Spittin' Grits

Won’t You Please Come Home

For reasons that I didn’t stop to analyze at the time and that now seem like excuses, I have sorely neglected Spittin’ Grits for more than a year. Dismayed, I regret my neglect.

Several events have jump-started my engines to prevent future ill winds from pushing me off course or shutting me down permanently. Spittin’ Grits is no cruise ship Triumph, which, if you ask me, suffered from gross neglect and sent out its own ill winds. No one’s going to tow this blog into the Port of Mobile.

Only a word or two more about that crappy situation, and then I’m through. According to Media Post’s blog Marketing Daily, tons of scatological jokes and pictures flooded the social media, even as Carnival’s CEO Gerry Cahill showed corporate stupidwill, not goodwill, by, ugh, puke, boarding the Triumph when he should have been at the gangplank with latex gloves on, handing out big checks to the cruisers. PR “professionals” are predicting that the gross event will be soon forgotten, but I’ll bet the story won’t be over until long after late night TV, Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the well known Fat Lady get through with it. And until Carnival dry docks the piece of s*%! and makes a Homecoming bonfire out of it. My money is on Carnival’s having to pay a really stinky price for its neglect of both the ship and its cruisers.

Enough already.

I can’t hand out any checks to former readers, but I can try to bring you back – not to merely a restored product, but to one that has bested itself. It will take time to re-link pictures to posts, to add to the blogroll and favorite web sites, to update the design and paths to social media, and more. But I’ll keep chugging away, far away from the Port of Mobile, which, I’ll bet, wanted only to cleanse itself of the Triumph.

Oh, stop!

My decision to get Spittin’ Grits out of dry dock came on September 1, 2012, with an e-mail from a complete stranger in Lienz, Austria, just across the Alps from the top of the Italian boot. For six days I let that e-mail just sit in my in-box while I pondered this hoaxy looking piece of possible spam. I finally opened it on September 6; then it opened the only door out of the wardrobe to discovering the real story of my father’s World War II experience. Since then, as e-mails have bounced back and forth across the continents, my sister, Susan, our first cousin Emory, and I have been on a quest to piece together that story. The project has pulled in other players, like Kurt in Pennsylvania, Anton in northern Italy, several of my father’s old friends, and many others.

Lieutant John T. Cravey and daughter Joanna, August 1943

Roland in Austria found me through this blog. He had been on a search for family members of Lt. John T. Cravey, as had Kurt in Pennsylvania, for about five years. It appears that had Spittin’ Grits not been on the Internet, the search would have never seen results and we would never have known dad’s real story. He found me here by way of the cutline (above) under the photo of my father with me the newborn in his arms. He was earning his wings, which would take him overseas to meet his fate on February 22, 1945.

The next post will honor that day as one of the most meaningful in our family’s life.

I hope you will come back and stay for a while.