what I've learned from life, by Mary Elyn Bahlert
This morning, a walk up Mount Wanda,
summer brown – early this year.
Up the long path to the top –
A windmill, high and lonely,
Turns and listens
As the earth crunches beneath our feet,
and as we circle, again and again,
The azure sky draped overhead.
Here, tired from the climb, the trees our companions –
our lives have come to this! –
We stop! We breathe. —Mary Elyn Bahlert, 6/2021
It was in the beginning of January, 2001. My mother was in the last days of her life, and she lay on her bed, under hospice care, in the Mathilda Brown Home in Oakland, every day, all day. I sat with her often – as often as possible – and we chatted idly, our conversation about ordinary things. From time to time, Mom would close her eyes as she lay on her back, and I sat in the silence – our last times together.
At the time, I was the proud and enthusiastic owner of the Palm Pilot, powered by batteries, that held my calendar.
One afternoon, I sat next to Mom’s bed as she rested, and because I had not brought a book or other work from my office, I turned on my little computer-calendar and started to play Solitaire- a bonus feature. A few moments later, Mom sat up, and threw her legs over the side of the bed, as she looked at the object in my hands. “What is that?” she asked.
?????????????????
Over the years, I’ve come to value my own curiosity more and more. Curiosity has been a great gift to me. As I get older, I know that I prefer to spend my time with curious people – people whose sights are set on the abundance of wonder in the world. Their curiosity may lead them to interests that aren’t mine, but it’s the quality they possess that makes them interesting – and, well, curious – to me. What they give me from what they’ve received from their own interests continually makes my life richer.
And their curiosity flows over – to people. Curious people are interested in other people, about the world other people inherit, about how other people got to where they are going now, what decisions they made, who they’ve encountered in their lives. Over the years, my friends loved to visit with my parents. In their small living room, my friends’ lives were of interest to Mom and Dad, whose lives were enriched by the young people in their lives. Mom and Dad were interested in the lives of the young people who visited, and the young people knew that – and liked it.
My brother Ronn was 9 years older than me; he married when I was 14. In my eyes, he was all grown up, making his way in the adult world. One day, after he’d been married a year or so, he said something to me that I’ve never forgotten: “Do you know that some people are not as interested in things as we are in our family?” “No,” I answered Ronn, in response to his reflective question. I’ve never forgotten his question, his observation, really, about the world as he saw it – his own world growing larger by his connection to another family.
Curiosity has led me to be curious about myself, to be curious about my inner life, about what has brought me here, about who and what I’ve encountered over the course of the years of my life. My curiosity extends to other people: what makes them tick? In my mind, curiosity is not dependent on finding answers; curiosity is interested in questions…
I’ve always loved libraries. What better place than a building whose purpose is to hold books, computers, magazines – all filled with something to satisfy someone’s curiosity – or to leave someone’s curiosity unsatisfied, so that they have to go back for more?!?
I didn’t come from highly educated people, people with degrees and titles. But I did come from a curious sort, people whose eyes lit up with the discovery of what was new, new in their lives. I expect that the quality of being curious is not related to education.
And would the world be different, if human beings were less concerned with certainty than with curiosity?
Our house on Ring Street stood right next to the alley, and from the porch of our upper flat I could see my Grandma Markowski in her long black coat, her head covered in a cotton scarf, as she made her way from her house on Burleigh Street to our house – walking in the alley. Grandma was a babushka, a peasant woman from Ukraine who came to the United States with my Grandpa; he had left his home to find a better life for himself and his children.
The alley was lined on either side with garages. My dad rented a garage down the alley to keep our car out of the weather. When I was a child, we children played outside for hours, close to home when we were little, and farther away as we grew. From the front porch or the small back porch outside our kitchen door at the back, my mother could keep an eye on me as I played.
I have a memory from those times, when I was very young. I am in the bath tub, and Mom is helping me with my bath. As she runs a washcloth over me, and without looking at me, Mom says: “I saw you hit a little girl when you were playing today.”
“That wasn’t me – that was another little girl who looked just like me.”
I see Mom turn her head away, a smile coming to her face. She liked to call me, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary”.
One of the favorite games of kids in my neighborhood those days was playing Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, our television heroes, whose show we watched faithfully every Saturday morning, one in a line-up of shows for children that aired – a new episode every week. Randy Larson, a neighbor boy my age who lived in a flat around the corner on 12th street, played Roy Rogers to my Dale Evans. And one day, as we played our parts, riding our bikes in place of horses – skinny, blond-haired Randy Larson leaned over from the seat of his bike and planted a kiss on my cheek! We laughed!
*
My mother always kept up to date on happenings in Milwaukee. And she read the obituaries, faithfully, in The Milwaukee Journal. If something or someone of note to me had had their name mentioned, she made sure to tell me. And so, one day, I had the news from my mother that Randy Larson had been killed in Vietnam.
In 2015, Jeff and I traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet up with our good friends and traveling buddies from the U.K. – Pat and Tone. While there, we visited the Vietnam Memorial. I had long wanted to see the Memorial, the Vietnam War having made a mark on me as it had on all members of my generation. I looked for Randy’s name on the register, and found his name engraved on the Memorial.
Just another working class kid, a kid who died serving in a War that was not declared a War, his name a memory on a wall.
My first grade school was Robert M. La Follette Elementary School in Milwaukee. During the summer before I started fifth grade, my family moved a mile west where we rented another flat – we always lived in the second floor flat – where I walked to Clarke Street School on 28 and Clarke Streets. I had to cross 27th Street, a busy thoroughfare on the North Side.
I made several good friends at Clarke Street School. One of my best friends – Frances (Peltz) Assa – and I re-connected several years ago; we had lost touch after the 6th grade. Through the years I had thought about Frances, and one of the joys made possible by the Internet has been our re-connection in our 60’s.
Now, though, I remember a day that was an important day in my life, one I often remember. In the summer after 6th grade, my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hospel, invited me to spend a day with her at her home. I expect that only a few of us received that gift, although I don’t know for certain. I took the bus from 26 and Medford – where we lived in the big upper flat in the house second from the corner of Medford Avenue and Tamarack Street – to the East Side of Milwaukee, east of Humboldt Boulevard.
I now know that as a child, I identified with my teachers – unlike most children, who identify with their parents or those who’ve been their care-givers. The trip to spend the day with Mrs. Hospel would have been significant for me. I’m sure I was excited, although I don’t recall. The bus trip alone – a young girl, arriving on a city bus – would have been cause for excitement.
No one in my immediate family had been to college, and my childish ability to note these differences was important to me.
In my mind, I see the wall in one room of Mrs. Hospel’s home. Was it the living room? The dining room? I know we had lunch. Sometimes, I think I can almost remember what she served for our lunch together, but I do not remember. I see the wall, I see the framed pictures there. And when I see them, I realize – again, as I did as a child – that this house, this way of living was different than the way we lived, the way my family lived. I knew this, with a child’s knowing, a knowing I have not lost through the years.
At the end of our time together, Mrs. Hospel walked me to the corner of Humboldt Blvd. and Locust Streets, where we sat on a bench, waiting for the bus to take me home again. Just a few years later, I would wait on that same corner for the bus to take me home from the University. As we sat there, I remember talking to Mrs. Hospel, asking her questions about herself. I seemed to call on a part of myself – a larger, more adult part of myself – to have this conversation.
A good friend of mine – a retired school teacher – tells me that some-times she sees in children a part of them that is mostly hidden, but that rises to the surface in certain moments; as a teacher, mother and grandmother, she loves these moments. I think she was describing the Me I knew that day. Maybe this part of me was my True Self, that larger, indescribable Self that we have always known, that has been with us, is in us, birthing us – forever.
Sometimes, Facebook is a remarkable thing! A few years ago, Mrs. Hospel and I became Facebook friends. When she was my sixth-grade teacher, she was in her first year of teaching, and so, I expect, she is only 10 years older than I am. We’re both still young – and in the Wisdom Years…
We aren’t born with it, but we acquire it when we’re young. We grow up with it. There it is, in the sound of mother’s voice, of daddy’s voice, in the hushed voices of elder siblings, who have inherited it, like we have, from the air, from the air we are breathing, the air that Momma and Daddy are breathing. We inherit it,just as they inherited it.
And the generations before them.
Shame. Shame arrives on our bodies, in our bodies, in our organs, from these willing people, who love us, but who hate the shame that inhabits them, and so they try to shed it, shed it anywhere – on the couch, at the store, in the nursery, in the kitchen! But still, shame remains. It sticks to the folks, it has stuck to them for generations, and it sticks to us, catches on us – on our soft places with willing contours – just like it caught onto them.
I know shame well, like a well-known sister, who’s been in my life for as long as I can remember. I know her feel, the sound of her voice in me, the whining and the sass that come along with her, that came along with her when she set herself into me. She was fleeing, I’m sure of that, fleeing someone else – Mom, likely, and Dad, and probably even my well-loved teachers in the school I walked to, dutifully, every day.
No one wanted it, and so they kept throwing it off, onto me, onto you, onto any unknowing partner in the crime of shame. We all got it. We all ate it, whole, uncooked, unbaked, unwashed. We took it in, until it began to cover us, that slime, and after a while, we began to think this shame was us.
Then we were lost in it, and some of us are still lost in it, drowning in the shame, the grimy, greasy stuff that didn’t belong to the ancestors, and doesn’t’ belong to us. But still, we hold onto it, willingly, because if this is me, then this all I’ve got, and I don’t want to let go.
One day, after I thought I was free of her – after all, I’d named her, like some scary apparition in the dark – I was talking to a friend in a well-lit room, near the sea – I could hear the crash of the waves in that lovely place – and something was said, I said it or my friend said it, and – there she is again, caught on something in me, a word, a memory that flitted past, the sound of a voice, a feeling – and I couldn’t shake her. Knowing her, making room for her, giving her a name was not enough. I learned that.
Sometimes, now that I’m older, I feel her still. But not often. If I had not left her behind, I wouldn’t be able to speak as I do today, or lift my eyes into the eyes of everyone I meet, like I do today. I wouldn’t be able to sleep as quietly as I do. I left her somewhere, maybe in some therapist’s office or in an old journal, or spilled on the floor of some healer’s dark and quiet room, but part of her is here, still. When I’m angry or seething or tired or dismayed – sometimes then, she arrives, again.
Her sticking power is not what it used to be.
All of this came to mind when a friend told me she had not been raised with shame. Hmmm, I thought, I hope that’s true. Maybe it’s true. Is it true? It got me wondering. I began to remember, then, my long association, my long knowing, my ancestry and all that have inhabited this same dna. Did we have some hooks in us that others did not, do not have? I don’t know. I used to wonder. I used to be envious of those who used their shame in another way, who got ahead with it. I couldn’t. I can’t.
Maybe I learned to love her, or at least, not to hate her. Maybe I have learned to simply acknowledge her when she arrives, as if to greet an old friend, someone who I no longer have anything in common with, and our only connection is a slender thread, a memory, not even a longing.
