Last week, I traveled up to Massachusetts to attend the memorial service for my uncle, John Juergen  Bubbers, who died in May after a long illness.  I was reunited with my cousins most of whom I’ve not seen in many years.  Sadly, it has been funerals, first of our grandparents and now parents that have given us the occasion to gather together again.  It’s probably typical that at these events that bring together extended families, we all observe our cousins and the grandchildren and look for our genetic connections.  This person looks like Oma, that person has Opa’s mouth, and so on.  In fairness, we also acknowledge who resembles a spouse who married into our family.

I took particular notice of one of my cousins.  When we were younger we were very similar looking, both of us blond haired and blue eyed and bearing some resemblance to our grandfather.  Now, not so much.  He was always taller and skinnier than me, and now it seems even more so, especially on the skinnier part.  That’s right, Fred. He got skinnier. What struck me was how much he reminded me of his father.  In his physical manner, speech patterns, even the way he carried himself was eerily evocative of my Uncle John.  It’s been decades since he lived in his father’s household, so how strong could his father’s influence be by this time?  When I remarked on this to my sister, she said, “Well, Freddie, I hate to break this to you, but everybody’s been telling me how much you remind them of Daddy.”

“I try not to,” I said.

“There, the way you said ‘I try not to.’  You sound just like him.”

There’s no escape from Gregor Mendel and his wretched wrinkled peas.

One of the things that we all felt deeply with the passing of my Uncle John is that, for our family, another generation is now gone, and with it the links to our unique heritage are now broken.  In our nation of immigrants, heritage always seems to be both a curse and a blessing.  When we are young and desperately trying to forge our own identities, heritage can seem like heavy baggage, weighing us down.  The old stories don’t mean much to us.  In moments of doubt, however, when life’s challenges make us question just who we think we are, heritage is a home that provides solace and comfort.  In our case, our story is of a German-American family that, through circumstances driven by abject poverty and the sheer bad luck of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, became Nazi refugees, arriving penniless back in New York in 1939.  It can’t be understated how much that experience shaped the lives of my father and his brother and in turn the lives of all of their children and grandchildren.  As my daughter, the youngest and last grandchild of my father’s generation, begins her first year at Florida State University, I have to take notice that there are no exceptions to this precedent in our extended family.  At our reunion last week, there was no doubt among us that the values that were forged into those two brothers by poverty and war were responsible for this.  An education, an intellect, a profession, a trade, a skill are priceless possessions and are things that can never be taken away.  My sisters, my cousins, myself, and all of our children are the beneficiaries of those two brothers’ extraordinary achievements.  To be the recipient of an unearned gift is the very definition of living in grace.

After the service, I had a long solitary drive across western Massachusetts to consider all that had been said and offered during the previous two days.  One thing that was on my mind was the life-long sibling rivalry that existed between my father and my uncle.  It was always hard to know the true nature of this conflict.  In the end, my father and uncle were more alike than they were different, and neither of them was disposed to revealing much of their inner lives.  My uncle was a man with enormous intellectual gifts, and had accomplished much in his life.  He was one of the pioneers in the audio engineering industry (he helped put both the “hi” and the “fi” in Hi-Fi).  My father,  the younger brother, never felt he could live up to that.  I’m sure many people told him that he didn’t have to and he had done a lot to be proud of as well, but stubbornness also seems to be a family trait.  Forgive us, we’re Germans.

This rivalry was kept out of sight and I’m not even sure how we are even aware of it aside from a very rare unguarded remark and the fact that as my sisters and I grew up, our accomplishments always seemed to be measured against those of our cousins, who were a few years older than us.  I believe there were some periods where the brothers didn’t talk, but they weren’t long and they always ended.  What I do remember was that our two families visited as often as time and distance allowed, and my father and uncle always remained in touch and visited with each other up until my father’s death in 1999.  The mysteries of their relationship will now never be solved but they are also now moot.  In all the ways that truly matter, they were brothers and loved one another.  It may have been impossible for either of them to say it, but they showed it in everything they did.

Nothing made me more aware of this than something that happened at the luncheon-reception that was held after the memorial service.  On of the people who spoke at the service was a man who met and became one of my uncle’s closest friends in the last four years of his life.  He was a charming bow-tied gentleman with a British accent.  As a fellow engineer, they had formed a friendship, cautiously at first, but it became fast and deep.  He was with my uncle on the day that he decided to finally end the dialysis that was now just prolonging his suffering.

After the service, the gentleman and his wife sat down with my sister and me at the reception.  When we introduced ourselves as John’s niece and nephew, the gentleman said, “Oh you are Fred’s children!” He turned to his wife and said, “John used to tell the most wonderful stories about his brother Fred. There was one that I loved and I can only hope it was true.”

I asked him if he could tell it and he began.  After only a few sentences of setting the scene, I immediately knew the story. “Is this the one about the priest and the Kodak girl?”

The gentleman’s face lit up.  “Yes it is,” he said.  “Is it true?”

“It’s true,” I assured him.

“You’ve validated it for me and it’s so wonderful to know,  ” he said.  “Please…you tell the story.”

I proceeded to tell the story as best as I could and was rewarded at the end when the table erupted in laughter. It was a story about something funny that had happened many years ago in my father’s drugstore that revealed a sharp wit and sense of irreverence that I think was something that both my father and my uncle shared.  To learn that my uncle was telling this story years after my father had died was for me one of the most moving moments of that day.  I can’t think of a more simple example of the love, respect, and affection that my uncle had for my father.  Enduring love, hidden in plain sight.

I guess now I’m obligated to tell the story that led that profound epiphany as I drove through the Berkshires listening to Jerry Garcia sing “Ripple.”  The title of this article may be misleading, so let me reset some expectations.  “Oral Tradition” conjures up images of epic and lyric poets captivating audiences with tales of heroic derring-do and beautiful maidens chastely worshipped from afar.  That’s not what this is about.  Don’t think of the Divine Muses, think of New York Wisenheimers.  As for poets, don’t think Homer, think Joe Pesci.  Here goes:

My father’s drugstore was his pride and joy.  The main focus of his business was the prescription counter, on a raised platform at the back of the store.  He kept his store tasteful and didn’t have racks of cheap house-wares and motor oil in the middle of the floor.  From the street, you could seen through the plate-glass windows and doors straight through the store to the prescription counter.  He still sold the things you normally find in a drugstore, but he kept them to either side of the store on shelves and in display cases.  The biggest part of his non-prescription business, from the early sixties to the later part of the seventies, was Kodak film.  In those days, there were no one-hour photo kiosks and digital photography was science fiction.  Instead, you brought your film to a drugstore and it was sent out to a lab for processing.  A week later you came back to get your pictures.  My father sold and processed a lot of film and even had a display case of Kodak instamatic cameras, which he sold.

Among the promotional items that Kodak used to distribute to retailers in those years were life-size cardboard cutouts of pretty young models posing with Kodak instamatic cameras.  They were tame by today’s standards and the models were always wholesome looking types (think Mary Ann, not Ginger), but they did show some flesh.  Every year or two, Kodak would send a new model, to keep them looking fresh since over time fashions changed and colors faded.  It wouldn’t do for Kodak advertisements to have faded colors, now would it?  My father placed his model in the back of the store in front of the left side of the prescription counter.  It was out of the way, but due to the wide open nature of the store, it was still eye catching.  My father gave them names.  One that I remember in particular, and I believe figures in this story, was a pretty brunette with cut-off jeans and a polka-dot halter, the kind that wraps around the back of the neck, crisscrosses in front, and ties up in a bow in back.  Yes, I know cardboard cutouts don’t have backs, but I have a pretty good imagination when it comes to things like this. Her name was Marie and she had replaced a blonde named Heidi.

One day, one of my father’s regular customers, a priest from the rectory at nearby St. Bart’s came into the store and asked to speak to him.  My father came down from behind the prescription counter and said, “Yes, father, what can I do for you.”

The priest gestured at Marie, who remained smiling with her perfect white teeth.  “This display is in very poor taste,” he said.

“What do you mean, father?”

“The way her breasts are protruding.  I can see the valley between them and I think I can even see the shape of her nipples.  When I look at her I am filled with lust and I become aroused.”

Most people would be rendered speechless at the revelation of a priest’s lust and arousal, even if that revelation is only verbal. My father wasn’t most people.   Without missing a beat he said, “Why father, thank you for pointing that out.  I’ve never noticed her breasts.  I’m a leg man myself.”

God bless the memories of John Juergen Bubbers and Frederick Herman Bubbers.

And continue to bless the lives of all their children and grandchildren.

Related memoirs:

“Gifts“

“Gifts Epilogue: Christmas 1979“

“My Old Man, BS Ph“

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

The night before, when my family opened our presents, I had been given by Santa Claus, a small drum set, a GI Joe, and a little plastic guitar with the faces of John, Paul, George, and Ringo on the fret board.  A good haul for a five year-old, but I wasn’t going to get to play with my new toys until New Year’s Day.  I didn’t mind, though, for although it was Christmas Day, my sisters and I were dressed like it was Easter Sunday because we were headed to Kennedy Airport to fly to Miami Beach.  I can still remember how wondrous it all was to be living in the capital of the world.  We had a World’s Fair, Bernstein was with the Philharmonic (a hero in my family, likely because both the maestro and my father were born in Lawrence, Massachusetts), the United Nations was in Manhattan and our country’s membership was still something to be valued.

We lived in Queens, a borough of what was then “Fun City.”  My father was the sole owner of a drug store and worked long hours, but he made the most of the little time he had to spend with us.  On Sunday afternoons, when we weren’t at the World’s Fair, we might be bicycle riding in Central Park.  On a rare evening when he was able to close early or he was able to get someone to fill in for him in his store, he’d come upstairs and say, “Hey kids, let’s go for a ride,”  and we’d pile into his ‘63 Skylark and head off somewhere.  Where we were going would always be a surprise.  Sometimes my mother would come along, but more often she wouldn’t.  Being a parent, I now understand that these impromptu outings that took the three kids out of the house for a few hours were as much about parental bonding as they were about my father giving our mother a break.

Sometimes we went into Manhattan in the early evening and just walk around Lincoln Center, dazzled by the lights and the architecture, the chicly attired concertgoers at the Metropolitan Opera House and Philharmonic Hall.  In my memory, all the women are wearing Oleg Cassini and look like Jackie Kennedy.  There were television sets in the lobbies, so you see and hear a bit of what was going on in the concert halls and the theaters, but the main attraction was the Zero-Mostel-Gene Wilder-The-Producers fountain.  Not to fear, sometimes we did actually get tickets and see an actual performance of a ballet or a symphony.

Another spur of the moment destination was Kennedy Airport.  International travel had kicked into high gear by the mid-sixties and the International Arrivals Building at JFK was no less glamorous a place than Lincoln Center.  In my memory, many of the women are dressed like Jackie Kennedy, but were they were Europeans, Asians, Indians, and Africans, so I also have some images of colorful flowing garments.  The announcements were in multiple languages.  We were at the crossroads of the world.  Maybe it’s because I was so young at the time that I remember it this way, but I have to believe that it was all so new and so exciting, that everyone else felt that sense of wonder and a believed that we were lucky to be living in the best moment of history.

So, on that Christmas day, I didn’t mind that I was being taken away from my drums and my toy guitar.  The GI Joe stowed away in a suitcase and got to go swimming in the hotel pool.  I was going to fly in one of those 707’s that I had seen taxiing around from the observation deck on our sightseeing trips.  It was everything I could have imagined and more.

If only flying first class these days were as good as flying coach was then.  The flight down on National Airlines, which at the time was an icon for Florida vacations.  It was a morning flight, so breakfast was served, and you were given a choice: eggs, pancakes, or french toast.  As the flight attendants (okay, stewardesses), who were all dressed like Jackie Kennedy, moved through the cabin, they didn’t run out of any of the choices.  And the food itself was, well, just like normal food that appeared to have been cooked in some traditional manner, not manufactured.  On the flight back home, there was steak.  Normal steak.  There was real silverware with the airline’s logo engraved in the handles.   Pillows were free and the stewardesses didn’t have to make change because you didn’t need to buy anything.  Life at 30,000 feet was pleasant and civilized.  For a middle-class family from Queens it was royal treatment.

Needless to say, those days are long gone.  There have been periods in my adult life that my job has required constant travel.  I’m thankful that I’m now in a job that only requires occasional travel and I have enormous sympathy for the people I work with who spend most of their time on the road.

For most of last year during my last stint as a road-warrior consultant, I few every week flying from Dulles to Seattle-Takoma.  On travel days, Monday mornings and Thursday nights I had to mentally prepare myself for what lay ahead with some quiet meditation.  The whole experience, from check-in to baggage claim, was like being sucked into a torture machine.  I would be mentally stressed out and physically abused for the next eight hours and there was nothing I could do about it.  The only thing to focus on was the fact that no matter what I went through, my battered body and fractured nervous system would eventually be ejected by the torture machine.

The list of annoyances and abuses, major and minor, are well-known and there’s probably thousands of other blogs and columns just like this one in this post-Slater era, but here’s a short, non-inclusive list: TSA personnel barking out commands at security checkpoints, in-experienced non-roadwarriors clogging up security check-points who don’t listen to the barking TSA personnel, check-in counters that have endless lines, no airline personnel and broken kiosks, airline cabins that are now like cattle-cars,  sweaty, portly rowmates (not that I have any right to complain), grumpy flight attendants (not to single them out, everybody seems grumpy), two hour ground stops, the battle for overhead compartment space, getting nickeled and dimed for everything, and on and on and on…

My coping mechanism has always been to let everything go.  It’s a rather strange accomplishment for me because friends and enemies alike would agree that I can never let anything go, but in this context it’s different.  There is absolutely nothing I can control and my fate is  in the hands of others and the randomness of a chaotic universe.  While that may also be true of all the other things that I can’t let go, in this case, it’s a clear immutable truth that I can’t deny.  I have no control over whether my flight is delayed or cancelled or my bags get lost, or I get stuck in flat-against-the-back-wall seat 39C between two fat guys,  or I die a fiery death which might be caused by religious fanatic or a defective rivet.  I’ve also always believed is that the cabin crew are just as much victimized by the experience as the passengers, so when when they seem a little cranky, I cut them some slack.  Their lot is worse than ours.  They have go through what we go through and it’s their job to be nice.  For low pay.

No doubt all the security hassles since 9/11 has made things beyond unbearable, but the quality of the experience of air-travel was becoming unbearable long before then.  The decline in quality probably began with deregulation when airlines were made to compete with one another.  The intent was right, and it did indeed make air travel available to nearly everybody and not just the slightly upper middle-class and above.  Something went haywire after that.  In competing with one another, airlines engaged in price wars that not only drove their competition out of business, they drove themselves out of business.  This recklessness in business management is mind-boggling.  How do 49 dollar tickets to Florida make sense in any business model?

The flying public, and our society in general, have some responsibility for creating the current situation that we’re now all whining about.  The most important rule in business is to pay attention to your customers and provide products and services that they value.  The message that we have been sending over and over again is loud and clear.  The only thing that matters is price.  We’re a consumer driven society and we want what we want, when we want it, and we want it as cheap as possible.  Never mind that anyone else, our fellow citizens no less, needs to make a living.  This is why in the future, every job will be a McJob and we’ll all be working for WalMart.

An airline that attempts to address any of the issues that we complain about would find itself at a severe competitive disadvantage.  If for, example, an airline decided to improve in-flight comfort by putting fewer seats in their plains, giving us more leg room and more room to recline, thereby reducing the level of physical torture, it might be very appealing, but it doesn’t change the amount of fuel required to reach a destination in any significant way or the cost of that fuel.  That means the airline would have to charge us more.  An airline that did that would find itself in severe financial straits very quickly.  We’ve told them over and over again that we’d rather save as little as ten dollars on a ticket by flying in cramped cabins and arriving at our destinations needing a chiropractor.

They’ve lower the price of a ticket to exclude baggage handling, and so now everybody tries to carry their baggage into the cabin, causing fights over compartment space, creating unsafe conditions in the cabin, causing boarding and un-boarding delays, and forcing flight attendants to be involuntary (and unpaid) baggage handlers.  But the ticket is cheaper.  The airline travel experience would be vastly improved for passengers and crew alike if baggage handling were included in the ticket and nothing larger than a small handbag or a briefcase were allowed in the cabin.  Make it an FAA regulation so that all airlines would be impacted equally.

The airlines have been racing to the bottom and we’re getting what we pay for. It’s time to bring back some regulation, not in pricing or other anti-competitive ways, but in levels of services required by airlines.

For additional perspectives on the Slater incident and air travel general:

• Ann Hood’s essay at Salon about her days as a flight attendant back in the days of glamour.
• Airline Pilot Patrick Smith’s column, also at Salon. Smith’s column, even when he’s commenting on the current condition of air travel, still has a joyful feel that celebrates the wonders of aviation even though he has enough experience to give him the right to be more cynical than he is.  He’s also a damn good writer.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

In the coming weeks, this mini-eBook, along with the others, will also be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Apple Bookstore, Kobo, and Sony.  The folks at Smashwords have been working their butts off implementing all of the distribution deals that they have been put in place.  Given the fragmentation of the eBook market that currently exists, where the retailers each have their own formatting requirements (unlike the world of print publishing), Smashwords is solving a real problem in bridging the technology gap and helping authors reach as many readers as possible.  It’s exciting to watch and to be a small part of Smashword’s quest.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

On Christmas Day of 1979, my parents, my sisters, and I drove out to Stony Brook to visit with Oma and Opa.  Opa was in the terminal stage of the cancer that would take his life the following March.  Christmas was very, very different that year.  Oma’s advanced age and Opa’s severely weakened condition made living in the four floor walk-up next-door to us in Queens impractical, so they had settled into the Stony Brook cottage.  Our Christmas Eve tradition of have a supper of German cold-cuts and salads up in their apartment before coming down to our house to open presents was suspended for the first time in my lifetime.

My father was spending as much time with them as he could while still running his drugstore full-time, and they were blessed with caring neighbors who helped out as well.  Much of all this activity I had missed because I was in my sophomore year at college and I was up in Albany.

The day was overcast, cold, and damp.  We arrived in the early afternoon.  Oma met us at the door and hugged each of her grandchildren and spoke in hushed tones.  Opa was in the living room that also functioned as a dining room, sitting his old rocking chair in the corner.  He was in pajamas and a thick terry-cloth robe that couldn’t hide his emaciated condition.

My father helped Opa out of the rocker and to the table.  Opa was clearly in pain and his legs were too weak to support his weight.  Oma had prepared a scaled-down version of are traditional Christmas Eve supper: knockwurst, bauernschinken, cervelat, creamed herring for my father, and potato salad.  Oma had also thoughtfully prepared a small dish of tuna salad just for me as she always had since the one time, when I was six years old, I had told her that I liked it.  Opa couldn’t eat much of this food anymore.  His meal consisted of mashed potatoes and a small piece of bauernshinken Oma had cut up for him and a piece of buttered bauernbrot.

After our meal, at Opa’s request, my father and I helped Opa into the sun parlor,  we sat him down in the middle of the sofa that faced the window and slowly pivoted him so that he could lay down.  My father stood at the edge of the sofa and held Opa’s shoulders and gently laid him down.  “Get his legs, Freddie,” my father quietly said.  I knelt down and with both hands picked up his ankles and laid them down on the sofa.  All I felt through his pajamas was bone.  Opa winced several times during this procedure.  Oma came in and covered him with one of her loudly-colored homemade afghans.  The excitement of the day – the anticipation our visit, the meal – had taken its toll on him and he quickly fell asleep.

Later, while we were all quietly talking in the living room, Opa woke up.  In a loud, stern voice, he called out, “Children! Come here!”

My sisters and I filed into the sun parlor and stood before him on the sofa.  My parents stood in the doorway.  It was about 5 o’clock and the sun, hidden all day, was low in the sky, finally breaking through the clouds and barren trees outside briefly lighting up the room.

“We will now sing a Christmas hymn,” Opa said.  With that, he began to sing, in German, “O Tannenbaum.”  This was unusual for several reasons.  First of all, my sisters and I speak no German whatsoever (aside from the names of the food Oma served us, and I had to Google them in order to spell them correctly here), much less the words to “O Tannenbaum.”  Second, we were never the sort of family that sang Christmas carols at home.  Maybe in church, but never at home among ourselves.  We did, of course know the tune, so we joined in and hummed along with him, awkwardly at first.

Opa sang verse after verse with one hand desperately clutching the afghan tightly to his chest, the other holding my hand.  He struggled to find the strength to continue singing and his eyes turned glassy.

I am forever haunted by that moment.  I remember thinking at the time about that sun parlor in earlier times, when we were children.  All those summer nights Oma and Opa shared with the steady stream of grandchildren.  The joyous laughter that arose from the board games we played with Oma and competed with the crickets outside.  Those times, those children, all seemed so far away on that Christmas Day.

Thirty years later, a question that can never be answered lingers on for me.  Where was he in that moment singing a Christmas carol that none of us but him knew?  My lifelong love of stories and literature and reading and writing has been quest for understanding what makes all of us who we are, to see into that inner life we all live.

The first half of Opa’s life was very difficult.  Born into poverty just before the dawn of a new century, he struggled to survive all of the turmoil of his times.  As a child in the early days of that new century he could have scarcely imagined the course his life would take. He was a soldier in one world war, a refugee in another.  He struggled just to feed his family during the Great Depression.  Living long enough to see not only his two sons go to college in the country he may have dreamed about, but also all of his grandchildren.

So, where was he on that Christmas Day?  What memory was his inner self reliving?  The carol he sang had no real connection to us. It’s presumptuous to think that during what he knew was his last Christmas, with an entire lifetime to consider, most of which preceded us, he was remembering one of “our” Christmases.  I can never know, I can only imagine.  Maybe it was a December night in 1915 or 1916.  He and his comrades, all of them cold, dirty and hungry, had briefly found themselves in a warm, quiet place.  Maybe while he sang “O Tannenbaum” with his comrades, he imagined a hopeful future, free of hunger, free of strife, and free of fear.

© 2009 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

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.

My father once gave me an address and I found the house they had lived in, a non-descript three story dump where they rented a flat on the top floor. I took a picture of it for my father and thought that the place might have fit in anywhere the working poor live in the northeast. It could have been Troy, it could have been Yonkers, it could have been Bridgeport, or it could have been Hamilton Street in Albany.  To my father’s surprise, it hadn’t changed in fifty years.

My uncle Johnny was born around 1921 in Lawrence and my father was born in 1930, also in Lawrence.

The depression was devastating to places like Lawrence. The mills closed down for what turned out to be forever and destroyed their fragile economies. It was during this time that my grandparents decided to move back to Germany. I never got the chance to ask them as an adult what made them make what they later admitted to be the biggest mistake of their lives, but all I have are the memories of what they told me when I was a child. For whatever reason, in 1935 they moved back to Hamburg.

They did tell me that within days of arriving “home”, they had realized their mistake. Opa, visiting some old friends at a police station heard, “John, go back to America. Get your sons out of Germany.” Indeed, my uncle, aged fourteen, was in grave danger, first of being “recruited” in to the Hitler Youth, and then into the Army. Everyone in Germany knew that war, and disaster, was coming. My grandparents had been born in Germany, so their sons’ US citizenship meant little to The Third Reich, and after Opa’s experience in The Great War, he wasn’t going to let that happen to either of his sons.

This story was told to me many times by both my father and by Oma. My father’s version is one of excitement and adventure, the kind of thing that thrills the five year old boy that he was at the time. He never seemed to understand that his older brother could very well have been senselessly slaughtered fighting on the side of evil or that he himself might have been incinerated when the allies firebombed Hamburg.  Oma’s version, however, is a little darker. The last time she told me this story I might have been about thirteen or fourteen, so I think the truth of what they must have felt is more frightening than she was willing to tell me at the time.

It took my family some eighteen months to finally be together again in America. Opa worked double shifts in factories for about a year to earn enough money to return to the United States. He headed to New York City to find work and to prepare a place for Oma and the two boys when they arrived.

In the meantime, my father and my uncle got to experience both the gifts and the punishments of a classical German education. I remember my father proudly showing me his German composition book containing his writing exercises, written with the most exquisitely beautiful and precise penmanship I’ve ever seen, particularly astounding when I realize that it was done by a five year old boy who had learned German as a second language just six months before. My father told me it was the product of both high standards of excellence as well as canings on knuckles and buttocks from the stern schoolmaster.

When Opa had finally sent enough money back to Oma, it was time for them to join him in New York. They took the train from Hamburg down to Genoa, Italy and from there sailed to New York. My father’s account of this trip is the romantic vision of a small boy, riding on a train, seeing Italy, boarding the huge ocean liner. Oma’s story about traveling south on the train, a mother with her two sons, trying to keep the youngest one from innocently telling their story to fellow passengers, passing through checkpoint after checkpoint and having documents scrutinized, is a little more scary.

I can’t pretend that their experience matches the sheer terror of what it must have been like for the many thousands of other people who were fleeing Germany at the time; they were, after all, “pure” Germans. They were still, however, fleeing fascists and fearing for their lives and futures. It is a state of fear that I can hardly imagine myself enduring.

The experience seems to have been particularly traumatic for my uncle. These days, we hardly think of fourteen and fifteen year old boys as “men”, but back then in that time and place, he surely must have felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, feeling that he was the protector of his mother and young brother as the three of them made their way south among all the other refugees.

At my mother’s funeral several years ago, I saw my cousin, Marian, for the first time since we had both become adults with children of our own. She asked me if my father had ever spoken about Germany. I told her that he had quite often and that Oma had told me about it too. Marian, her sister Susan and her brother Eric, had never heard much about it; their father never talked about it when they were growing up, and they hadn’t been able to spend as much time with Oma and Opa as my sisters and I had. She told me that her father, now in his late seventies, had just begun to talk about it in halting, sketchy terms. I spent some time with her and told her the things I could remember. I’m afraid my poorly remembered version of the story told her little about her father’s life-shaping experience.

My grandfather managed to get a factory job in Astoria, Queens and had found a place for them to live on Corona Avenue in Elmhurst. In return for being the superintendent, he had an apartment in the basement of a small apartment building. Being a super in a building in those days was a bit more work than it is now: keeping the hallways and stairwells sparkling clean, installing screen windows in the spring, replacing them with glass storm windows in the fall, keeping the coal furnace in the basement burning through the winter. My father helped him in these tasks as Opa found whatever other work he could in order to make ends meet.

My grandparents lived in that building for the rest of their lives. When Opa was superintendent they lived in that basement apartment while the two boys found what jobs they could while pursuing their educations; my father became a pharmacist, my uncle an audio engineer. Later, after the boys were grown up and moved out, Oma and Opa moved to an apartment on the fourth floor. It was large enough for the two of them to live comfortably as well as entertain guests. There was a living room, a dining room, a bedroom and a small kitchen. Oma served a Christmas Eve dinner for my family every year consisting of homemade potato salad and several varieties of German sausages and cured meats.

The bedroom had an unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline. When I was a small boy, Opa would give me a pair of binoculars and I would scan the distant skyscrapers for hours, silhouetted against the orange and red sky at dusk with the last rays of the sun glinting off the stainless steel crown of the Chrysler Building, and on into the evening when the lights of the Empire State Building and the Pan Am Building fascinated me.

After the war, in the late 1940’s, Opa had managed to scrape together enough money to buy a small cottage in Stony Brook, out in what was at the time, the distant reaches of the north shore of Long Island. A few years later he was able to buy the lot in back of the cottage creating a large wooded property with pretty gardens in front and on two sides of the house. In back of the house was a large lawn, shaded all summer long by towering oak trees.

It was a small, inexpensively constructed house that he improved over the years: excavating out a full basement, replacing the beaverboard walls with sheetrock, adding wood paneling to the living room, and adding a lovely sun parlor to the side that caught the afternoon sun. There was only one “official bedroom”, so a large dining room table was placed in the living room and the dining room was turned into a bedroom with a huge, in the eyes of a small child, maple bed and matching furniture: nightstands, a small table and lamp, a dresser and several well-stocked book cases. The sofa in the sun parlor opened up to a king sized bed as well.

There was enough room in the house for all six of their grandchildren, some by themselves, others paired by relative age, to take turns spending time each summer with Oma and Opa, going to the beach on most days, but sometimes fishing off the pier in the village or taking a drive in Opa’s Chevy to Montauk or Shelter Island. To me, this little cottage seemed a million miles away from the sidewalk on Corona Avenue back in Elmhurst. The air was fresh and clean, some mornings faintly carrying the salty scent of the Long Island Sound, and crickets and owls sang all through the night.

When my father bought the drugstore a few doors down from the apartment building, Opa retired and went to work for him. He dusted and stocked shelves and made deliveries, first using his own car, and then when my father was able to afford it, a specially painted Volkswagen beetle:

Newtown Pharmacy

Free Delivery

HAvemeyer 4-3000

During the summer, my father would hire a teenager for making the deliveries and Opa would spend July and August in Stony Brook with Oma, hosting the grandchildren as we rotated through. When I was old enough, I got the summer job, first riding all over Queens to make deliveries on a bicycle and then, after I got my license, the famously painted Volkswagen. The girls I dated in high school eventually got used to sitting at night in a car that stood out among the others parked alongside a small park near a Long Island Railroad overpass.

During the years that Opa worked for my father, a special bond formed between them. Opa was, I believe, my father’s closest friend in the world. As my teenage years progressed, my relationship with my father became strained and distant and we were never completely reconciled. I have always been envious of the relationship that my father had with his father.

My cousins lived in Huntington on Long Island. Oma and Opa were equally kind and generous and loving to all of their grandchildren, but because my sisters and I lived next door to them in the city most of the year, we got to spend more time with them. As the youngest of all the grandchildren, and the most spoiled, I probably got the most exclusive time with them.

When I was very young, Opa would stop by early in the morning on his way home from the deli with fresh breakfast rolls to bring me up to the apartment to have breakfast with him and Oma: orange juice, rolls with whipped butter and jelly, tea with milk and honey, and fruit. When I started school, I visited them in the afternoon when Oma would have afternoon cake and chilled leftover tea, again with milk and honey. I would spend a few hours with Oma until it was time for me to go home for dinner.

Oma, as everyone who knew her will remember her, was always a “Lady.” She was always dressed tastefully in dresses that she made herself. She spoke gracefully, as if she were a member of gilded age society. The rest of us were amused by this and teased her sometimes, thinking that she was trying to put on airs because we did, after all, live in the middle of middle-class Queens, and we had the accents to prove it. She did, however, have a good sense of humor, at least when it came to tolerating her youngest grandson’s childish pranks.

While Opa was a very quiet man who always retained a very strong German accent, Oma was very talkative and had barely a trace of an accent. To this day, I cannot understand how it was that this woman who came to America in her twenties and learned English as a second language could speak such grammatically perfect English with hardly any accent. At some point she may have taken lessons, because I remember her once asking me if I was studying “elocution” in school. I had to ask her what “elocution” meant. The one thing that she always had problems with was the “ch” sound which she could never do; it would always come out as “sh”. I used to play a game with her where I would say, “Oma, do you remember the name of that movie you took me to see? The one with the magic car?”

“Shitty Shitty Bang Bang,” she would reply, and then get flustered and scold me. I now realize that after the first twenty or thirty times I did that, she probably caught on and was play acting with me just so she could hear the scrawny little boy with the short pants and crew-cut laughing hysterically. So much for Oma putting on airs.

And she could talk. It became an in-joke in the family that you could have a conversation with Oma and not have to say a word for the first hour.

It was during those afternoons that Oma would tell me stories. The very first one I remember her telling me was “Hansel and Gretel” while I looked at illustrations through a tiny window in the back of a small plastic toy Bavarian cottage, clicking on the chimney to advance to the next picture.

As I got older, she tailored the stories to my age. Since they were from Hamburg, their apartment was decorated with pictures and mementos from the German city. There were several small nick nacks depicting Hummel. When I asked her about them, she told me the story of Hummel, the ill-tempered water carrier who was taunted by children who cried “Hummel Hummel”. Poor Hummel couldn’t chase them because he was weighed down by the water he was carrying so he would reply, “Mors mors,” a low-German phrase loosely translated as “asses, asses.”

Many years later, after both Oma and Opa were gone, one of Opa’s younger brothers came to visit America for the very first time and stayed with my parents. He was in his seventies and spoke no English. He seemed both surprised and disappointed that none of my father’s children knew German and that my father had to act as a translator. When he asked again, through my father, “No German at all?” I replied “Mors Mors.” With that, the old man’s face lit up with joy and he leapt across the room, pulled me out of my chair, and kissed me on the lips. It’s a Hamburg thing.

Oma told me the story of her trip out of Germany with my father and uncle many times. When I first heard it, I was quite young and her story was probably told the way my father remembered it: an exciting adventure. Gradually, as I got older, she added in more of the frightening aspects of the story.

She also told me about the sinking of the Titanic, about how she heard about it as a little girl in Germany when it happened. She told me about Scott’s expedition in Antarctica, followed by Richard Byrd’s flight over the South Pole.

I was captivated by her stories and asked her to tell them to me over and over again. None, however, captivated me as much as the story of Lindbergh’s flight over the Atlantic in 1927. She told me how no one had believed that a man could fly solo for so many hours and find his way across the unforgiving north Atlantic to Paris, but Lindbergh, through courage and conviction, had proven them all wrong. She was able to talk for hours about it as I eagerly listened to it again and again. She told me that when I was old enough, she would give me the book that Lindbergh himself had written and I could read it all for myself.

That day came when I was about ten or eleven years old and I was staying with them for my annual turn out in Stony Brook. In addition to finally being able to go out on the big fishing boat from Captree State Park on the south Shore with Opa, as my older cousin Eric had once done, she finally presented me with the book.

On the first night in the sun parlor, with the crickets singing outside the window screens, and after several games each of Clue and Parcheesi, Oma handed me her copy of Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis. It was a huge intimidating book for me, but every night I climbed up onto the big maple framed bed that dwarfed me with Lindbergh’s book in my hand. I struggled reading it, but by the end of my two weeks that summer in Stony Brook, I had completed it. On the final Sunday afternoon while Opa was putting my suitcase in his car for my trip back to Elmhurst, I attempted to hand the book back to Oma. She pushed it back to me and told me that it was mine to keep.

For many years, Oma and Opa had been members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and they were voracious readers. Although he was very quiet and usually let Oma do all the talking, my memories of those nights in Stony Brook include the picture of Opa sitting in the corner of the living room in his rocking chair, reading a book or a magazine while Oma played board games with me and told me stories in the sun parlor. He rocked very slightly in the chair as his eyes focused intently through his reading glasses. In later years he would also use a large, square framed magnifying glass.

Starting with The Spirit of St. Louis, Oma would periodically give me books to read, each time turning them into gifts that didn’t need to be returned. Finally, when I was a college-bound senior in High School, she said “Take any books you want, they are all yours.”

As my teenage years progressed, my interests diverged from what seemed to be the only acceptable field for my generation in my family: medicine. My relationship with the rest of my family, particularly my father, was a disaster, and there were times when I wondered how I could be such an oddball in this family that was producing medical professionals. Throughout all this, Oma flew in under the radar and nurtured my interest in literature. The books she gave me during those years included Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring, Marchette Chute’s Shakespeare of London, Collected Short Stories of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, and several volumes of Shakespeare, organized into tragedies and comedies.

I have a book entitled The Hemingway Reader next to me on my desk as I write this essay. It contains the complete text of The Torrents of Spring, The Sun Also Rises, eleven short stories, selections from five other novels, and selections from non-fiction works on Spain and Africa. On the blank page facing the inside cover is an inscription, hand written in a fine slightly Germanic looking script:

John & Frieda Bubbers

1953

Every book that Oma gave to me was so inscribed, with both their names and the year the book was acquired. At some point in time The Book-Of-The-Month Club, in cooperation with Scribner’s, sold a matched set of Fitzgerald and Hemingway novels. Each book has a blue hardcover and a black spine. Titles on the spines are embossed in silver and the author’s names in gold. Oma and Opa only had a few of these volumes. Over the years, I looked in used book stores, gradually filling out my collection. On one happy day when I was in college, I found both a Gatsby and a Farewell to Arms in a musty old used book store on Pearl Street in Albany. These books aren’t of much value, the ones I purchased that day were about two dollars apiece, but they are the two authors who matter the most to me, and my collection began with a gift from Oma and Opa. The completed set now sits on the mantle above the fireplace in my den.

When my sisters, my mother, and I were preparing for my father’s funeral, we were pulling out all the old family photo albums to use the pictures to decorate the funeral parlor. Here and there in the photos we found pictures from long past holidays where both Oma and Opa were present along with my father, my uncle and all my cousins. The pictures are striking. First of all, there’s the abundance of blond hair and blue eyes, blond enough and blue enough that I’m sure to have given tsoris to the grandmother of one of my old girlfriends. Even more striking, however are the physical features that you can see in all of us who have descended from Oma and Opa. A geneticist could use these photographs as lecture aids. My father resembles Oma. My uncle resembles Opa, although he still has some of Oma’s features. My sister Judy and my cousin Marion look like Oma. My cousin Eric and I look like Opa. My daughter Caroline looks like Judy, my father, and Oma. We do, in fact, have photographs of Caroline, Judy and my father each at about the age of five or six. With my father’s girlish blond hair style that mothers of all generations to like to inflict on their little boys, the children in all of these pictures from different generations look identical.

Opa died after a long battle with cancer when I was a sophomore in college. The protracted illness that had slowly killed Opa had been particularly difficult for my father and the death of his closest friend hit him very hard, heightening the disappointment he felt with me. At the time, I was away at college majoring in everything except pre-med. Oma died of a sudden heart attack several years later.

Years later, I now have questions for them that can never be answered. What was it that sent them back to Germany? Was it simply poverty, or was it more? How frightening was it for Oma without her husband, shepherding her two sons south to Italy and back to freedom? By the time I was born, they had completely embraced America. Opa went to visit Germany just once in the 1970’s and Oma never left America again after those eighteen months in Germany in the 30’s. She voted Republican in every single election from Eisenhower to Reagan.

The biggest mystery of all is the collection of books. There is a significant amount of Hemingway and Faulkner in this collection. The Hemingway is understandable. His writing style and subject matter crosses all cultural barriers and he is still one of the most popular writers of English around world. What I can’t understand is how a woman who was raised in Germany, who came to America in her twenties, and who learned English at the same age, could both tackle and embrace Faulkner. Reading Faulkner is not for lightweights and I doubt that these books were ever default selections for the book club. The contents page of The Collected Stories of William Faulkner as very faint checkmarks next to each item. The inscription on the book tells me they acquired it in 1953, after their sons had both been married and moved out; not that I can imagine either of them reading a book by Faulkner they didn’t have to. How I wish I could ask Oma what she thought of “A Rose for Emily.” It is only now that she has been gone for almost twenty-five years that I realize that she must have possessed a finely tuned ear for language and a love for literature and ideas.

Oma and Opa quietly lived a literary life, unnoticed by everyone but their youngest grandson to whom they gave their most precious gift: an enduring love of stories.

Tomorrow: Gifts Epilogue: Christmas 1979

See larger image The Spirit of St. Louis (Paperback) By (author) Charles A. Lindbergh List Price: $20.00 USD New From: $12.72 In Stock Used from: $1.76 In Stock Release date November 25, 2003.

See larger image To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Harper Lee List Price: $15.99 USD New From: $5.84 In Stock Used from: $0.75 In Stock Release date May 23, 2006.

See larger image Silent Spring (Paperback) By (author) Rachel Carson List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $6.09 In Stock Used from: $3.14 In Stock

© 2009 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

These current-day price wars conducted by giant retailers remind me the the transformation of the business my father was in for forty years.  He was, by profession, a pharmacist.  He was also a businessman.  He owned the neighborhood drugstore in our section of Elmhurst, Queens.  After working his way through pharmacy school, serving in the Army during the Korean war, and then working in other people’s stores for a couple of years, managed to buy the neglected and rundown business in his own neighborhood.  From the time he bought the business in the early fifties until he modernized it in the early sixties, the store looked very much like the one in Edward Hopper’s painting.  Hopper is perhaps best known for his handling of light and the thing that strikes me about this painting is the light streaming out of the store into the darkened street.  It’s 10 PM and everything is closed but the drugstore.  The doorway in the shadow next to the store leads to the stairway up to the second floor where the druggist’s children are sleeping and his wife is waiting for him to close the store and come home.

The picture also prominently shows two hanging show globes.  Even after my father completely modernized the store, he had two antique standing show globes that he kept in the store windows.  From time to time, he would empty them out and change the coloring.  I remember helping him in the back of the store, filling them with water and tincture of this and tincture of that.  For some reason, I never knew what the hell these things were and what purpose they served and I never even thought to ask him.  With the help of Wikipedia, I now know they are a traditional symbol for pharmacies dating back to at least the 16th century.

My father took his profession and his responsibility to his customers and to our community very seriously.  He considered himself a healthcare provider and his customers looked to him that way.  If they had a cold, or a fever, or a scratch, or a sudden rash, they consulted him first.  If it was something easy, he handled it.  If they needed to see a doctor, he patiently soothed their fears so that they wouldn’t be too afraid to go.  When they had seen a doctor, while my father filled their prescriptions they often asked him all the questions about their condition and their medication that they had been too afraid to ask the doctor.  Some people even called him “Doc,” just like in the old movies.

Although my father was a health practitioner, and no one who knew him ever had any doubt that he did what he did because he loved it, he was also running a retail business.  Over the course of my life I saw it become more and more difficult.  When I was born, it might very well have been his dream that I too would grow up to be a pharmacist and he would hand his business down to me.  By the time I was a teenager, he had seen where the retail pharmacy business was headed and realized there wasn’t much of a future in it.  At least in the way he thought a pharmacy should be run.

We lived in a middle class neighborhood.  My father’s business was successful, so we were probably better off than most people, but we were not rich either.  We lived modestly in an apartment above the store even when we could have bought a real house in a slightly better neighborhood, as some of the other merchants on our street did.

My father’s store was pretty much like any other neighborhood drugstore at the time.  On the shelves near the front of the store where the various sundries one expects: combs, hairbrushes, shaving cream, toothpaste, shampoo.  There was a small counter with cosmetics, a cigar humidor and a candy counter next the cash register.  At the back of the store, on a raised floor, dominating the entire space, was the reason the store existed, the prescription counter.  While my father’s store carried all the normal drug store items, it was the prescription counter that was, as we call it in retail business-speak, the primary revenue center.

Other than my grandfather, who worked in the store dusting stocking the selves, and running deliveries, my father never hired any additional staff.  Over the years he occasionally had a temporary pharmacist come in so that he could take some time, but that was very rare.

As the sixties turned into the seventies and the seventies turned into the eighties, the retail pharmacy business changed drastically.  Chains were established, very often by  pharmacists of my father’s generation who liked business management more than they liked pharmacology.  Chains battled, then merged and became ever larger.  They became large enough to negotiate prices directly with pharmaceutical companies and HMO’s, open stores with floor space three or four times the size of the traditional (now labeled “independent”) drugstores.  They sold everything from lawn furniture to motor oil to potato chips.  The prescription counter was still in the back of the store, but it was the loss leader that drew you into the store so you could buy all the higher profit margin non-prescription items in the front of the store.

Somehow, through all of this, my father remained successful and left on his own terms when he retired comfortably in the early nineties.  The key may have been that he never actually tried to compete with the chains the way they competed with each other.  He didn’t fill up his store with aisles of toys, housewares, and car fresheners.  Instead he focused on filling prescriptions personally while his customers waited.  I remember seeing him behind the counter when the store was busy, deftly filling one prescription after another, banging out the labels two-finger style on his Hermes Rocket, and talking to his customers.  I may be exaggerating, but I don’t think anyone ever had to wait more than ten minutes to get their prescription filled.  So, while the chains used the prescription counter to get customers in the door to buy other stuff, my father used the prescription counter to get them to keep coming back.

He was the last of his breed.  The other neighborhood drugstores in our area either went out of business or got acquired by the chains.  Newtown Pharmacy at 91-09 Corona Avenue in Elmhurst was the last to go.  One fact is telling:  When he retired, he didn’t sell the business, he sold the building.

Last week I needed a prescription filled.  I brought it to a nearby CVS in the morning.  I was told by a pharmacist technician who didn’t know my name to come back in the afternoon to pick it up.  That afternoon when I came back, she handed me the prescription and I made my way back to the front of the store.  I’m sure that same pharmacist technician won’t be there the next time I get a prescription filled.  On the way to the cashier, I picked up some blank DVD’s, some AAA batteries for my wireless mouse, a spare light bulb for the lamp in my office, and a six-pack of Arizona Iced Tea.

As I stood in line waiting to check out I understood how my father stayed in business and competed successfully against the giants, why customers old an new brought there their prescriptions to him instead of the supermarket.  He provided personal, human service and didn’t treat healing and wellness like commodities.

© 2009 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

“One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you’ve now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You’re next. Another thing about parental mortality: No matter how much you’ve prepared for the moment, when it comes, it comes at you hot, hard and unrehearsed.”

Those words introduce Christopher Buckley’s memoir, published yesterday in The New York Times Magazine.  Author Kathryn Harrison has written about traumatic events providing a “before and after” for their victims’ lives.  Most of us will not ever know the traumas she has explored in her books, but we do, all of us, have a before and an after.

Growing Up Buckley

See larger image Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir (Hardcover) By (author) Christopher Buckley List Price: $24.99 USD New From: $4.88 In Stock Used from: $2.36 In Stock

See larger image While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Kathryn Harrison List Price: $7.99 USD New From: $4.07 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date November 24, 2009.

© 2009 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

I’ve put them back up, however, because the place has been on my mind lately.  In the late 40’s my grandparents, who lived in a rented apartment in Queens, scraped together enough money to buy a small cottage in Stony Brook, which became their summer home.  When I was growing up in the ’60’s, I spent a good part of each summer with them and I have very fond memories of the place, as do my sisters and my cousins.   I wrote a bit about it in a personal essay about my grandparents.

One of the things that I think is important in a piece of fiction is a strong sense of place.  Whether it be Hemingway’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin, placing a reader in a place they can see, taste, feel and smell, is critical creating what John Gardner called “The Fictive Dream.”  It’s necessarily about burying the reader with dense passages of description, it’s about providing just enough to capture the essence of a place and time, using as many of the five senses as possible.

For me, my memories of Stony Brook are particularly vivid and I have been writing a series of stories set there during the time I was growing up.  They’re not really autobiographical; I grew up in Queens and my fictional characters are seem to me to be like people I might have known, but aren’t based on myself or any real person.  The stories are about a family in Port Jefferson, a town near Stony Brook that I actually lived in for a few years as an adult.  The first story, “Brothers,” was published first in Static Movement and again in The Square Table. “Come Together,” the second story will be appearing in a future issue of Cantaraville. I’ve completed a third story, I think the best of the set, that is under consideration for publication next year in a well regarded literary journal (I’m keeping my fingers crossed).  I’ve also begun a fourth story.  The story cycle isn’t something I’m actively working on.  Usually when I finish one story, I have absolutely no idea what happens next.  When it finally comes to me, six months or a year later, I write the next story.

One of these pictures played a role in the writing of one of these stories.  The picture at the top of this article was taken from the fishing pier at the Stony Brook town beach, next to the Stony Brook Yacht Club, and just across the street from the historic Three Village Inn.  That strip of beach on which stands that little green beach house is a place that my grandparents used to take us for cookouts.  It’s located at the end of a road that extends past West Meadow Beach and past some cottages, whose legal status has been questioned for years.  This picture was my desktop background while I was working my third Long Island Story.  I was writing a dramatically tense scene and I needed a break.  There before me was that lovely place that I remembered so well, so I had my characters jump into a convertible on a sunny spring day and drive out to that little green boathouse.  It provided a happy, energetic interlude in an otherwise sad story.

The Gallery.

Updated May 2011:  The story mentioned has been published:

See larger image Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $1.99 USD Release date February 6, 2011.

© 2008 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

My last name is unusual and has been a mixed blessing. It’s rather funny sounding and I got teased about it when I was a child, but it’s also memorable, so it’s probably a good thing that people remember your name. There aren’t too many Bubberses in the world, so when you encounter one, they are probably related to me in some way, but how isn’t always clear. All I know for sure is that my grandparents came to America from Germany after World War I. Some years ago, a Bubbers, in search of other Bubberses, contacted my father. That branch of the family, possibly a forgotten uncle of my grandfather’s, had emigrated much earlier and had settled in South Dakota. There are now descendants of that family scattered around the Midwest and in Florida, none of whom we knew about until about twenty years ago.

My first name comes from my father and I had always assumed he had gotten from his mother, Frieda.

Occasionally, I Google myself to see how the various things I’ve published on the web show up in search indexes. Last night, I found a link to the obituary of a certain “Fred Bubbers,” who lived and died in South Dakota in the early part of the last century. He probably would have been born in America at about the same time as my grandfather was born in Germany. To give credit where credit is due, the website containing the obituary is Genealogy.com.

I don’t know how I’m actually related to this Mr. Bubbers, but one thing is for sure. Ich bin ein klutz.

Here it is, in its original style, the obituary of Mr. Fred Bubbers:

FRED BUBBERS SUMMONED

This community received a shock, such as it never before this had, when word reached us that Fred Bubbers was dead as a result of an accidental gun shot wound, received while hunting ducks at the lake last Sunday afternoon. The tragedy happened just as Mr. Bubbers was stepping up on the bank of the creek at the south end of the lake. He had waded across a shallow place and had raised his gum barrel to keep it out of the water. While he was in the act of taking a step with his right foot the left foot slipped back, throwing his body forward just enough to place the muzzle of the gun in a position just above and back of the right knee as the gun was being carried under the left arm. While in this position, the hammer accidentally slipped, discharging the gun, the load of shot entering the leg just back of the knee severing a large artery which resulted in Mr. Bubbers death within a period of four minutes.

The deceased was born in Rozellville, Wis., August 22, 1885. In 1910 he came to South Dakota where he purchased a relinquishment and has made this his home ever since. In 1915 he was united in marriage to Miss Molly Robinson of Washington, D. C. His unexpected departure is mourned by his heart-broken wife, his aged father, one sister and three brothers of which John and Ernest are residents of this community. The community extends their sympathy to the bereaved family in their hour of sorrow.

Funeral services were held at the Auditorium Wednesday afternoon, Rev. Schaar officiating and his respect that he was held in was shown by the unusual large gathering that followed his last remains to the Morristown cemetery where interment was made.

With all due respect to anyone who knew Mr. Bubbers and may still  mourn his loss, “Mr. Bubbers, meet Mr. Darwin.”

© 2008 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.