Writer Morris has created a spirited memoir combining childhood memories with philosophies devised over a long life of war, peace, and contemplation. Born in 1931 and mostly raised in the rural deep south, Morris weathered many of life’s storms. As the Great Depression made its impact, his father took what employment he could find—farmer, mechanic, whiskey supplier—putting the boy, his siblings, and mother in barren shacks where he soon learned that discipline could involve severe punishments with no prior explanation of why they were inflicted. He would later discover that he was born out of wedlock, that his father had been imprisoned for bigamy, that he had half-siblings from his father’s marriage to someone who was not his mother, and that his birth parents married years after his birth.
His engaging descriptions of boyish incidents range from nearly freezing to death when he innocently walked away from home in a blizzard (an early example, he says, of being rescued by a guardian angel) to brutal beatings by his mother with straps and switches for sins of which he had no understanding. Gradually he was able to bear the tough times while appreciating the pleasant ones. After high school, he joined the Navy at the beginning of the Korean War, finding security in shipboard life—”a warm bed and three hot meals a day,” simple pleasures he had lacked in childhood. He was assigned as a recruiter and served in the military during the Vietnam era.
Though raised nominally Christian, Morris was never convinced by conventional religion, but has, as he rocks rhythmically and muses on his past, nurtured all-encompassing pantheistic beliefs, melding etheric viewpoints with scientific knowledge related to the creation of the earth and its occupants. Morris “rocks” through memories—of early sexual encounters, credible and often highly amusing—and of warfare, frank and disturbing. He now believes that his family, including four sons, benefited from his life as one of the “Children of Chaos” who shared the upheavals of life in his times.
As Morris reflected on these many intimate experiences and national and international issues, and believing that his time here may not be long, he took to heart the urgings of family members to compose his autobiography, which includes candid and poignant stories of cohesion and dissolution among his close clan and discoveries made through research of heritage and history. He offers definitive and thought-provoking arguments about the negative changes he has observed in America and the wider world. He lauds the use of books as an alternative reality, “an escape from the stress and daily mundane grind of the hustle and bustle of the modern world.” Sharing folk tales, familial strivings and planetary possibilities, he allows readers to muse, to be amused, and to absorb the many differences between our country’s past and present ideals and stumbling blocks. There will be many readers, across a wide spectrum, who will take Morris’s rocking chair reflections as inspiration to design their own lively, spiritual and workable credos, as he has so clearly done.
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