Gifts
Thursday, December 24th, 2009Part 1:
This essay was originally published three years ago in Seeker Magazine. When I began writing it, my only intent was to document a family story that was going to be forever lost due to the passage of time. As what sometimes happens when writing personal essays, they start out about one thing, but in the process of writing them, they turn out to be about something else. In this case, I discovered, over twenty years after they were gone, the impact my grandparents had on the person I became.
Tomorrow, Christmas Day, 2009, a new epilogue to this essay.
My grandparents, John and Frieda Bubbers, or “Oma” and “Opa,” came to America some time after World War I. Opa had been a soldier during the war and for a brief period after the war was over, during the social and economic chaos that was Germany during that time, he had been a police officer. He never spoke much about those experiences, but when he was in Astoria General, near the end of his life, he struggled and had to be restrained when the nurses attempted to place an oxygen mask over his face. He was having flashbacks of trenches and gas masks.
The young couple settled in a small German community in Lawrence, Massachusetts, probably around 1920 or 1921. He never told me what he did for a living, but I imagine that he worked in the textile mills that were still operating all over the northeast at the time. During my time with Computer Associates, a software company based on Long Island, I traveled quite frequently to our office in Andover, just a few miles from Lawrence. I took several trips to Lawrence and saw a poverty stricken area that didn’t seem to have ever recovered from the great depression; the mills still standing like red brick carcasses, crumbling, abandoned and overgrown for over fifty years.

