o’clock, Lucy got up from the sofa in the living room and pushed her walker toward Jan’s. When they met in the middle of the room, they both smiled and hugged each other with genuine joy on their faces. After introductions all round, we sat down to talk.

    Lucy and Jan met in 1953 when they both lived with their husbands in an apartment complex in Beaumont. They first talked when they were outdoors hanging clothes on the clothesline behind their apartment building. Both women were new to Beaumont – Jan’s daughter was born in the spring before Lucy’s was born in October that year. They were new mothers who quickly became new friends. Their husbands luckily liked each other, too which meant the couples got together often. Lucy’s husband Jay died in 1979 while Jan and her husband Otis shared a sixty-fifth wedding anniversary before his recent death.

    What struck me as I listened to them talk about their families, about what was going on in their lives now was how remarkable it must be to have a friendship that stretches across sixty years of change and challenges. Their bond survived everything life threw at them. Hot and cold seasons came and went for six decades, but their loyalty to each other never got too hot to go up in flames or too cold to freeze and wither away.

    In a separate happening this week I was reminded of friendships I’ve lost in the past years along with the pain that accompanies losing them. We are a mobile society; our moving parts rarely stay in the same place for very long. We change our homes, our jobs and the people in our lives that go with them. Sometimes we just change the people in our lives. For Lucy and Jan, however, the new became old over sixty years – but always remained special. Their story of friendship is a remarkable one I continue to salute today.

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

    Ten years after her death, I still miss my Aunt Lucille. Thankfully her daughter Melissa and I continue to maintain a family connection I cherish.

  • passing the torch at the beach

    passing the torch at the beach


    Let the word go forth from this time
    and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed
    to a new generation of Americans.”
    — John F. Kennedy, January 20, 1961, Inauguration Day

    (l. to r.) 3 year old Ella and her Nana, 5 year old Collins and her Kitty

    friends in the water

    friends on dry land

    Let’s blow this popsicle stand

    Grandma Camp at Folly Beach, South Carolina

    all photos courtesy of our designated photographer Nekki

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

    Slava Ukraini. For the children.

  • You Don’t Have to Break Up to Wallow (from Four Ticket Ride)

    You Don’t Have to Break Up to Wallow (from Four Ticket Ride)


    Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life made its Netflix debut over the Thanksgiving weekend with much fanfare, hoopla and hype as the three leading actresses appeared on every talk show under the sun to promote the four-part mini-series that was supposed to be a panacea for the yearnings of a major contingent of followers who wanted more from the Gilmore women of Stars Hollow and Hartford. The original American TV comedy series ran for seven seasons from 2000 to 2007, was apparently quite popular, and still missed by many.

    Pretty and I were not Gilmore Girls watchers in those first runs; perhaps because we were younger, our relationship was newer, our social life was busier, we were watching Frasier re-runs… or something else I can’t remember. Whatever the reasons, we missed it the first time around. But since we are now seasoned Netflix subscribers and recently finished the gazillion-episode BBC series Doc Martin  and needed a new diversion, we decided to give the Gilmore Girls a whirl.

    We recently started with the first season and are now prepared to spend the rest of our lives watching Loralei and Rory get daily coffee fixes at Luke’s coffee shop because each of the early years had at least a hundred episodes per season. Luckily, we found ourselves growing fond of the characters as we usually do when the writing is good and the actors as good as the script.

    For example, in one of the first season’s episodes this week I was disappointed when teenage Rory’s first true love, Dean the grocery store bag boy, dumped her. Such a cute, sweet boy – young love blossomed, bloomed, bleeped, fizzled, done. And on their three-month anniversary, too. Sigh. What to do? Talk to Mom.

    Mom’s (Lorelei’s) advice to her teenage daughter was priceless: wallow. That’s right. Wallow. Stay in your pajamas all day while you eat pizza and ice cream…don’t put on makeup…don’t shave your legs…sit in a dark room watching old movies like Love Story, An Affair to Remember, Ishtar, Old Yeller and have a good cry. Wallow the day away.

    What’s really amazing about this advice is I’ve been wallowing minus the crying part and old movies for years without realizing it; my wallowing has nothing at all to do with my love life. I was born to wallow, and then I had a relapse when I had a real job that required getting out of bed, applying Clinique makeup every morning after my shower, spending a fortune on perms and color to give my straight-as-a-board graying hair curls and blondeness,  getting dressed in appropriate business attire, commuting long distances to an office where I sat in front of a computer screen looking at numbers all day while agonizing over the financial decisions my clients were wrestling with…all in all, a relapse that lasted 40 years.

    But now, I have reclaimed my roots (the silver ones, too), and I wallow almost each day. Some days I never get out of my pajamas, my toothpaste gets more use than my bath soap, I gave up shaving my legs for Lent and didn’t resurrect it for Easter, I only wear makeup for date nights, and my straight short white hair qualifies for the “man’s haircut rate” with my hair stylist.  The longest commute I have is from my upstairs office to the kitchen downstairs. Life is good.

    Writing is the perfect career for wallowing. If Pretty asks me what I’ve been doing when she comes home from surveying her antique empire and finds me still in my pajamas, I can say Oh, I’ve been writing all day – which could or could not be exactly true. Unless you count watching In the Heat of the Night as research. (Ishtar, no thanks.)

    Today is New Year’s Eve, the last day of 2016, the day when many of us will be making our resolutions for 2017. I have started my list with the same one I’ve started with for the past 40 years: I need to lose 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 pounds this year. My, how time flies.

    Hm. I never get past that first one.

    If you are making your list and checking it twice, add a day to wallow once a month. You don’t need to break up a relationship to do it – simply indulge and wallow. Indulge. Wallow. Enjoy.

    Pretty and I wish you a Happy New Year from our home at Casa de Canterbury to yours wherever you are in cyberspace around the world – stay safe, and we’ll look forward to having you hang with us in 2017!

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

    In 2017 Pretty and I moved from our two-story Casa de Canterbury in downtown Columbia across the Gervais Street Bridge over the Congaree River to our one-story Casa de Cardinal in West Columbia, fifteen minutes away. Happily, many of our friends in cyberspace made the move with us. And yes, to answer your question, I do still wallow but in the intervening years I read something about the importance of getting dressed every day even if you work from home, so I have given up wallowing in pajamas. The good news is it’s possible to wallow in street clothes. In April of 2021 when I turned 75 years old I finally followed through on a Birthday Eve resolution to lose 50 pounds and have kept it off for two years. In July of 2023 it’s kinda fun to think about New Year’s Eve temperatures and using the oppressive heat as an excuse to wallow. Give it a whirl.