Month: January 2025

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Fran

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Friendships – in particular, friendships with women – have been an important part of my life. Over the years, I’ve had friendships with women I can travel with, friendships with women to talk over important happenings in our lives, friendships with women I can take my troubles to, friendships with women to have fun. And there was – is – my friendship with Fran.

Frances and I were the smart kids in class. Frances was Jewish, something I knew, although I don’t know why I knew. In fifth grade, she and I carefully planned a “This is Your Life, Miss Schmidt,” for our gray haired, navy blue polka-dotted dress, dark stockings and old woman shoes teacher. We were friends through the sixth grade. Then, Fran disappeared from my life.

In Junior High, I was with the same group of kids over the course of the three years. We were placed together based on our IQ test scores, tests carefully administered to grade school students. But Fran was no where to be found.

***

Several years ago, I received an email from an unknown sender. I was invited to take part – although long-distance – in an anniversary celebration for my Milwaukee High School, Washington High. Except for a few friends from those days – one or two or three – I had not stayed connected over the years. From time to time on trips back to Milwaukee, I’d driven past the school, retracing my steps from home in my rental car. The email I received, after information about ways alumni could continue to support Washington High, had a question: “Did you go to Clarke Street School?” The email was signed: Fran xxxxxx. As soon as I read the email, I shot an email back through the ethers: “Are you Frances xxxxxx?!” I asked.

Yes, the writer was Frances! And we had re-connected, thanks to the Internet and our shared history. Later that year, Jeff and I met Frances and her husband Jakov – an Israeli man who she had met at the University of Wisconsin. We enjoyed a brunch at their home in Shorewood, Wisconsin. There, I asked Fran whether her family had suffered losses during the Holocaust. Her father, she told me, had lost his first family, and her mother, also from Europe, was his second wife.

*
Last spring, Jeff and I visited Wisconsin, and we spent several days visiting favorite places, so lovely in the early spring. One Sunday morning, while Jeff and his brother Randy took a long walk through Shorewood, I visited Fran in her home, just a few blocks away. As she and I visited, Jakov quietly joined us for a few moments, then disappeared again into another part of the house.

After that, communication seemed to stop. I sent several emails to Fran, then decided to wait – or to let her go. After all, we’d not been connected for most of our now-long lives. Finally, late last year, I received an email. Jakov had passed after a short illness, and she’d spent the year adjusting to her new life, a widow. Our lives do go past so quickly, something I know now, as an elder. When I see an “old” friend, like Fran, I see and hear the person she had always been to me – a treasured friend.

“Incidentally, Clarke Street School, built in 1902, has a winged facade similar to these schools’, though there are no arched windows. There are, however, arched brick details that somewhat echo the Siefert and 37th Street facades and it has the same low dormers as Siefert and Brown. It is also built on a U-shaped plan but has another segment added, creating a deformed “E” shape footprint”. — Bobby Tanzilo, “On Milwaukee,” January 28, 2012

Fran and me, circa 2014, Kiel, Wisconsin

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“A man must be coming!”

Mary Elyn Bahlert

At this time of year I remember – always – the days of the New Year in 2001, after my Mom had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer, and as she spent more and more time in her small, much-loved room at the Mathilda Brown Home in Oakland. She had loved living at Mathilda Brown almost since the day she arrived, in August of 1998. And for that, I was grateful. She needed the assisted living care she received there, and the home was big enough for Mom to find a good friend with whom she could spend time. And small enough for her to feel comfortable, to know everyone. She was safe. She was happy. That was enough.

In December of 2000, she was diagnosed with the cancer, and after a final visit to the physician, Jeff and I had taken her back to her room and alerted the staff that she would now be on hospice. The staff at Mathilda Brown hurried into high gear, understanding that my mother would be receiving the care she needed from hospice, and that they would provide her basic living needs, as always. She grew thinner and thinner as the days went on. But she could still be lively, and fun – forgetting that she was ill.

One day I sat with her as she lay in bed, and we talked. She asked me then: “what is wrong with me?” “You have cancer,” I told her. Even hospice care had noticed how honest we were with one another. And this time, when I answered, she said, immediately: “we’ll fight it!” Slowly, looking into her eyes, I shook my head, “no.” A sadness came across her, then. And in another moment, it was gone, replaced by another thought, another mood.

Now, remembering, it is hard to believe that only a few days before she died, Jeff and I took my mother and Mildred, a woman for whom Jeff was caregiver, to stay overnight in a place overlooking the Pacific, in Half Moon Bay. But we did it. I don’t remember much about that trip – except that we did it. It was a lot, caring for the two elders. But we did it. And we returned them both safely to their homes.

Suzie had been to visit Mom, Ronn had been called and alerted to her coming death, a friend – a colleague – had stopped to visit with her.

The week before Mom died, I had an idea. One morning, I picked her up at her home and we drove to the neighborhood where Jeff and I lived. I took Mom for a manicure and pedicure. She chose the colors – she always liked pastels – and we spent an hour chatting together and with the women who worked in the shop. When their work was done, and as we were getting ready to leave, Mom held a hand to her face, admiring the freshly, carefully painted nails.

“Hmmm,” she said. “A man must be coming!” The shop women giggled along with Mom and me as she glowed with delight.

“A man must be coming!” Indeed.

Mathilda Brown Home closed, several years after Mom passed. We live in the neighborhood, close to the Home, and sometimes, on my way to other errands, I drive past the building, the grounds still beautiful, although its original use as a residence for single women and then as an assisted living facility is now its history. I always remember how happy Mom was to be safe at home there.

Mom and Me, Mathilda Brown Home, circa 1998

beauty, nostalgia, reflecting

Shedding the tree

Mary Elyn Bahlert 
In sadness the lively tree is shed of color,
gleaming ornaments 
      carefully, safely wrapped in soft paper,
      paper that wrapped them safely when I was young.
With each one wrapped, a memory:
      a smile, 
      a tick of sadness arrives
as I lay them to rest for another year.

These days, I lay them in their boxes
with a wave of grief at how many Christmases have passed,
how few festivals of Light there are to come.

     Mary Elyn Bahlert, 1/2025
Beautiful Christmas companion, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 12/2024
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Dad

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Dad had strong arms, the arms of a working man, the arms of a man who crawled around on silos all day in that steel mill. We didn’t know – I didn’t – how he counted on those arms – those working arms – until years later, when I heard him say as he lay in his hospital bed in St. Joe’s cancer ward, with a tremor in his voice: “I used to be so strong.”

Those arms were his pen, his pad of paper, his living.

He was strong, in the way working men are, although he was not any taller than me, when I was grown. His eyes sparkled and flickered as he sat in front of the television in that narrow living room, in all the upper flats we lived in, every night, laughing at Lucille Ball, drinking a beer, two, three. He loved to laugh, and his eyes would twinkle if he got us to laugh, too.

When I was small, Dad would lay down next to me to tell me a bedtime story. His favorite was “Jack and the Beanstalk.” When Jack climbed the beanstalk, he discovered that the giant at the top had lots of food, and cases and cases of beer, in his coffers. Most of the time, Dad would soon be snoring as I lay awake, always slow to go to sleep.

From the time I can remember, and even before, my days began when the alarm went off in my parent’s bedroom – 6 AM. Mom was up first, her nightgown covered with a chenille robe, in the kitchen, where she reached to the top of the refrigerator to turn on the radio, to hear the weather report. Day after day, she got the frying pan heating on the gas stove, added the bacon, and two eggs for dad. The coffee pot perked alongside. In a few minutes, I’d hear Dad’s footsteps in the back hall, all the way to the basement, where he shoveled coal into the furnace, and shortly, the room I shared with my little sister was warm, that cozy warm of rooms in cold places. I lay in bed, the heavy quilts that kept me overnight covering me.

Twice a year, winter into late spring, autumn into winter, dad changed the storm windows into screens, screens into storm windows, year after year after year. He did it himself. When he worked, Dad did not talk, although he loved to talk, to tease, to show his pride for us in his words, in his bright eyes. When he worked, Dad lifted those heavy, heavy storm windows by himself, and balancing each one in his strong hands, he fit them into the space they served, bolted them into place, and we were safe again, safe in his strong arms, safe from the coming winds and snow.

*
I have a soft spot for working guys.
I see Dad in them, his truth, his simplicity.  They get the benefit of the doubt from me.

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Seeing the Mother-land

Mary Elyn Bahlert

1988. The times were very different from these times. The world was changing – quickly, it seemed. I was in my fourth and final year as the Associate Pastor of First United Methodist Church in downtown San Jose. And I had learned about a trip sponsored by the World Council of Churches to travel to the Soviet Union to honor the 1000 anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to Russia.

The congregation I was leaving gifted me – through the donations of several folks – what was needed to travel to the Soviet Union as part of a delegation of Americans sponsored by the World Council of Churches. I was grateful – and very excited – to see what was part of my family’s homeland. My mother’s parents – my maternal grandparents – had immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1914. They had held onto the hope for their people, even in the New World, expecting that the formation of the Soviet State would bring freedom. History would prove otherwise, of course (once – having received as a gift, a large volume about Stalin’s time, I’d had to stop reading when Stalin’s slaughter of the Ukrainians numbered well over 10 million people – primarily in the 1930’s). Their hopes did not correspond to the life they had here.

The trip began with several days of study of the Soviet Union and the Orthodox Church tradition in Brooklyn, New York, before the group made the journey to Moscow. Since we were guests in a Communist country, our group had been assigned to travel to events in several cities, and without our consent, the group was divided into smaller groups with different itineraries when we arrived in Moscow. I traveled to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and to Odessa, a beautiful city on the Black Sea.

In the Soviet Union, the time had received the name, perestroika – restructuring of the economy. The people of the USSR – and the world – had hopes for the new Soviet Union. It was an exciting time to be in the USSR as a foreign visitor; indeed, the WCC trip coincided with the visit of Ronald Reagan, the U.S. President, to the USSR.

I was as close as I would ever be to “my people,” the people of Eastern Europe. As the years have unfolded, I have learned that my family – who had broken with “Church” by some turn of events in Ukraine, before emigration – must have been Catholic, a common faith and practice in Ukraine. Still, I was grateful for the introduction to the Eastern Church, the Orthodox Church. For me, traveling with the WCC was a doorway into a deeper look at life in the USSR – one doorway among many.

And so I was privileged to see the homeland, over fifty years after my grandparents had left their home. My privilege was reflected in another way; I told my mother about the trip, and invited her to join us, to finally secure her passport, to see the place where her people had lived, and where some still lived. She couldn’t see herself traveling that distance, and out of the country, and so she did not join the trip.

I’ve been inside many churches in my lifetime – to be sure. And there in the Soviet Union, I saw some of the most beautiful churches I have ever seen. The high arched ceilings, the iconography, the beauty of those places touched me. Even more, the babushkas – the poor women who came to the church with their prayers in their hearts, who bowed, again and again, standing before the saint to whom they gave their prayers – touched my heart. I carry their devotion with me, even now.

We learned that the Soviets – atheists – had protected the churches through all the years of the USSR, since 1917. They, too, had been moved by the beauty of those places. When the anniversary of the Orthodox Church was being planned, minutes from the organizing included these words: “Members of the Bishops’ Pre-Council Meeting gratefully consider it necessary to note the positive attitude of the Soviet Government to the questions put forward by the Hierarchy of the Church.” In other words, the government had agreed to allow the celebrations.

When we were not in churches, my roommate and I walked through the streets of the cities we visited. And in Kiev it was that I saw “my people.” The faces, the eyes, the way the people carried themselves – I recognized. They are forever “my people.” The days we were in Kiev were beautiful spring days. The lilacs were in blossom. The people felt the freedom of the spring as well as the changing times – as difficult as the present and the days to come – like all the days in the past – would be.

*

When I read the news these days, the world hears rumblings again coming from that Eastern place, now called Russia, again. I often think that Putin, President Putin, has never lost his history as KGB, and so he rattles the chains to control the people of his country – and the people of Ukraine, a sovereign nation. We may see the lock-down, the disappearing of that place as a free land – again.

On the back of this photo, in my mother’s hand: Vlas Markov Srebny Feodosia Maksuda Srebna, Ivanka (Ivan, little one) Srebny, 4 yrs. old . Photo circa 1914.