My mother’s father and mother who were still living in Europe, died within two weeks of each other in 1919, during a then virus epidemic. My father’s father died while still living in Europe and after he died, his mother Bertha and her three sons and three daughters, emigrated to the United States. Bobba Bertha as we called her, lived at various times with the family of one of her children. My father was very close to his mother and siblings and often visited them.
At one time when Bobba Bertha was living with her daughter Sylvia, in an apartment in Brooklyn on Tompkins Avenue, Poppa went to visit and took me along. I think I was about 3 or 4 years old, and I assume Bobba Bertha may have been in her seventies. I recall Bobba sitting on a chair in front of a window with me on her lap looking down at the people walking in the street below. As I sat on her lap with my hand touching her hands, it ran across the wrinkling of her skin.
I will in about two weeks reach my 93rd birthday, and quite sure the wrinkling on my skin exceeds that on Bobba Bertha’s. When sitting on a chair with my eyes closed and one hand moving across the skin on the other, a vivid picture appears and there I am sitting on Bobba Berth’a lap with my hand moving across her wrinkled skin. Wiping away a tear or two, I am grateful that while recent memories leave us in despair, old memories always stay with us.
Ben Haber
January 2, 2021
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