“Yes!” Buby said, “Yes Dahlink!”

My Buby told me that she had been “quite a lively dancer,” when she was young.  Even in her clunky chunky heels with a Darvon in her system she’d be game to step out onto a tennis court, or you’d find her planting fish-heads by some corn in our yard, “the way the Indian used to do.”

Andy came home from the farmer’s market with Lilacs yesterday and a flood of memories came back, color and smell transporting me to childhood; it was my Buby who adored the lilacs, who would cut some from the bountiful hedges that neither my mom or dad could really care less about and bring them in, set them apart to really be seen… just the way Andy, my mountain flower, does with peonies, gladiola, orchids and now lilacs (and that’s just what’s vased around me as I write this post.  Yes! I am fortunate, and doubly so to know it).

I had wanted to plant lilacs in my yard when we finally got a yard, but lilacs need a hard frost and Studio City is hard-frost-impaired, and thus it has been many a moon since I saw and smelled freshly cut lilacs.  And when I did, the back of my mind was pondering Momalom’s final five-for-ten theme:  “Yes.”

And then it hit me, in contrast to my parents’ “no,” I grew up with my Buby’s “Yes.”

Can you take us to the hobby store?  “Yes,” Buby said, strapping on her babushka like a leather flight helmet and piloting the Pontiac, her view between the dashboard and the arc of the steering wheel.

“Can we buy a model?”  “Yes,” Buby said, carefully pulling money from a well-ordered purse and a neatly clasped wallet, her modest fixed income doled out sans guilt.  She was patient as we walked through the vast Hobby Models store at Devon and Western, the back room filled with ornate trains powering round and round their little worlds.  Sometimes we got rockets.

“Can we have francheesies?”  “Yes,” Buby said, sitting across from my brother and I across from Hobby Models, in a booth in The Gold Coin restaurant, she ordering blintzes or borscht for herself, and allowing us kindelah to eat hot dogs stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon, violating every dietary law she followed.  Still no guilt, no judgment.

“Can we stay and see the second movie?”  “Yes,” Buby said, sitting beside us in the ornate but fading movie palace, my parents cavorting around Europe.  We sat and watched Midnight Cowboy unfurl—male prostitute comes to New York City and becomes best friends with homeless Ratso Rizzo (a MUST SEE BTW), flashbacks of the brutal rape of Joe Buck, the “midnight cowboy,” helps us understand his repetition compulsion, shame and torment (but not when you’re twelve—we could really not fathom why men were pulling his pants down).  In the end, Ratso dies, on a bus to Florida, held tenderly by Joe (we were all crying).  It was inappropriate, and great, and it made me want to be a filmmaker.

That same trip we went to see Barbara Streisand in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, but not because we liked musicals staring Babs, but because the theater switched from the matinee feature to an R-rated film called The Baby Makers at the evening show.  “Can we stay for the other film, Buby?”  “Yes, dahlink.”

After watching the film—about a couple who can’t conceive, hiring a sexy young girl to carry the father’s baby, with total nude scenes and a sexual betrayal that ends with lovers being doused with blue paint, not to mention a red spot in white shorts when the nubile young lass loses the first pregnancy (none of which we remotely understood)—we asked Buby if she thought that it was okay for us to have seen that.  “Of course, dahlink, it’s time you learned about the making of the babies” she chimed in her singsong Austrian-Hungarian accent.

When I was really little and Buby told me that God was everywhere, I asked her if God was in my pocket.  “Yes,” Buby said, and she said it like she knew what she was talking about.

When I tried to trick my brother into drinking laxatives, he saw that Swiss Kriss floating atop the hot cocoa.  “Do you want to drink it, Buby?”  And Buby said, “Yes.”

When my parents were on yet another trip, the “orient” I think it was, I was thirteen, cutting Hebrew school and acting out.  I ran away and came back and was outside cursing my Buby up and down to my brother for everything my parents didn’t stick around to hear.  I turned and saw her standing in the open doorway.  Did you hear everything I said?  “Yes,” Buby said, not hurt, not angry, but wise.  She made a cup of tea, sat down and talked with me at the kitchen table.  She didn’t make everything all better, and so she rides with me in my heart and informs the way I try to roll.

While parents have to balance love and limits, grandparents get to say, “Yes.”

So, in honor of my beloved and long dead in body and yet very alive in spirit Buby, I crib from James Joyce, that Yes Man! di tutti literary Yes-saying-men, and from Molly Bloom, pendulum swaying like Buby breasts, from the lusty back to the loving, wholesome and nourishing:

“I was a pisher of the suburb yes dahlink when Buby Rose put saltwater in my nose like the gypsies did or shall I wear quiana yes dahlink and how she scrubbed hard my face by the sink shayna punim and I thought well as well her as another and then I asked her with my eyes to ask again yes dahlink and then she asked me would I yes dahlink to say my lilac Buby and I put my arms around her yes dahlink and let her hold me so she could feel my loneliness yes dahlink and her heart was steady and wise and yes dahlink I heard yes dahlink I love you Yes.”

Namaste, Bruce (and Buby)