I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: easter sunday

  • easter, comes the resurrection

    easter, comes the resurrection


    Fifteen 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 recently bought a second home in Montgomery, Texas, so I could be closer to Mom as her dementia progressed; she lost that battle two years later, but 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 thankful I was there with my mother, too.

    The Hispanic 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 voice.

    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 children. 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 their minds in those moments.  Hallelujah. We were all risen.

    Memories were made and lost that afternoon. The children who ran to find eggs among the old people in the place where their mothers worked 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 Southern Baptist family that 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 for 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.

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

     My divorce from the politics and religion of the Southern Baptist denomination took decades, but I am grateful for the biblical stories I learned in Sunday School about resurrection because I continued to believe in the power of hope I experienced even in the midst of personal despair on an Easter Sunday afternoon in Texas when the children came to play.

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

  • 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)

  • easter, comes the resurrection


    Ten 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.

    Stay tuned.

    (This is an excerpt from my third book, I’ll Call It Like I See It.)

  • an extra special Tuesday


    The cover of my third book features a family snapshot of my favorite Aunt Lucille who was my daddy’s sister, her daughter Melissa, my mother and daddy, and me.

    I am the child fiddling with my gloves and not looking at the picture-taker, whoever that might be. Probably my Uncle Jay who was my Aunt Lucille’s husband and my first cousin Melissa’s father. He liked to take pictures and had the most impressive camera of anyone in our family so naturally he was the photographer for important occasions like Easter Sunday.

    I was ten years old at the time of the photo, and I’m assuming it was a picture taken right before we went to church for an Easter service at the Richards Baptist Church in Richards, Texas the little town in Grimes County at the edge of the piney woods. Population 500 counting dogs and chickens.

    My mother looked happy – no doubt because she managed to dress me in a ruffled dress, Easter bonnet and, reluctantly, white gloves. My daddy is the one with the crew cut, which I’m sure I secretly envied.

    My Aunt Lucille is the beautiful woman wearing an appropriate corsage with her Easter outfit that included gloves, handbag and hat. Melissa was probably two years old and apparently not too thrilled with either her Easter outfit, the photographer’s efforts, or a combination of irritations as we prepared to go to church that day. She’s the pretty little girl with the frown.

    I love this picture – and I love the people in it.

    Time, distance and the vicissitudes of life, as my daddy used to say, make it difficult to keep in touch with my cousin Melissa who is the only one remaining in this picture besides me. She lives in San Leon, Texas with her husband Tim and their three dogs. San Leon is a small town on Galveston Bay past Houston if you’re driving south toward the Gulf of Mexico and the Galveston beaches. Regardless of where you’re driving, Melissa and Tim live a thousand miles from Pretty and me in South Carolina.

    But today she was in Charleston with Tim who was there on a work assignment and we had made plans to get together. Pretty wanted to take me, but she was still in the business of the final push to clear out Casa de Canterbury since the new owners brought a big ol’ moving van up to the porch today and started unloading. That’s a convoluted story for another day but needless to say, Pretty was overwhelmed with no opportunity to drive me to Charleston at this point in our lives.

    In (and up) stepped my good friend Dick Hubbard who happily agreed to drive me to see my cousin Melissa for an early lunch at her hotel today. Bless his heart. Dick and I have been friends for 30 years but usually meet for lunch in Columbia so we enjoyed the extra time to visit on the two-hour ride down to Charleston and back. Gossip,  the meaning of life, his husband Curtis,  my wife Pretty, pickup trucks were a few of our topics as we drove in a slight drizzle…just enough to require his new windshield wipers every once in a while.

    The visit with Melissa was perfect. We caught up on two years’ worth of current events in our lives since we last saw each other in Texas in the summer of 2015. We talked politics, books, retirement, what Tim was doing, how Pretty was doing – but mostly we talked about the other three people in the book cover picture who are no longer here and how much we both miss them.

    Melissa and I share the solitude of being “only children” and what that means when we have lost our parents and grandparents. Neither of us has children of our own – Melissa’s daughter died many years ago of cystic fibrosis.

    But today was a joyful day because we could talk together about the people we both knew and loved when we were growing up: we are each other’s people after all. Sixty-five years of family history are ties that will always bind us, regardless of the years between visits or the distance of a thousand miles that separate us today. Thank goodness for facebook.

    Both of us actually knew the people we were talking about; and that’s a happy thing, as Melissa likes to say.

    This was an extra special Tuesday for me, a day I won’t forget anytime soon…until we meet again.

    Melissa and her playhouse in Beaumont, Texas

     

  • Ministers of Happiness


    Today is Easter Sunday, and I tried very hard to come up with an Easter recollection to complement my deep reservoir of Thanksgiving memories which flow from me like rivers to oceans or even my Christmas memories which aren’t quite up to Thanksgiving levels but still trickle in through little streams of consciousness. The best I had was clothes…and music.

    I can visualize frilly pink Easter dresses, white lacy Easter bonnets, snug-fitting white Easter gloves, shiny white Easter shoes and a matching white Bible to carry to church. I had won the white Bible the summer before during Vacation Bible School as a reward for memorizing the most scripture verses in my class. My name was engraved in gold letters which stood out nicely against the white leather Bible.

    The dress was home-made by my paternal grandmother Ma who tortured me with fittings several times before the actual final inspection was made and the dress approved to her satisfaction. She and my mother coordinated the remainder of the ensemble with a great deal of whispering behind my back because they wanted to avoid the exasperated facial expressions I made whenever they brought up the subject of the Easter “outfit.” Horrors – please don’t talk about that.

    The Easter outfit was like a Halloween costume to me. I might as well have been dressed in a white cowboy hat wearing a black Lone Ranger mask sitting astride my stick-horse yelling Hi, ho, Silver, Away periodically during the congregational singing at our Southern Baptist church. Instead, I was sitting demurely between my grandmother and granddaddy singing Up from the Grave He Arose. As a matter of fact, I definitely would have preferred The Lone Ranger look over the Easter outfit.

    But I had to wear the clothes to hear the music, and I loved the music even then. The old rugged cross was exchanged for a crown, because he lived I could live forever, just as I was without one plea I came because his blood was shed for me, I lifted up my heart to sing hosanna, hosanna to the king because of the amazing grace that found me when I was blind and could not see. The hymns had 18th. century harmony which I knew nothing about at the time I learned to sing them, but that lack of composition understanding didn’t interfere with my love of the experience.

    Even the sermon on Easter Sunday morning was hopeful – once you got over the nasty business of the crucifixion – the minister was so happy about the resurrection. Really, he seemed to me to be more joyful at Easter than he was at Christmas when the tidings of great joy were proclaimed by the angels.

    My first Easter Sunday was the day I was born on April 21, 1946, which makes this one my 71st.  Unbelievable.  Where does time really go. I miss my family and the singing at the little church today. I don’t miss the Easter outfit.

    Although it isn’t my birthday, I am going to make an Easter wish. My wish for all of us today in the midst of a world that is fraught with monumental uncertainties is that we become ministers of happiness founded on our own good health, good relationships, erasing inequalities where we can, creating trust in our communities and standing against injustice whenever we witness it. One by one, as the saying goes.

    Resurrect hope today.