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, who 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, the stuff of dreams for a cornetist then and now. 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. Good ones.

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 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 helped 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, an accordion player 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 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.

My Unauthorized Autobiography rant - I mean, articles - in my website originated years ago when the word "blog" would have been a typographical error. I formatted it to read sequentially, no small hassle, and with many updates of the website over time, it became hard to find. Although well received, it went unmaintained after a few installments. This replacement, my official blog, gets started right where the old version did and will continue where it left off - easier to do, easier to find, and wondrously interactive so people can comment on the blog entries, too, instead of just read and stew.