Jay loves the fall, but hates it, too. It's a political thing, trying to maintain the delicate balance of family sensibilities with the need to remain under half a ton overweight.

Fall has some great stuff going for it. There's the wondrous spectacle of the leaves turning orange, red, yellow and whatever. Jay's often seen - and photographed - blue and purple ones - always a joy, and the prospect of cooler days, welcome after having suffered through another of the Deep South's infamous summers.

Sadly, there's the annual Season of Food, too. That's the period of gluttony between summer salad 'cause it's too hot to even eat, and winter comfort snacks in between the hearty soups, stews, and chowders. Jambalaya, even. Jay's always been a person of the large persuasion, some of the time - like now, for instance - holding down the higher end of the category with gusto. It runs in the family, so Jay likes to say he got it honest.

Take Thanksgiving, for example. Much is made of turkey and dressing, but T-giving dinner at Jay's Grandma's house - a tradition that defines traditions - always included copious other food of many kinds for copious guests, all of whom, especially darling Jay, were expected to bestow copious compliments on the chef - chefs, plural, in most cases. Jay's other cooking-inclined relatives brought along their respective specialties and presented them proudly. If there was some to take home, they were saddened, wondering what went wrong with the preparation.

Here's a typical example: You only had three helpings of (whatever) didn't you like it? No kidding, not exaggering one bit! Hey, how ya doing, I brought all your favorites. True, no doubt, and Jay had - well, has - lots of favorites. He's way fond of dessert, though he can put away considerable tonnages of other victuals, too. Then there's the unintentionally backhanded "My, you've gotten a lot bigger since I saw you at (whatever event). Do you want another slice of pie? I made it special 'cause I knew you'd be here."

No kidding, all these are real, quoted from among many sad episodes that haunt Jay's memories. In later years, Jay tried to mitigate the expected consumption in the hope of being able to breathe during the afternoon of wheezing that followed T-day feasts. This plan didn't work. "You're not eating much, are you sick? Let me see if you have a fever. Eat something. You'll feel better." Well, he got it honest, like he says.

Pictures of Jay's late father are way scarce.  For one thing, he was always the shutterbug, the one who yells "say cheese" and unleashes the Flashbulb Dots Vision Syndrome. The few exceptions have largely been consumed by the dysfunctional family's long-lasting dis-functions.

Nonetheless, this is William Gross himself, photographed in glorious black and white by Jay, himself, with his Hasselblad 500c while the Old Man photographed Jay with the Kodak Instamatic that he's holding.

Says Jay, "We clicked each other at dusk on the lawn in front of my photo lab. The Old Man spent most of the latter part of his life in Rochester, New York, annually revisiting the South to pursue the elusive fish of central Florida. Some summers he took the car train, but when he drove the whole route he stopped off in town for a chat and a night's rest. Born in Rochester, he didn't mind the winters there. I was born in South Carolina and didn't mind the summers here. So... Well, you know."

Here's another one, courtesy of Jay's Cousin Chuck Jermyn of Rochester.

It's a cool old 1940s portrait that suffered greatly from cropping, perhaps to fit into somebody's too-small frame, but Jay managed to Photoshop a scan of it into usefulness.

Then there are these shots, also courtesy of Chuck.

Bill and Joephine (Bill's girlfriend in Rochester), and...

Bill and his sister Irma, in the 1960s in front of the family's home in Aiken.

Jay's been around. His family often ventured to Folly Beach, South Carolina, for vacations. That tradition took a small break in the 1950s when Hurricane Hazel eliminated the wooden ocean front hotel that the family frequented. The hurricane arrived while the family was IN the hotel. Jay's father, ever mindful of the weather, noticed the unbeachability that had beset the trip for several days. He gave up waiting impatiently for the weather to clear and packed up the Studebaker for the trip home. By that time ocean waves were lapping onto the narrow lane that led to the mainland. The rain was extremely heavy but he managed to get all of us home. Wet, but safe.

After that experience, annual beach outings moved to Myrtle Beach a couple of times, but settled on Savanna Beach and Tybee Island, Georgia, when Jay's favorite aunt moved there with her new husband Bill.

Jay liked Savannah for its donut shops, and he enjoyed the drive to his aunt's house for its down-home Southern scenery, mostly trees and cotton fields. A few times he went to Savannah with his grandmother on the passenger train - they still had those back then. Jay took the train to New Orleans, and to Dallas and back several times. He's also enjoyed the wondrous and famous Silver Meteor to parts south, namely Florida, as well as to Washington, DC, and Richmand, Virginia, from which a couple of times he took a train to Charlottesville, Virginia.

He does not like flying. Or airports, or crummy scrunched up seats with no legroom. But Jay has yielded and flown to places too far for car or train. After driving to California once and only once - and back - Jay's sworn off of deserts. He's seen one, and that's enough.

Some years ago, Jay roamed extensively around these United States. By Hondacar. Houston, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Nashville, Orlando, Philadelphia, Dallas, Atlanta, and lots of places between. Discoursing on the wonders of Amiga computers and peddling his magazine and his books. Lately, he pretty much confines his travels to 'round town. Too many diets to watch, too many pills to take, and not enough driving time between requisite rest stops.

Jay's Sainted Mother long ago went on to that Big Hair Salon in the Sky, leaving this particular universe a sadder if not much wiser place. So on this, the annual Mothers' Day celebration, Jay surrounds himself with comfort food and mostly lays low.

He and his Mama had their differences, often about inconsequential things owing to a mile-wide streak of stubborn in both. Most of the time, they patched their disagreements with mute apologies and moved on to other matters. And to items they could agree on, like the delectability of Mama's home cooking. Born in 19(mumble), Mrs. Gross was the older-sister-by-five-years to Jay's favorite aunt. Their mother was also noted for her cooking and taught them well, but all three adopted different styles and used different recipes for just about everything.

Take cornbread, for example. Go ahead, take three pieces. Among the three consummate cooks, no two made the concoction the same way, although all tasted great. For reasons known only to their egos, they often sought Jay's opinion on their dishes - soliciting compliments, of course, and threatening to topple the delicate balance of power. Jay could not like one over the other, you see, but fortunately didn't have to as all the dishes were great. The challenge, often insurmountable, was to say as little as possible, preferably nothing, without giving offense.

The competition for Jay's favor exacerbated at holiday time - like Mothers Day. In fact, Jay came to dislike family occasions because of the intense pressure to favor one cook over one or more of the others. Never noted for diplomacy, Jay usually managed to invent delicate ways to issue compliments to the chef without offending the other two chefs. Mostly, however, he tried to steer clear of the questions in the first place, sometimes with just as disastrous results.

Unfortunately, with food there's no sidestepping the issue. You either eat the dish or don't, and if you don't eat it you couldn't stand it. Right? In Jay's fiercely competitive family of cooks, that means ask for seconds and maybe thirds, or be accused of not liking the dish. As in: "Awww, you only ate two slices of my (pick one: peach pie, chocolate cake, fruitcake), don't you like it?" Jay's extra hearty appetite and insatiable sweet tooth saved him from having to invent excuses.

Along with spring flowers, April brings along the birthday anniversary of Jay's favorite aunt, Vonice. Known as "Bud" to all who knew her, she gave Jay his first and favorite puppy, and always looked after his welfare.

Last time Jay saw her, she traveled 80 miles to visit while he was laid up with a Dreadful Condition, bringing good wishes and chocolate, the latter of which didn't survive the afternoon.

Jay's favorite vocation and avocation is photography. Photos gratia artis. He started young, encouraged by his father who at family events proudly took the current-model Kodak box camera off its high shelf in the closet. The old man set everybody blinking with the flash from huge bulbs, even in outdoor sunlight, and after weeks of waiting gleefully showed off curly edged glossy prints, square and sharp, many of them color. Yet, Jay's family album contains very little that survived the internal combustion of his dysfunctional family, so most of what's extant is stuff Jay shot in recent times.

Photographically, Jay started by recording his grandmother's flower beds with his father's Kodak. When the prints came back, an interminable wait later, the flowers were all black and white. Not beautiful, hand printed black and white, but bleached out "drugstore" prints - which is of course what they were.

Jay gave up in despair, unaware that changing the film would have brought color prints. Several years later, Jay received a new Polaroid Land Camera - freshly invented - with a kit of accessories. It was a gift from his father. The camera required some finagling with exposures, but Jay managed to figure out the EV system and went about recording absolutely everything for posterity - the cat, the house, and any relatives who'd put up with the hassle. None of these great images survives, so posterity, the Smithsonian (and the dumpster) are out of luck. After the new wore off, and the cute little Wink Light died for the second time and couldn't be repaired, Jay moved on to other enthusiasms, not to say obsessions, and parked the Polaroid.

Years passed, as years are wont to do. While at the university of South Carolina in Aiken, studying journalism, Jay snagged part time employment as a newspaper correspondent. His Sainted Grandmother bought him a 35mm camera, and a new interest was re-born. Again with the black and white. Only this time the prints got individualized attention from the newspaper's photo lab and even appeared in print.

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.