If you look in here often, and I hope you do, you might have noticed that comments are now disabled. That's because so many ninnies were spamming these hallowed pages with nonsense posts trying to get their idiot spam sites crosslinked. It didn't work. I set "must approve" for all comments at the outset, so none of the garbage ever saw print - except a few that auto-posted for an hour or so last week after the blog's host kindly upgraded the blog software. It took a little while for me to redo the settings and remove them.

Later in the week, I boiled over at spending so much time trying to keep back the increasing number of spammers, and extinguished commenting entirely. You can still comment, and you're welcome to do so, but you have to send comments to me in an email. Just use the "Contact" tab at the top, and do the usual thing in the screen that appears. If anyone ever wished for anarchy, the Internet is their wildest dreams come true.

Sad, sad, that it's come to this. I so wanted this to be an open forum, where I hold forth and everyone is perfectly free to agree with me in comments. Or not. I can't spare the time to police it, however. Even though the updated software has a collection of automatic spammer deleters, abuser identifers, repeat offender blockers, and other niceties. Would that the Internet were a place of civilization and decorum, like once upon a time was Congress and tennis courts and the Olympic Games. Tennis before McEnroe's notorious rages, Congress before a certain idiot South Carolinian's recent outburst, and the Olympics before Harding.

I played tennis and loved it - not professionally, of course - years ago, when players in the downtown courts in North Augusta congratulated opponents on good shots and miraculous saves. I tuned out of tennis when the McEnroes of the world - and there have been plenty - argued with the officials, threw tantrums, and reduced the game to a street brawl with nets. With the Olympic Games' sports commentators trying their best to fire up nationalistic emotions, and succeeding, I watched curling - mostly with the sound muted so I wouldn't have to listen to the commentators' drivel. It's not a game I fully understand, but it is interesting, with strategy, skill, and a bit of luck thrown in. During one of the finals, the commentator suggested that a team's best choice would be to run down the clock. Don't take any shots, just stall, to keep the lead and win the medal. To her credit, the other commentator acted offended. "That would not be sportsmanlike," she said, and "A curling team would never stoop to such a tactic." I'm paraphrasing. Consult the tapes for the exact quotes. Someone always has tapes.

Now, if I'd been justly and thusly chastened in public on national television I'd move on to another subject, fast. But the first idiot persisted. "It's all about winning, and that would win!" Somebody please turn this dummy's microphone off, or reassign him to the ice hockey rink. And do give the other commentator a medal, the Jay Gross Award for Appreciating Sportsmanly Behavior Despite All Adverse Indications.

In addition to Miss Bobo, Jay's teacher Hall of Fame (He also has a Teachers' Hall of Infamy, but is sparing you that for now) includes the late William T. Slaughter. An accomplished organist respected for his technically superb and musically inspired renditions of Bach fugues, Mr. Slaughter taught band instruments in all six (!) grades at Aiken Junior and High schools. He was a one-person staff - no assistant teachers back then - ably assisted at the High School by a student staff that included (ta-da!) Jay.

Mr. Slaughter taught all the instruments. Reeds, flutes, percussion and brass. Glockenspiel and timpani, oboe, clarinet and saxophone. French horn and trombone. Maybe he knew and played stringed instruments, too, but he didn't teach them, referring interested students to teachers in nearby Augusta, Georgia.

He gave private lessons in a back room of his house in downtown Aiken, and Jay, who stuck with band from Seventh to Twelfth grades, was one of his students, a half-decent one in his later years. Jay played cornet, the "symphonic" version of the trumpet. At the outset of band class in the Seventh Grade, Mr. Slaughter examined the facial structure of each new student in turn and recommended an instrument that suited them. He probably skewed the choices to what instrumentation the high school band would need three years into the future, but he never let on. Jay's choices were cornet or French horn, the latter of which, Mr. Slaughter warned, was quite difficult to play.

Easy choice, really. Jay took the path of least resistance, with blessings from his father, whose disliked music in general except for the military bugle call "Taps." After an impressively inauspicious start, Jay caught on to getting a sound out of the instrument, moved up to shaky scales and the occasional arpeggio, and kept at it, even practicing occasionally as whim and necessity dictated. When Mr. Slaughter recommended private lessons, Jay's parents footed the bill, and Jay's father even sprung for a silver Conn Connstellation cornet. He'd already bought a baby grand piano that took up much of the livingroom.

Jay's hero list took on new musical entries. Harry James, of course, because he was still the rage in the early Sixties. And Bourbon Streeter Al Hirt, who had popular tunes in the Top Forty of the day.

Jay's love affair with music started even earlier, as his Sainted Mother insisted he have piano lessons. She so wanted to be able to play the piano herself, but didn't take lessons. Instead, she dutifully pursued a mailorder self-study course in which the middle piano keys were numbered on a cardboard overlay. The course ignored basics and moved right into songs. Eventually, she learned to play her favorite piece, "The Merry Widow Waltz," quite well, but after that she stopped studying.

On the other hand, Jay flopped at piano. He learned to read music and count rhythms, but never got the knack of reading both treble and bass clef lines at the same time. When he figured out that he could improvise the music by reading only the treble clef, that was the end of piano studies. After exhausting only two piano teachers, the first being one of his cousins, he got stuck on "Flow Gently Sweet Afton," and gave up, turning his attention to the cornet, which only entailed one clef at a time. He took up piano studies many years later and learned to play a few of his favorite classical pieces - long after giving up all hopes of professional musicianship.

Jay played first chair cornet in the Aiken High School Bands and helping to organize the Pep Band at the University of South Carolinia (slash) Aiken. That was pretty much the end of his career, however - although at the urging of a colleague at the newspaper where he worked, he played hymns and carols with the Salvation Army Band on Main Street a few times. Decades later (see the picture and don't laugh at the hot pink hat), Jay again had delusions of musical adequacy and relearned the cornet, but that episode was cut woefully short by health and other troubles.

Jay’s never been one to limit himself to a single obsession at a time, so the heroic Clark Kent shared Jay’s fancies with other personages of fact or pulp or electron beam. Not that Clark was ever really out there into obsession territory, mind you. Jay splurged extraordinarily conservative percentages of his meager allowance on a few Superman comics, expensive at mere dimes a pop back then, plus a few spinoffs like Superboy and Krypto the Superdog, but he didn’t bother with other heros' trappings in the high-tech-marketing-challenged Fifties. Neither did Jay-dimes land on those paradigms of herohood Batman, Spiderman, and the their ilk. Jay’s favorite comics were Little Henry and Dennis the Menace, heavier emphasis on the former.

The Jay Library and Archives, if one could ever exist, would contain few dog-eared dime wasters, because Jay’s other, dearer heroes didn’t have comic books to their credit. Something about the none-too-marvelous marketing potential of Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Jackie Gleason, and W.C. Fields comic books, although they richly deserve such grandiosity.

Independent of his scandalous carryings-on in France, Benjamin Franklin was one of Jay's mild-mannered heroes. Franklin's start as a mere printer's apprentice interested Jay, who performed printer's apprentice tasks early on. But really, apprentice isn't quite descriptive of Franklin’s station in life. Franklin was a "printer's devil." That's the person in the print shop who returns metal type (now way obsolete) to the sorting cases after a job is printed.

Holy Gutenberg, Batman! Hand typesetting comprised sets, called "fonts," of single characters cast onto blobs of lead-and-tin alloy about an inch high. These were sorted letterwise in broad, compartmented trays, the famed “California Job Case” among them. To "set" type, a typesetter person (now also way obsolete) picked up each letter in turn and arranged them in word order, adding spaces, ruled lines, whatever, in a metal “composing stick,” a two-sided hand-holdable brass tray, there to be accumulated into a “galley,” a larger, three-sided steel tray that often wasn’t very hand-holdable, owing to the weight of its charge of heavy type, rules and spaces. Eventually, these "forms" were wedged into "chases," four-sided iron frames, placed in the printing press, inked and printed onto (at last!) actual paper.

It took considerable time to set type, so printers often kept intact any jobs that they expected to be reprinted. The rest of the “forms” were re-distributed to the typecases to be used again. The people assigned to the re-distribution task occupied a position somewhat lower than office cat: the printer's devils. If you worked really hard, put in extra long hours, and studiously kissed the correct cans, you could start as a printer's devil and end up as a typositor, or a printer, or something even fancier like ambassador to France, as it was with ol' Ben.

By all accounts, Ben's ambassadorship didn't result from his labors in the print shop, however. It was more the reward for his artistry with the stuff of type before type is set: namely, words. And that’s not to even mention the revolutionary ideas behind them. That if nothing else qualified him for Jay-hero-hood. Benjamin fought with words battles that might’ve otherwise been relegated to flying lead - and not the kind from which type is made. He was inquisitive and inventive, notwithstanding being somewhat sight-impaired (Jay relates, as he’s worn thick glasses since Third Grade), and also self-made, wise, and witty. Jay heard about Benjamin’s better deeds at school, of course, churning out the requisite book reports, bio’s and essays.

Ben’s shadier doings were conveniently skipped in the schoolbooks, so Jay learned of these on his own. Ben’s hero status remained, nonetheless, unimpaired. If anything, he earned Jay’s additional respect for doing as he pleased at a time when nonconformity in matters moral was rewarded with a chunk of rope formed into a final necklace.

All around, Ben’s easy to like as a hero, and so is Thomas Jefferson. Tom, however, tainted lofty principles with tacky travesty, and practiced different preaching from what he treatised. Indeed, Tom let Jay down, bad. The more Jay’s learned about the real Thomas, the less Jay’s inclined to reserve him any space in emulationville. Thomas carried on something awful about ending slavery right at the outset of these United States. Yet, the man kept slaves. Kept them, even though he could’ve easily afforded to free them, setting an example for others to follow.

Maybe in Virginia it was just “done,” and you could argue (feebly) that freed slaves in a slave-holding society would've put them at great risk. However, such was hardly the case in France while the French were annoying themselves and the rest of the world with their own confused revolution. Two-faced Thomas didn’t seem to notice, though his slaveholding rightfully ruffled French feathers.

The public didn’t seem to notice Tom’s indiscretions in the White House, either, but that was before television, and CNN et al weren’t there for obsessive-compulsive blow-by-blow instant-replay descriptions, either. The supremely homophobic Tom is therefore way far off his original pedestal in Jay’s mind, respected only grudgingly for the beauty of his buildings. The rest of it was arrogant puffery, flowery prose that meant nothing to himself, inspiring as some of it was to others. The man should’ve stuck to architecture, and left idealism to those with conviction.

You can tell a great deal about somebody if you know what heroes he holds dear. It's like knowing who he hangs out with and in what pub. It’s as good as stalking him for a week through the gutters of the city - or through the coffeehouses or the jazz clubs, as the case may be. We are what we eat, for sure, but we are who we emulate, just as certainly. So, let's get started analyzing Jay (this is, after all, the UNauthorized auto-bio) by detailing who some of his heroes are, were, have been. And why.

Jay’s favorite heroes have rarely been who you might expect, definitely not the usual crowd. But then, Jay’s not the usual lot himself, he urges it to be said. “I’m not noted for conformity.”

First off, the Man of Steel. Nope. No way. Jay's peers admired Superman - that is, if Jay can be said to have had any actual peers. Jay’s "contemporaries," we’ll call them with a wicked grin, took their hero worship seriously. They donned capes fashioned of faded beach towels and were able to leap tall sand sculptures in a single bound. They were faster than a speeding Lionel train set. Big fat hairy deal.

Jay, on the other hand, didn't consider the Caped One eligible for hero worship, much less emulation. On the contrary, he considered Superman’s other half, Clark Kent, the stuff of wannabe dreams. Clark was so immensely coooool. Definitely the stuff of hero-hood, au contraire the brash Superman. The oh-so-cool Mister Manners could do the presto-change-o thing in a handy phone booth, stomp the appropriate villains, and reappear all pressed and clean with his reporter's notebook full of pithy information. And just in the nick of time for the first-edition deadline at the ol’ Planet. Talk about a nose for news!

When Metropolis - the town, silly... When Metropolis was threatened, and Superman’s talents were called forth, Clark was a sure follow-on, dependably scooping up duhh-on-the-street interviews, gathering background information, and oh, by the way, saving Aiken - oops, Metropolis - from harm in his other identity. He never even got winded. Must've never got long-winded, either, ‘cause the editors never appeared to give him any grief about eating up too much space on the front page.

Through it all, and “it all” was quite an ordeal every afternoon on television, Mister Kent managed his double identity without ever requiring the services of a therapist. The Phone Company might have been a little peeved from time to time, but they never let on. His bosses at the newspaper, supposedly none the wiser about his double identity, either never suspected or were too busy with their editorial pens and chose to ignore their reporter’s cute tricks. So, Clark gracefully held onto his job at the newspaper office, gathering the scoops in spite of constant interruptions for saving the town or the dunce Lois from doom. Or themselves. Now THAT was a hero!

Would Clark make a go of it at CBS News now? CNN? Mister Mild Manners probably wouldn't last ten minutes or one dead princess, whichever came first. Something about mild manners and shoving a microphone into a grieving face would probably not click. Besides, the world was easier to save back then, when the good and bad guys were easy to tell apart. And politics weren’t required.

Jay admired not only Clark's dual role, but also his very mild manneredness. Clark Kent was truly a gentle man, keeping his powerful alterself a secret even when showing off would have been soooo much fun.

During most of Jay's early years he was beset, tortured, taunted, and otherwise made miserable by aggressive male contemporaries, not to say peers. So, it’s hardly surprising that his hero wasn't the swashbuckling aggressor half of the Superman bundle, but the debonair Clark. The fact that Clark made his way as a newspaper reporter was even better. Ah, the stuff of heroes: pad in pocket and press pass tucked into the ubiquitous hat, but secretly attired in tights underneath the Fifties’ most conservative suit. Let the next-door neighbor boys and the down-the-street brats emulate Superman with their striped towels, their blue pajamas, and their short flights off high porches. Jay wore glasses and carried a notebook.

Maybe it sounds dramatic from this perspective, but even in Jay’s days as a child he wanted a career in communications. Printing and publishing, maybe, newspapering, bookwriting, even radio. Not television, but that would have been okay if none of the others came through. As it turned (turns?) out, Jay eventually achieved plenty more things that hadn't been invented back in the days of leaping over low hedges with the imagination on high beam. Yes, there was electricity, and you didn’t have to fly a kite to get a charge out of it.

Jay was good enough at some things to make a go of them later in life, and bad enough at lots of things to develop a serious aversion to being laughed at. Kite flying was one of those latter. And basketball. And baseball. And... well, lots of other things.

Jay’s far from a literary scholar, or even a learned one, but he got it honest. He’s not from a literary family, really, and certainly not from a family of journalists, though he’s always loved newspapers and periodicals, as well as books. Jay’s father, orphaned at nine or so, didn’t make it past Rochester’s Fifth Grade. Jay’s Sainted Mother was educated in South Carolina, as was Jay, which says a whole lot right there without dwelling too much on the nitty gritty of the matter. She trudged miles from her parents’ farm to Windsor, South Carolina, when school was only eleven grades. She graduated - the first in her family to hold a high school diploma - and packed off to Columbia, the state’s capital, to attend secretarial school.

Throughout Jay’s childhood, if you could call it that, the household contained maybe two dozen books, all bibles, biblical

storybooks, and other trappings of Southern Baptistness. A relative had handed down a ten-volume set of baby raising books, not one of which, on Jay’s meticulous inspection when such matters became of interest, contained any reference to how babies were occasioned in the first place.

Along about Elementary School time, Jay’s parents wisely sprung for a set of World Book Encyclopedia when the salesman came to call. When Jay became interested in non-biblical literature along about Junior High School, they subscribed to Life, Look, the Reader’s Digest Books and the Book-of-the-month club. Nice as they were, none of those volumes contained...  Well, you know.

Jay discovered fiction in junior high school. They call that “middle school” now, not necessarily complimentarily. He read voraciously, though sporadically, establishing a tradition of reading absolutely everything by a given author and then moving on to someone else. Among Jay’s favorites were Arthur Conan Doyle, Earle Stanley Gardner, and Agatha Christie (sensing a theme here?). Though Aiken had a decent library, Jay always preferred to buy books, and keep them for later reference after devouring them. Enough with the third person. Just let Jay tell it.

Actually, I was never entirely comfortable in libraries, with all the shushing and the necessity of treading lightly on squeaky floors so as not to incur frowns from imperious librarians. The real problem was, however, that once I returned the books I didn’t have them anymore, in case I wanted to reread some passage I’d enjoyed. Oh, and that other problem: the librarians would know what I was interested in, and reading, and not necessarily approve, and potentially cause a stink if they didn’t. Not so with store clerks, who were much younger and didn’t look at anything but the cover price to ring up the sale.

My collection grew, and I printed a bunch of Ex Libris plates (on my own letterpress printing press, a story for later chapters) to distinguish treasured volumes. I accumulated books for decades, in spite of disasters that wiped out my collection several times. Although I again have lots of books, with Internet searching at my fingertips I rarely need to look up anything on actual paper. But I like having them.

Here's another one, adapted from Jay's stellar endeavors as editor of Verbatim, the newsletter of the Midlands Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. This tale is about his favorite High School English teacher. She's why you won't read certain... "phrases" in this tome. Okay, here's Jay.

Impeccably prim, our wool-suited English teacher strode in from the hallway. Sensible heels, tick, on the cheap tile floor. She dropped her gradebook onto the desk, set the battered wooden lectern aside and stood laser-level straight, pine-tree tall at the greenboards in front of the class. “B O B O,” she lettered in yellow chalk. Her bony hand made deliberate, precise strokes easily readable from the farthest reaches of the room. Perfect.

Miss Bobo was, herself, exactly that.  Perfect, unerring, unforgiving - and easily readable from the back row of seats.  She had certain “requirements” - demands, really - that had to be met, and she set them out methodically in stern tones on the first day of classes, emphasizing her points by stabbing her index finger toward the ceiling and lowering her gaze to peer over her dark-rimmed reading glasses after each one. Ominous, intimidating, intriguing.

Think and be

“Cogito ergo sum,” she began. Gaze. “Ergo, people who do not think do not exist. Therefore, in my class do not ever not think.” Meaning: don’t think you’ll pass Senior English at Aiken High. Miss Bobo’s cogito corollary was her dearest pet peeve, her biggest booboo, a Rubicon you did not cross. You did not answer her question about Chaucer’s Wife of Bath with “I don’t think she was a slut.” You could say “I think she wasn’t a slut,” or even “I don’t know.” However, mere utterance of the forbidden “I don’t think” got you a brooding frown and a red mark in her grade book. Sometimes even a sarcasm. But really, she had a point. Think not, be not; think and be. Be or be not, Shakespeare wrote, but think and at least be graduated, and then not-think your way through English 101 if you can.

Miss Bobo’s classes were advanced, “college prep.” All of her students would matriculate at some college, even me. It was her duty, her mission-from-the-diety, she explained, to make sure that we not only did not not-think, but also could indeed think. Cogito with the best of ‘em and communicate the fact verbally or in ink, without blinking an eye, and never omitting the dot over one, either. She warned us first thing, and reiterated her warnings anytime someone slipped up. She explained that she considered not not-thinking to be her personal goal for every class. I don’t think she ever failed.

Miss Bobo started every class with a short discussion of the material that her students, whom she insisted be seated in alphabetical order, should have read from the textbook or other resource. Her lectures were excruciatingly grammatical, meticulously organized, and beautifully incisive. “Every character has a flaw,” she orated on Chaucer’s Canterbury rimes. “The Wife of Bath, debatably, is promiscuous; the cook is dirty; the Miller, well, you’ll have to see for yourself.” Wicked wink. "If you dare."

Why: a favorite question

For testing, Miss Bobo didn’t think in terms of true/false or multiple guess. She thought essays - well organized, well thought out, and skillfully argued. “Compare the... with those from...” and “discuss why....” Keyword “why,” a favorite question of hers, and often a difficult one for which there is no simple, or even correct, answer. Stick close to the subject, organize thoroughly before you set pen to paper or tongue to teeth, answer the question directly, and whatever you do, don’t make any Bobo booboos when you write. Or when you speak, even exemporaneously.

In addition to not not-thinking, she had a sizeable list of no-nos. Here are some that have stuck with me after more than forty years. Some are here for entertainment, and some for admonishments. Some are way obsolete, now, and some still ring true. You’re on your own as to which is which. However, as with all of Miss Bobo’s booboos, you can’t be faulted for following them, though in some cases you can for breaking them.

Miss Bobo’s booboo list

> And what kind of sort is that?  In Miss Bobo's class there was never a sort of anger, nor a kind of repression. Miss Bobo despised the terms. She was quite binary about most things. Are you mad or not? You're either repressed or you're not, or maybe you could try to get a 'somewhat' past her if you must qualify. Well, are you or not, she still would have asked. And to which sort of repression do you refer, exactly? Is "somewhat" a disease or a degree? A fruit, perhaps?  Kind of funny, eh? Well, you sort of get her point. Don't you?

> “Not only” is not the only part of the construction, which not only won’t stand alone, but also won’t do with only “but” on the other side. In other words, if you start with “not only,” you absolutely must have “but also,” not just “but.” As in: “I think the Miller’s tale not only raises eyebrows, but also blazes trails in low-brow humor.” Moreover, the connected parts must not only be related, but also be parallel. Perfectly parallel, not just somewhat close. Sentence structure, tense, gender, number, and the tint of the spots on its underwear. Parallel to the max. “Everyone has a ‘but,’” she explicated-admonished-adjured with a smirk. “Cover yours with an ‘also,’ and your grade will reflect your effort.”

> Don’t divide. To split an infinitive was to incur Miss Bobo’s ire. There was no reason, no excuse to humanly err, and little probability for Bobo to divinely forgive.

> Don’t start. If you’re going to do a thing, just do it. Don’t begin or start something. This was a major biggie with her, and she was right. In the South we love to fix to do something. Like, “I’m fixin’ to start the turnips a-boilin’.” Best not speak that abomination in Boboland. Best not read much literature, either, or this one will start to bother you, too. Authors, even famous ones, sin often.

> Waste if you must, but never want. Not many emcees would pass Bobo’s class: “I want to welcome you all....” Nor Oscar winners: “I want to thank my mother....” Unless you’re not going to, she urged, don’t want to do something, just do it.

> Don’t partialize. Whether spoken or written, English sentences have subjects and verbs, at least one of each. If your sentence fragment had two or fewer words, and if you could defend it as contextually sound without sweating, you might have a chance to get one over. Otherwise, no.

> Precisely write precise words. For example, don’t use “less” if you need “fewer.” Less is quantity; few is number: less flour, but fewer cups of sugar. Further is conceptual, farther is space. Subtle, but true. Precision, precision!
> She preferred and encouraged the correct use of “more than” instead of “over” when “over” is just plain lazy, which most of the time it is. You could write “over the fence” but “more than fifty yards,” not “over.” Picky, but correct, in her Chaucer’s Knight’s way. The Knight’s character flaw, she explained, spewing and obviously relishing self criticism, was a perfectionist.

>This and that won’t stand for everything. Picture a paragraph of action, sentence after sentence, after which the sumup “this” can’t stand for all of that and keep on going, like:  “Smith threw rocks at me, and this made me mad.” The word “this” must be specific, like “this action” or “this situation.” Otherwise Smith will keep on with the rocks, gleefully assisted by Miss Bobo.

In addition to her peeves list, she invoked the usual forbidden constructions like passive voice, verbs to be, lazy adjectives and adverbs, run-on sentences, and such. However, she was willing to cut some slack on most of these if you could argue persuasively that the context justified the infraction. The class was creative writing and literature. She took “creative” creatively, and encouraged breaking conventional rules. Except hers.

Forbidden reading

Miss Bobo cleverly “assigned” extracurricular reading that was prohibited by the benighted Aiken, South Carolina, school district’s vigilant thought police. Chaucer’s infamously bawdy Miller’s tale, for example. Although printed unexpurgated in the course’s textbook, it was forbidden reading. She explained, simply, that the county’s all-knowing censors did not, repeat not, permit her to assign us to read the tale, because of its racy content, and she would not dare defy them. If we did want to read it, however, she was not in a position to stop us, and felt no obligation to prohibit speaking or writing about it in class. Indeed, she kept a little list. 

The same prohibitions applied to certain works of Huxley, Orwell and others – a list of which, she said with a smirk, she had dutifully mimeographed while off of school property and would distribute after class outside the walls of her room. She had just enough copies for every one of the thirty-eight students. The purple-lettered page was entitled “Forbidden Reading List.” In keeping with the rules with which she did not agree but was obligated to follow, she suggested we not check out any of the offensive literature from the county’s public library according to  Dewey’s decimals printed on the sheet.

The school’s own library didn’t have them so don’t bother looking, but the county library maintained multiple copies of each on hand. Neither should the banned books be purchased in paperback from local bookstores or from the book sections of the local dimestores, most of which carried them in stock. Nuff said. In a short time the entire class, including both preachers’ sons and the Jewish kid, could expertly discuss the offending volumes. Miss Bobo did not assign them for reading. She didn’t have to.

Rules and booboos notwithstanding, Miss Bobo strongly encouraged creativity, especially if you could creatively break a rule and defend it (vigorously) as essential to the context. Ask “why” if you wish, but prepare for an extended hairsplitting explanation that delved into reams of thought far beyond high school. I loved every minute of her class. However, I waited till I got to college to break any of her rules.

Jay tells stories, and oh, the stories he tells. Many of his tales detail the doings, sayings, and habits of his grandmother. Jay's paternal grandparents escaped the planet before Jay got the opportunity to hit them up for loans - that is, before Jay was born. The maternal-side units, however, contributed substantially - in a non-monetary sense - to Jay's upbringing. Let's just let Jay tell this one, since after all this is his autobio.

Now if everyone will please open your hymnals to page 42, let us stand and sing together "Amazing Beans." My sermon today is on evolution. I suspect we all know what that is. However, in case there's someone out there with Doubt in Their Mind or who has lived under a rock for a century, I'm going to ask my free-thinking grandmother to give us a quick review. I’ll narrate, since she died more than forty years ago.

Born in 1898, my maternal Grandma grew up on her family's farms near the microscopic town of Windsor, a full morning's journey by horse-drawn buggy - about 15 miles - from Aiken, South Carolina. They didn’t actually live in Windsor, but a good piece down the road from there. Windsor was where they came to get supplies - it had one store back then - and occasionally caught the daily passenger train to Aiken, the big city. (Yeah, well, it was big to them, anyway.)

Not much beyond Windsor was within reach of electricity, running water, telephones, and indoor plumbing. Yet, life was good. There was plentiful food if you didn’t mind growing it, shucking it, grinding it into grits, boiling it over a wood- or kerosene-fired stove, and troubling the hens for some eggs to put with it. The occasional drummer - a drifting direct sales specialist who lugged satchels of sewing threads, kitchen contraptions, bibles, and other frivolities - brought most of the items you'd otherwise have to ride a horse half a day to fetch. Besides, the horse was usually occupied, like the paternal grandfather unit, with the plowing and therefore unavailable for a shopping trek.

Grandma courted long, married young, and prospered in spite of the usual vicissitudes. She and her husband share-cropped for a while, managed - i.e., milked the herd  of - a small dairy for a share of the profit, and later moved to a farm of their own. Time fujited onward, as it stubbornly insists on doing. Automobiles replaced buggies, cotton mills replaced farms, and light bulbs replaced kerosene lamps.

The big move

When the Forties replaced the austere-to-the-max Thirties, Grandma moved to town. She and my grandfather brought her cracked and discolored dinner plates and her marble-pedestal lamp, the only survivors of a house fire that claimed everything but them and their two daughters. Grandma also brought along her unusual, personalized religion, honed in the country, to be tested in town.

In Grandma’s bucolic stomping grounds, Windsor Baptist Church was a small, wooden affair hand-built of locally hewn timber by its original members. It perched atop a gentle slope in the center of town on land donated for the purpose by Grandma’s family. The tiny building, brick veneered in its latter days, presided over two graveyards, one in front, where Grandma rests today, and another one for people of African-American descent, off to the side under some drooping oaks.

You could easily fit several churches the size of Windsor Baptist into the citified Memorial Baptist Church in Aiken. Its imposing edifices built of the finest materials just outside the ten-thousand-strong city limits, Memorial Baptist blazed trails in zealotry, racial prejudice, and devotion. To white-only church services, Grandma insisted on bringing her adopted granddaughter, who was black. Orphaned in the rural community by a fire, the girl had been cared for by her white neighbors, my grandparents. When Grandma moved her family to town, she brought Annabelle along. At twenty-two, Annabelle found out a thing or two about the world, and it wasn't all good. In the country, she was Grandma's adopted child, created equal and treated so. In the city, she was a threat to the very foundation of Southern culture and religion, a face of color with as much right to the frontmost church pew as Grandma herself. Or so Grandma saw it.

Debate raged, and feathers ruffled. Pointed sermons flew from the pulpit like hounds escaping hell. The preachers trotted out all the arguments of the Separate-Equal Fifties, the gist being that the Deity never intended the gospels to apply to people with extra suntans. Besides, if Annabelle were allowed in there might be others, and there'd be this difficult-to-explain exception, and besides, the church would have to install "colored only" water fountains, restrooms, and pews, and signs would have to be installed on the existing facilities to indicate "white-only," and it would be better for everyone if Annabelle would go to church with her own kind. She did. Grandma went, too. She bitterly pointed out that we were quite welcome. Grandma could quote scripture with the piousest, and did, pithily, at every turn. It's a good thing the good Baptists didn't know the scripture all that well, though. She took some liberties with the quotations. “I took this child in and raised her like my own," Grandma summed at every opportunity. "If my Annabelle can’t go to Memorial church with us, then we can’t go either.”

Let us all now stand and sing together: "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight..."

All the little children

After a battle worthy of any TV soap opera, the church had to relent. To any race-based objection Grandma would burst into the Sunday School children’s song.  Loud.  “‘Red and yellow black and white...’” Grudgingly welcome at last, Annabelle chose to stay home. Before the civil rights movement even got started good in the South, she married and left us for Boston, where she could attend church in peace without invoking Grandma’s name.

In addition to a board of deacons that included my highly skeptical father, the citified church had its own personal Avon Lady, who led a tradition of regular visitations of the Faithful. Besides interracial adoption and socialization across ethnic lines, the good Baptists frowned severely on much else that Grandma loved - tobacco, gin rummy, and dancing. Nonetheless, she persisted in the religion, although she went underground with her indulgences in Tube Rose snuff, cards, and square dancing. She explained to me, a child, that she, not the board of deacons, was fully enlightened as to what was impermissible behavior, but best not to raise the issue with the Misguided Well Meaning. Ever the good grandson, I never tattled.

From the farms around Windsor, where “lawns” consisted of sculpted areas of bare sand meticulously combed with a rake, Grandma brought another of her passions to town: flowers. In that respect she brought the country to town, pestering relatives and friends for cuttings, seeds, and sets for her favorites - pink dogwoods, fluffy willows, and ball-shaped chinaberry trees. Pink and lavender four-o'clocks and deep purple verbenas speckled the space around the porches. Behind a low wall of bushy marigolds, thousands of zinnias in colors to challenge a rainbow graced her yards, front, back, and side. She maintained strict planting plans. Tall varieties with large blooms decorated the brick foundations. Bushy types with button-ish blooms occupied amorphous islands dug into the lawns.

Grandma assiduously recycled her zinnias. She stored seeds from heedfully selected plants in cloth sacks that she sorted by color and style, for planting come spring. Zinnias had one main problem: evolution. Her Baptist upbringing notwithstanding, Grandma knew about evolution, and she must have believed in it behind her veil of Creationist conformity. Darwin had his beans. With Grandma it was zinnias.

The problem was with blooms that had a protruding center section. To Grandma, these were bad, ugly, and undeserving of a place in her yard, much less her heart. She mercilessly culled such plants as soon as they showed signs of developing into undesirables. At seed gathering time, when the blooms were dry and brown, she always took care to explain her system for improving the species: ignore icky ones. Grandma might as well have quoted chapter and verse from the Epistle from the Evolutionists. Left alone, she admonished, zinnias would adopt the very trait she disliked, and all her flowers would have the unsightly center. Corrupted by even a single errant plant, the variegated zinnias would revert to plain colored and all her painstaking efforts over generations of plants would be lost.

Grandma didn’t study the science of genetics. She lived it. Each year she invested in several packets of seeds - agonizingly chosen at the uptown F.W. Woolworth’s and McCrory’s dimestores - to refine and replenish her zinnias’ gene pool. Pools, as the case may be. I listened. I paid attention. And helped her cull the undesirables by chopping them down and dropping their unwelcome carcasses in the trash.

We never cleared Grandma's Zinnia Theory with the Baptists, but it’s unlikely they would have agreed. On Sundays, however, when one or more of her favored country churches wasn’t having a homecoming or a revival, Grandma sat under her best feathered hats, front-row-center in the creationist-to-the-max Baptist Church. She sang the old standard hymns while she cooked, and vocally embellished Gershwin tunes while she gardened - out of earshot of the church’s notables. And she taught me the principles of evolution.