Bubba Sara at Casino Rama

​Bubba Sara at Casino Rama
By J. Kott-Wolle
Oil on canvas, 16x20, painted 2018
Original photograph taken - 2010
 
I never really felt close to my grandparents but I loved them and I knew they loved me.  They died when I was quite young and they only spoke Yiddish so it was tough to communicate and establish a real relationship with them beyond the adoring smiles.  When I met my husband it was completely strange to me to have that generation alive and well and part of our lives.  Lucky for me he had two wonderful grandmothers.  Being with them was almost like time-traveling to the shtetls of old and yet both were thoroughly modern women, each with a playful sense of humor.  Bubba Sara died in 2017.  She lived to be 102. Bubba LOVED the casinos.  When she turned 90 we (her grandchildren) took her to Las Vegas because she wanted, as she put it, “to go there one last time before moving to my apartment in the sky”. Even near the end of her life, when she slept a lot, she’d perk up if someone offered to take her to the slot machines.  I miss her every day.