I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

storytelling for truth lovers

  • the eyes of texas – and the rest of the world – are upon you

    the eyes of texas – and the rest of the world – are upon you


    A thirty-eight year old man accused of murdering five neighbors in Cleveland, Texas was captured in a smaller Texas town called Cut and Shoot that was less than 20 miles from where the crime happened after a massive four day manhunt by a collection of law enforcement organizations.The man lived next door to the victims which included two women aged 21 and 31 respectively, a 25 year old woman and her 9 year old son, and an 18 year old young man. According to the 9 year old’s father, the neighbor walked into their home armed with an AR-15 rifle and began shooting after an altercation between them over a crying baby in his home and the neighbor’s shooting practice in the next door yard.

    According to data published by Caroline Covington on July 28, 2022 in the Texas Tribune, Texans purchased more than 1.6 million guns in 2021 which was about 1 gun for every 14 adults in the state. Concurrently in 2021 the Texas legislature passed new laws allowing the open carry of handguns without a license to carry those guns under certain conditions per information provided by the Texas State Law Library. The Wild, Wild West of Hollywood westerns in the 1940s and 50s had returned to those thrilling days of yesteryear but the guns of the 21st. century were more powerful, more accessible, able to kill innocent people much quicker than the ones used in the 1952 Gary Cooper film High Noon.

    When Pretty and I had a second home on Worsham Street in Montgomery, Texas from 2010 – 2014 we drove through Cut and Shoot whenever we made one of our countless thousand mile trips between South Carolina and Texas. During that time we used the Cut and Shoot post office as a sign we were almost to Conroe which meant we were less than an hour from Worsham Street. Even our dogs sensed the two day drive south and west was nearing the end when we slowed for the small town speed limit and stopped for several red lights there.

    Now the name Cut and Shoot is infamous as the town where the Cleveland mass shooter was captured. The little town that got its name from a fight between two (who’s suprised?) religious groups, the home of ostensibly the only person with any claim to fame (professional heavyweight boxer Roy Harris) would achieve notoriety as the place where a middle-aged man with an AR-15 who killed five of his younger neighbors in Cleveland was found hiding in a closet in a house there.

    I really don’t care if the people killed and/or the killer were shades of black, brown, white, or mix-ish; what I do care about is that somebody somewhere had an AR-15 rifle and a temper. Everyone has a temper to some degree – even our fifteen month old granddaughter Molly gets mad when she hears the word No, and she feels free to act out by throwing whatever is in her hand to the ground as hard as she can.

    But not everyone has an AR-15 rifle, and in my opinion not everyone should.

    Ban the damn things. Ban them all.

  • one final birthday card – and gift

    one final birthday card – and gift


    The card was given to me by my good friend Bing at dinner in our favorite Mexican restaurant last night where she and another good friend Meghan treated Pretty and me to a delicious meal. Yummy!

    The card came with this book for our granddaughters – nothing is better than a delightful “message” book for an activist’s granddaughters. I loved it – and will love reading it to them. If you haven’t read it, you must. The words of wisdom work for all of us regardless of our ages.

    I must say thank you to everyone who has bombarded me with good wishes during what became my 77th. birthday month! You have made this a super time, as our three year old Ella says when she reaches for hyperbole. I couldn’t say it better myself.

    Onward.

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

    Slava Ukraini. For the children.

  • you can cage the singer, but not the song – Harry Belafonte (1927 – 2023)

    you can cage the singer, but not the song – Harry Belafonte (1927 – 2023)


    When I began my great escape from the familiar including what I felt at the time was the root of the war between good and evil that was constantly being waged within myself, a battle royale in which I never emerged the winner, the odyssey that began in Houston, Texas with the ultimate destination being the farthest place I could find on a map of the United States, I was twenty-two years old. The destination I chose was 3,000 miles across the country to the city of Seattle, Washington in the Pacific Northwest. The year was 1968.

    The circuitous route took two weeks and included two nights in Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada. I had high hopes for evil to prevail in my inner warfare. When I arrived there late one night, my first thought was I had entered the land of the midnight sun – the lights were the brightest I had ever seen…the people hustling from casino to casino on the Strip, the hotel marquees, the energy exploding everywhere. This young lesbian from rural southeast Texas was overwhelmed but excited to be there.

    The next day I learned I could afford two shows that night in the hotels if I didn’t lose all my money at the blackjack tables in their casinos. It was a close call, but I managed to save just enough for one early show and one midnight show. The twenty-two year old lesbian opted for the midnight show at the Tropicana Hotel, the Folies Bergere, because someone had told her the women danced around with nothing but feathers on. That story turned out to be true. Mesmerizing.

    The early dinner show I saw was at Caesar’s Palace headlined by one of my favorite singers. His name was Harry Belafonte. I can’t remember the calypso songs or the other ballads he sang that night in my maiden Las Vegas show experience, but I remember to this day fifty-five years later his presence on the stage that belonged to him – the way he made me feel his music with him, that he sang especially for me. His smile was beautiful, contagious, somehow uplifting. The man moved with a power that would rival Moses parting the Red Sea; he was magnificent. He exuded a sexual confidence that made me think I might be straight. I loved him when he was young before I loved him more for who he became.

    This morning on the Today show Al Roker told a great story about Belafonte who at one point in his life wanted to rent an apartment in New York City. The landlord refused the lease because he was Black. Belafonte responded by buying the entire building and giving the penthouse to his friend Lena Horne.

    Mindful to the end that he grew up in poverty, Belafonte did not think of himself as an artist who became an activist, but an activist who happened to be an artist.

    “When you grow up, son,″ Belafonte remembered his mother telling him, “never go to bed at night knowing that there was something you could have done during the day to strike a blow against injustice and you didn’t do it.″

    Former Associated Press writer Mike Stewart contributed to this report dated October 25, 2023.

    Harry Belafonte was a living legend for his good deeds and blows struck against injustice, yet I will remember the most handsome man I ever saw in person in a time long ago and far away whose show was much more entertaining than the women wearing nothing but feathers.

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

    Pretty and I will remember your passing on April 25th. Pretty’s mother died on that day in 1998. My mother died on that same day in 2012.

    Rest in peace, Harry Belafonte. As you once said, “You can cage the singer, but not the song.”

  • and now I’m seven and seventy

    and now I’m seven and seventy


    Six years ago in the summer of 2017 I posted my version of British poet A.E. Housman’s classic poem “When I was One and Twenty” published in 1896 in a collection called A Shropshire Lad. Housman, who was born in 1859 and died in 1936 at the age of seventy-seven, had partially funded the publication of A Shropshire Lad following a publisher’s rejection. In today’s jargon, we call that self-publishing. The book has been in continuous print since then so somewhere in London a poetry publisher in the last decade of the nineteenth century cursed himself on a Roman British tablet…or on something equally appropriate for turning down this classic.

    When I Was One-and-Twenty

    When I was one-and-twenty
           I heard a wise man say,
    “Give crowns and pounds and guineas
           But not your heart away;
    Give pearls away and rubies
           But keep your fancy free.”
    But I was one-and-twenty,
           No use to talk to me.
     
    When I was one-and-twenty
           I heard him say again,
    “The heart out of the bosom
           Was never given in vain;
    ’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
           And sold for endless rue.”
    And I am two-and-twenty,
           And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
     
     
    When I was One and Twenty
    BY Sheila R. Morris

    When I was one and twenty, my father said to me,

     “Work hard, be kind to others, the truth will set you free;

    a penny saved is a penny earned was his advice to me.”

    But I was one and twenty, no use to talk to me.

    When I was one and twenty, my father said again,

    “Work harder, be smarter, but always be a friend;

    love family, serve country, life’s games are played to win.”

    And now I’m seven and seventy I hear my father say,

    “You did your best, forget the rest, your heart led all the way.”

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

    Tomorrow is my 77th. birthday which I have celebrated with Pretty and our two best friends Nekki and Francie in the south of France for ten remarkable days filled with delicious food, three days at the Masters 1000 Tennis Tournament in Monte Carlo, and a day at the Cannes Films Festival (or “pre-festival” according to Pretty who knows everything about pop culture) where I donated my last American dollars to a casino next to the pink carpet.

    The trip was on my short bucket list – a trip made possible through the generosity of our friends whose love and laughter made my bucket overflow with happiness. The time with Pretty is always special – luckily she came home with me but told me she would like to live in Nice for two years (if she could bring her granddaughters and their parents!).    

     

    (l. to r.) Francie, me, Pretty, Nekki – country come to town

    Pretty and me at Matisse Museum

    Francie and me grateful for bus

    after unexpected downpour leaving Matisse Museum

    Francie and Nekki on hotel rooftop

    Pretty happy with setting, lunch and the polka dot hat

    Thanks to our trip photographer Nekki for capturing some of our memory makers.

    And thanks to all of you, my readers and followers who have also become my friends, for sharing part of my journey over the past thirteen years. Impossible to imagine that time without you.

    Onward.

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

    Slava Ukraini. For the children.

  • easter, comes the resurrection

    easter, comes the resurrection


    Thirteen years ago this Easter my mother was in a secured memory care unit of the Atria Westchase assisted living complex in Houston, Texas. Pretty and I had just bought a second home in Montgomery, Texas so I could be closer to Mom as her dementia progressed. On that Easter Sunday in 2010 I arrived in time for a chapel service before lunch with my mom.  After lunch, well, here’s what happened…

    The traditional Easter egg hunt came to us mid-afternoon through the children of the staff members. The day was beautiful, and the fenced courtyard area was the perfect setting for a party. Those in our lunch group pushed their walkers or were wheeled outside into the bright sunlight, those who could sat in the Adirondack chairs under the portico. I met three other daughters who were visiting their mothers that day which made me glad I was there with my mother, too.

    The Latino women who were the caregivers for the memory care unit brought their children to enjoy the search for the pastel colored plastic eggs filled with candy in the tranquil setting of the facility’s outdoors. Eggs were hidden everywhere, including on and around the residents.  Jim, a tall, sad, unshaven man who never spoke and struggled to move opened the chocolate egg Rosa placed in his shirt pocket; he ate the candy before the kids arrived. No one tried to stop him including my mother who in days of yore would have surely reprimanded him in her best elementary school teacher tone.

    The small group of children burst into the courtyard with an exuberance all youngsters bring to filling an Easter basket. Ages ranged from four to twelve, with one six-month-old baby girl held by her mother. They were dressed in their Sunday best. Little boys wore ties with their jackets, little girls wore pretty spring dresses. It could’ve been a movie set, I thought, because they were strikingly beautiful shildren. They flew around grabbing eggs with gusto as their baskets filled quickly. They were noisy, laughing, talking – incredibly alive.

    It was the resurrection. For a few brief minutes, the stones were rolled away from the minds buried deep in the tombs of the bodies that kept them hidden. The children raced around the residents searching for treasures, exclaiming with delight when one was discovered. One little boy overlooked a blue egg under a wheel chair, and my mother tapped his shoulder to point it out to him. He was elated and flashed a brilliant smile at her. She responded with a look of pure delight. The smiles and the murmurings of the elderly were clear signs of their obvious joy that proclaimed the reality of Easter in those moments.  Hallelujah. We were all risen.

    Memories were made and lost that afternoon. The children who came to the place where their mothers worked to find eggs among the old people were unlikely to forget this day.  Years from now some will tell the stories of the Easter Egg Hunt with the Ancient Ones.  The stories will be as different as their own journeys will take them.  For my mother and her friends, no stories will be told because they won’t remember. My mother doesn’t know I was there for her on Easter this year which is not unexpected.  But I remember I was, and it is enough for both of us.

    I was born on another Easter Sunday morning in April 1946, and that makes the year 2010 my sixty-fourth Easter. I recollect a few of the earliest Easters from my childhood: sacred religious days for my loving Southern Baptist family who rarely missed a worship service on any Sunday of the year but never at Christmas or Easter. I also remember having a hard time finding eggs in the church hunts. My baskets never runneth over. But to be honest, in recent years Easter Sundays had been difficult to distinguish from any other day of the week.

    When I moved away from my family in Texas in my early twenties to explore my sexual identity, I didn’t know I’d be gone for forty years. I also had no way of knowing one of the costs of my freedom from family togetherness was my absence from family rituals.  Distance, travel time, money, job obligations, girlfriends—these were the obstacles I had to overcome for visits home. Or maybe they were just excuses. I usually made the trip home at Christmas and less frequently one more time in the summer. But never for Easter.

    This Easter was special for me because it was a day with no excuses necessary. I shared a Sunday sundae with my mother for lunch today at a table neither of us could have envisioned a few years before. Today was just the two of us, and if there were barriers between us that once seemed too impenetrable, they were now lost in the cobwebs of time.

    We were all risen, indeed.

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

    Happy Easter if you celebrate. Happy Passover if you celebrate. Ramadan Mubarak if you celebrate.

    (This post is an excerpt from my third book I’ll Call It like I See It)