I am a spiritual seeker, a seeker who has "taken a drink from many cups." I love to accompany others on the deeper journey to witness to their True Self. Now a writer, photographer and poet, I have retired from full-time ministry as a pastor in downtown Oakland, CA.
Mom was diagnosed with cancer early in December of 2000. We took her home from the doctor’s office, Jeff and Mom and I silent as we made our way from his office to the elevator. We had all agreed to hospice care. When we took her back home to Mathilda Brown Home, the staff went into full gear as we all received an explanation about what hospice would entail. Jeff and I were grateful that Mom could stay in her little room, in the place she loved.
I visited daily then, and most days, I’d find Mom in her room, sitting in her chair, crowded next to her bed, or lying on the bed, resting. One day when I arrived, I found her on a wooden chair in the hallway, her bathrobe over a nightgown. She’d forgotten to change that day, so we went into her room and chose clothes more suitable for the day. “ I must be losing it!” she said. Another day, Mom was sitting on the edge of her bed, facing the window that overlooked an alley and the playground of Oakland Tech. When I came into the room, Mom said, without turning her head: “ I wish it would snow once, just for me.”
I wished it would snow, then, too. As tough as winter can be in the Midwest, we Midwesterners love its beauty, those days when the snow falls silently and without a wind to rustle it, to the earth. That winter, in the days before Mom died in mid February, weather reports on local radio announced that there had been a sprinkling of snow high on the hills over Oakland. I wished I’d been able to take Mom to see it, but by then, she was confined to bed.
I’m grateful that I love all kinds of music. And I love to sing – to myself, when I’m in worship, when I listen to the radio in the car. I love the melodies. I love the words. I love to pretend that I’m onstage, singing to an audience. When I’m in the house, I love to move my body to the rhythm of the song that I’m singing to myself. A little joy, a little gift that is part of my life.
My husband still teases me when he sees “Mar” coming out – the me in my imagination who stood in front of the bedroom mirror as a teenager and belted out the latest Beatles’ song.
youtube is a gift to someone like me. I can spend hours scrolling through youtube, watching videos of rock and roll stars, of country western concerts, of duets and bands from the 60’s, when I was in high school, until now. I’ve watched the Vienna Orchestra and the Rolling Stones in the same day – maybe even the same sitting.
Dancing is good, too. I’ve always loved to dance. I dance through the house to the tunes in my head, moving from one room to the next. “The body likes to move,” a wise person once told me. (Dancing is good exercise, too!)
A melody a day counts as a good day, to me. Hum it to yourself…
The trees love to dance, too… photo my Mary Elyn Bahlert, 10/2014
After I moved to the Bay Area of California from Milwaukee in the 1980’s, I was struck by the diversity of people in the Bay Area. I love the diversity, which I have always known to be a strength, and I love it here. I observed that in Wisconsin, the weather was more interesting, and in the Bay Area, the people are more interesting.
And there is nothing like the storms in the Midwest, that place where winter settles in early, and leaves late – often into early May.
Yesterday morning, as I was talking to a friend via ZOOM, a flash of lightening lit the sky outside the window, and a moment later, a boom of thunder. Just like that!
Later, I remembered a time, lying in my bed in my parent’s flat, when I would listen to the storms coming – the thunder, quiet in the West, and slowly, with each boom, the thunder, louder, until it was overhead. And then it passed to the East, out over Lake Michigan. Only after the storm passed did I settle down to sleep.
On one visit to Wisconsin, my husband and I sat with friends and family in his mother’s living room in a suburb of Milwaukee. It was summer, and the heavy, humid air was bright with sunlight as we talked. We were more interested in each other until the air changed, the sky clouded over with a storm, and we heard thunder in the distance. I rushed to open the front door, so that I could smell the storm through the screen. We sat silent then, listening to storm, as we heard the thunder clap in the distant West, move overhead, and then grow quieter as it moved to the East. For a few moments, the storm was more interesting than our visitors. Having relished the change in the air, we continued to visit.
I love living in the Bay Area, this place where a rainy winter is worshipped, heartily, this place where we suffer from years of draught. I love to see the shadow of San Francisco from my windows. I love the early spring and the daffodils that begin to bloom in February.
But I’ll always miss the storms in the Midwest, booming overhead, then passing to another place.
I love to see the shadow of San Francisco from my windows…
When I was a child and I thought about growing up and going out into the world on my own, I was often confused and even frightened by the possibility that I would be leaving the family I knew (well, leaving it physically – I have since learned that we never really leave our family of birth). But somewhere, “deep inside” of me, I had an idea that has never left me. I would grow up to be 17.
Why 17? I don’t have a clue!!! Didn’t then, and don’t now!
But the strangest thing, and something completely clear to me, is that I have always been 17. Take a look at me – I’m still 17!
I love to lead small groups – I volunteer to lead two small groups in the community in Oakland even now – and one time, I was leading a group of women. I asked them the question: “How old are you – inside?” As each women thought about it and then spoke aloud her inner age, heads around the room nodded. We could see it! One woman – a woman to me at the time, very old, although I am older now than she was then, told us that she was 18. She was right!
And so, this 17 year old old has entered her elder years, a retired person now. As my father told me, many years ago when I looked at him in disbelief, a child with her whole life ahead of her, “life sure goes fast.”
It sure does.
Even autumn is beautiful… photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 12/3/2014, Oakland
My husband likes to call me a “City Girl,” and when we travel, I like to add another city to my mental list of cities where I have walked, where I’ve stopped at a cafe for a cup of coffee, where I’ve seen the places that others recollect about having traveled to a particular place. Over the years, I’ve been happiest as a traveler when I’ve had time to simply walk a city; when Jeff and I stayed for several weeks in London as part of a “house exchange,” my happiest moments were the times we took the Tube into the city and walked slowly from one street to the next, noting the differences of that place, comparing what we were seeing to other places we’d been.
In my Junior Year of college, the University offered a trip to New York City to students during spring break. I wanted to go, that’s for sure. But how was I going to swing it? The $ 250.00 was more than I could see myself saving from my part time work at the carwash on weekends. One day, as the weeks to spring break quickly passed, my mother walked up to me in the kitchen of our flat, and from her hand, she handed me $250.00.
Where did she get the money to gift me the trip she knew I wanted? My parents’ habits around money were simple, working class habits. Dad brought his paycheck home every week, and Mom cashed the check at the grocery store, waiting in the line to the office booth at the front of the store, the booth where Green Stamps were redeemed, the booth where she paid the utility bills once a month. Later, at home, she carefully budgeted the cash in a folding paper folder made for that purpose; she and dad got an allowance, there was the money allowed for food, for utilities, and there was the money saved for Dad’s vacation in the summer, when we’d go to Door County for a week. She kept the budgeted cash in the bottom drawer of their dresser.
I’ll never know where Mom got the $250.00 she handed me that day, or whether it put her back a bit in the family’s budget. I don’t think so. I think she had carefully considered giving me the money, that she knew where it would come from, and I doubt it affected their budget.
I can see Mom’s face as she handed me the gift. I can see that she was opening a door for me, a door to a life she hadn’t had for herself, a door to some vision or dream she had for me, her only child to go to college. In her world, that $250.00 was an extravagant gift, certainly more than I had seen before. I’m still grateful for that extravagance, that gift with dreams and hopes – not spoken, but conscious dreams and hopes – attached.
I traveled to New York that spring on a bus with my friend, Vickie. There, we took in the Broadway show, “Hair,” we ate our meals in restaurants, at a New York deli, we walked and walked, and we lifted our hands into the street to get a taxi from here to there.
Later in her life, after my father passed and she had built a new life for herself, volunteering at St. Joseph’s Hospital, making new friends, my mother and her friend Mary took the bus trip offered by a local Senior Center to Washington, D.C. Later in her life, her world opened for her, and I’m grateful. After Mom passed, her friend Mary told me about the fun they’d had, traveling together, two elders, free women. Just like I had traveled to the big City with a good friend, many years before.
I’m grateful not only for the extravagant gift, but for the dream, the hope that was in and with that gift. Just as she’d passed the bills to me that day, she’d passed on that hope and that dream. In many, many ways, I’ve lived a life that my mother could not hope or imagine for herself. She dreamed it – for me.
