Shout-out to New York! Part II: Bubby

“Be a lamp, a ladder, or a lifeboat. Help someone’s soul to heal…” Rumi

by C.S. Gold

When people ask where I was born, and I say Riverhead, Long Island, they ask me to say, “Long Island” again. Then they laugh and look knowingly at me. Or one will ask with an eager voice, “Have you been to _______?” Whether it’s Manhasset, or Westhampton or Sagaponack, I’ve never heard of it. I feel so bad admitting I don’t know their special place, as I left when I was four, and only remember my back yard, where I searched for four-leaf clovers, and Bubby’s house in Brooklyn.

Bubby’s house was a second home. I don’t know many details about Bubby except these: Her name was Dora. Her parents had had a bar in Russia, and she had not felt loved by her stepmother. At the age of 16, she voyaged on a boat to America, and soon after met her husband my Zaide at a class to learn English.

After we moved to Mt. Airy, Philadelphia where my dad was a rabbi, we’d drive from Philly to visit Bubby, the one who would pretend to nibble on my hand and arm and say, “I want to eat you up,” and Zaide who is known for saying, after someone stole his eyeglasses in the synagogue, “They must have needed them more than I do.”

Through eery, yellow walled tunnels, covered by thin dust of exhaust, we rode into the city’s narrow streets lined by colorful signs hanging from tall buildings. My father seemed really big and powerful at the time and he would tell people a few choice words about their driving. They say that New Yorkers don’t use the brakes — they use their horns; showered with a mishmash of color and beeps we headed to 476 Ashford Street.

Surviving the ride (I hadn’t yet practiced mindfulness meditation), chewing on the middle and ring fingers which I usually sucked, and inwardly repeating words my dad had addressed to drivers like mantras, we arrived at Bubby’s duplex. Up the steps, my sisters and I climbed, sporting identical short bangs, and dresses — that I would wear for six years as the youngest.

“Sit,” Bubby would say. We went straight to the dining table. There we were comforted by the familiar scents of Bubby incense which permeated the pale blinze yellow walls from decades of cooking. Before us were stuffed cabbage, mashed potatoes, potato blintzes, bread with schmaltz, and much more…

In the collage of memories I see myself in the dark of morning at the edge of Bubby’s dining room peeking at Uncle Chaim who was placing tefillin with black leather straps around his arm and the black box on his head containing the prayer “Shema” — Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, and shuckeling and murmuring prayers.

“Make the light,” Bubby would say, as we went into the kitchen for breakfast later. At least five of my current _____pounds are from the potato blintzes that she cooked in a gigantic pot. After breakfast, I recall my older sisters and I would sit on the couch absorbing unrealistic ideas about future romance as we watched “The Edge of Night” and “As the World Turns”. Bubby stood beside us at the ironing board, her long gray and black hair in a bun, and as she ironed the smell of steam wafted to us from her ironing damp pillowcases, handkerchiefs, and shirts — fresh from the refrigerator.

When you weren’t expecting it, she’d reach for gifts for us from a surprise drawer above her bed: a magic kit, a science experiment kit, a colorful wand on a stick that blew in the wind! I recall wearing one of those gifts, a doll that zipped up in the back and became a purse — over my shoulder, dazzled that such an amazing creation could exist, on our walk to Blake Avenue, passing by pushcarts selling bananas or apples. We stopped at Goldie’s candy store to get rainbow sugar dots on white paper and returned to Bubby’s — chatting with neighbors on their front stoops on the way.

I don’t see too many people on their stoops these days, except kids who their mothers tossed out because it just became too much! (Just kidding). There are the folks who told their partners, “I notice that you seem to have gained five or ten pounds since this COVID-19 pandemic started” — they are on the streets (or seen on YouTube, photographed by curious neighbors).

I have a memory relating to Bubby that is hard to write about. It is from the mid-’70s. At the time I lived in a little tree-house in Ben Lomond, California that had originally been built as a special place for a woman to give birth. It had a ladder up to a little loft for sleeping, and a wood-burning stove below, with colorful spiritual decals on its many windows; it was built on a circle of redwood trees.

One day after walking ten-minutes on the winding, dirt path to the tree-house I found a dead mouse at my door-step. I took it as an omen. The next day I received the call that Bubby had died.

Because it was the hippie days, and I believed that cosmically Bubby was in the next world, a heavenly, place, I didn’t think it was important to go to her funeral in New York. And here I am sobbing forty-two years later.

I hope those of you in New York who have had loved ones die will have a space to mourn at the sorrow of losing someone in your close circle of love. I know many of you will never have the chance to go to the funeral. I hope you will look at photos of your friends or family members and speak about them and pray for them. I hope you will do what is agonizingly hard to do at such times — reach out to others to talk, to receive comfort in that singular aloneness. I hope you will cry a lot and laugh a lot too and mend with stitches of love, prayers and virtual hugs.

With much admiration for the courage of your essential workers and the endurance and resilience of you New Yawkers,

Claudia