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.
When I was growing up in Milwaukee in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the Christian holidays were honored culturally. We sang Christmas Carols during December at school. We had the week following Easter off – always – as spring break – whether or not the weather honored the season. And although my family were not church-going people, we celebrated the Christian festivals along with everyone else.
For weeks before Holy Week, Mom carefully decorated pysanky, the Ukrainian decorated Easter eggs. I had the job of blowing out the eggs before Mom sat at the kitchen table and carefully applied wax and coloring to the empty shells.
I was still small – maybe 6 or 7 – when Mom told me that a man had been hung on a cross to die. The streets were quiet that Good Friday – stores were closed to honor the somber day – when she let me go out to play on the front steps of the flat on Ring Street, alone. I ran up and down the steps. My instructions were to stay in front of house. And as I played alone on the steps, I wondered about that man who had been left on a cross to die. I thought he was somewhere not far away, but out of my hearing, in the quiet city.
Part of me was taken with the story, which in later years I would tell, again and again, to congregations in California, a long way from those narrow, bleak streets. I imagined the man into existence, in a way: captivated, wondering.
On Easter Day, Grandma Markowski would be making her way up the alley to our house, and we’d try to tap each other’s eggs colorful eggs – not pysanky, but regular decorated, hard-boiled eggs – to see whose egg didn’t break. They were the winner!
Later, Auntie Anne and Uncle Harvey, Mark, Patty, and Johnny would arrive for the dinner, ham and all the trimmings. Later still, the women would go into the kitchen to talk and talk as they washed and dried the dishes, while the men sat together in the living room, drinking beer, and waiting for the holiday table to be cleared so that the Sheepshead playing could begin.
Soon enough, Easter was over, and soon enough, the well decorated, hollow eggs that had been carefully decorated and displayed, were set aside, to come out another year. This year, like all the rest, a dish of the beautifully decorated eggs will grace my table, just as they did Mom’s table.
Pysanki by Mary Bahlert (Mom), Jeff Kunkel, Ronn Lass
Quiet now, this early spring into which we fall, a few days of sunshine and green rising from earth. Quiet now, we enter the Holy Week - watch the sombre procession - with unknowing eyes - unaware of what will pass, what is passing. We line the streets, shake the bells into sound, strike the cymbals, shout: "Hosanna! Hosanna!"
The people cried out as we have cried out into the night for Something to Save us: these earthy bodies, this pain, this solid march from life to death -
All in stark relief against the clouding sky. ---Mary Elyn Bahlert, 4/2025
Night sky over Oakland, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 3/2025
When I was five years old – five years and one month old – I started the long walk from 11 and Ring Street in Milwaukee to 9 and Ring Street, where I entered kindergarten at LaFollette Grade School. Those two blocks were long walks for a little girl. I expect – although I don’t remember – that my mother must have anxiously walked with me the first day or so, pushing in a stroller my baby sister, Susan, who had been born that March. After that first day or two or three, I walked those blocks with the other children from my neighborhood.
When I return to drive through those streets now, I see how short the blocks were, moving west to east, toward “the Lake:” Lake Michigan. I think of myself as growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan; it’s not too much of a stretch to think that way. The shore of Lake Michigan formed my compass-point, my sense of direction, for many, many years. “The Lake is on the east,” I think, “so I must be facing north, and to get there, I have to turn left, to the west…” etc. Years later, when I land in the Bay Area of California, I find that directions are expressed differently. “Turn right at the second gas station, then get into the left lane. You’ll turn left at the next stop light.” When I work at my first job in graduate school, someone hears me giving directions and says: “You must be from the Midwest.” Good guess.
That’s how our lives grow, how the edges of our lives expand: by walking those few blocks to kindergarten, leaving home for the first time. The edges widen by talking to kids whose lives inside their narrow flats are different. I hear about dads who are mean, for example, and I hear about mothers who laugh a lot. Until I leave my house in September of 1954 to walk those few blocks, my imagination does not hold space for those possibilities.
I am nostalgic for those streets, for those city spaces, for the shadows under the big elms that line the streets, for those narrow stairs with the small window on the right at the top, that lead to the second story flat with its small front room, tall windows, its small bathroom with the clawfoot tub that was used by 5 people without a thought that it could be otherwise. My nostalgia wants to be satisfied, so I ride my laptop via google earth to the front of that flat; I walk with google the two short blocks to La Follette School. I still see the beauty that was there, and I see the poverty, the simplicity of those flats, as well.
On the way to school one day, I learn that I am not Catholic. Michelle, my neighbor across the alley (which runs next to my house), a year older then me, asks me one day, as we walk to school: “Are you a Catholic?” I don’t know. That night, I ask my mother if I am Catholic, and she tells me no. I do not know the fraught history that lies behind her answer, and I will not know, for many years, the fraught history and longing that goes with not being Catholic, in me.
At LaFollette School, I am introduced to a kind of diversity, for the first time. I sit near the front, always, our seats assigned alphabetically by teachers in navy blue polka dotted dresses. In those narrow rows, in those wooden desks with holes for ink pots still marking the right hand side, I sit beside the children of first and second generation immigrants. I do not know that many of my classmates speak a different language at home. In my house, I often hear Ukrainian words, spoken with a kind of mysterious wink; from time to time, when my grandma visits, she and my mother speak their native tongue.
In the autumn, the elm trees that line Ring Street turn bright colors, and as I walk, I often try to catch a maple seed – a helicopter to enchant children – as it floats to the ground. Over the street, the trees meet to form a ceiling that arches from one street to the next. In later years, Dutch Elm disease would take the elms away, and when I see these streets now they are just beginning to be tree-lined again, after many years.
In winter, snowbanks form a path for children, four foot high, on the strip of land between the road and the sidewalk. After a winter storm, the tops of the snowbanks form a hardened, frozen, flat sidewalk parallel to the cement sidewalk. At the corner, I climb that tall bank of snow and stand taller than any adult, until I take the steps – made by other children – down again, at the place the alley meets the street. After the alley, I climb the snowbank again.
In spring, I walk to school as the glorious, wide, lilac bushes float their purple flowers, their scent into the air.
*
One summer day when I was 13, I walked down the steps in the narrow front hall, from the second floor, to look out the screen door that led to the downstairs porch. I looked out on that street, with its maples, its curbs with green grass growing beside the asphalt, the tall, spindly houses that held families – broken, near poor – the sound of traffic from the busy street a block over in the air. I don’t know what happened, then. Was it hope, speaking to me? Was it a barely covered wish, from inside of me, speaking to me? Was it the thought that my mother, my grandmother, held deeply inside, beneath the bright mind, the hand-sewn clothes? I heard a voice. The voice was clear, not to be ignored. “I don’t belong here,” it said.
The streets are not nearly as pretty now as they are in my memory. Milwaukee can be a bleak place, from December to late May. Grey clouds hang over the streets, over the city, for way too long each year. And the houses that line the streets – 50 or so years old when I lived in upper flats – are 100 years old now.
Those narrow streets formed me. I left them behind, many years ago. Still, they are my home.
My first job was at the Times Fine Arts Theater on Vliet Street and Hawley Road in Milwaukee. Word must have passed from one young person to another, because most of the other young people who worked at the theater were friends of mine from high school, and even earlier in my life. There was Pat R., her younger brother, Bobbie, my best friend, The Bug (who had received her name from Bobbie at some point), my cousin Mark, and a couple of other kids from the neighborhood.
I could take the 23 bus right to the front door of the theater to start my shift. I was the vendette, my friends Pat and Bug – who worked at different times – were the ticket sellers. We worked for minimum wage – I started at $ .90 – yes, that’s right – 90 cents! – and stayed at that rate for the year I worked there. And I worked no more than 15 hours each week.
My shift started with my walking down the left aisle in the dark theater to a little room off the dark hall behind the stage. There, I reached into the dark room to flick on the light switch, and I reached for a big bag of popcorn that was stored in that room. The popcorn had been popped at a sister theater, larger, with its own popcorn popping machine. I carried the big bag of popcorn back to the narrow aisle in the lobby of the theater, where I dropped the popcorn under the lights to warm. I had picked up some real butter in the back room of the theater, too, and I put that in the dispenser to warm and to melt. Then I was ready for customers.
Times Fine Arts Theater was not well-attended. Its fare was mostly “adult pictures,” although not what we would call X-rated these days. And then, the Theater showed one feature – not several in different theaters, which is common today. From time to time, I’d catch a few minutes of the movie currently running. But mostly, I stayed behind the counter where I sold popcorn and candy from a selection that was locked behind the counter until I opened it for my shift.
During the movies, I could talk and have fun with my friends who worked along with me. The usher stood at the doorway to the outer hallway, which was cold in the winter. The ticket seller had an electric heater which she had plugged in as soon as she arrived for her shift. Sometimes, crushes developed there between various couples, mostly short-lived.
I credit that job as marking the beginning of my life-long addiction to popcorn. (During COVID, popcorn-making in a pot on the stove became part of a daily lunch ritual with Jeff). I kept a small portion of popcorn behind the butter machine, and I snatched another kernel of buttered corn – real butter – from time to time. During COVID, popcorn-making in a pot on the stove became part of a daily lunch ritual with Jeff.
At the end of our shifts, we carefully counted out what we had made that night, and inventory of the candy in the glass cabinet that I opened from the back was taken. Then, I locked it up again, stuffed the remaining popcorn into the large plastic bag I’d stashed under the counter, and walked it back to the room behind the big screen.
When the shift was over, my Dad’s dark blue Chevy Bel-Air coupe showed up in front of the doors, and I was on my way home. Later, the Bug had access to one of her parents’ cars, and she’d drive me home, the two of us talking and laughing all the way.
Mornings, we walk among the graves, up hills and down. I read the stones, glean the stories buried there. A child, born and died, 2 days old. Her mother gone, too. Beloved father and mother, pictures frozen on the stone, as if they look the same today. One young man, mother’s son, died in war, before he lived his life.
Mornings, I count the years of the beloveds as we walk among the graves. I reckon those whose lives I now outlive, some by many years. I drift off, recounting my own life: who was I, then? The time has passed away, and so quickly.
Mornings, I am sad as we walk among the graves. I look into the sky, beautiful. I see the city in the distance, all that life booming and moving, all those moments of importance, passing too – quickly.
Mary Elyn Bahlert, 10/2020
From the beginning of COVID sheltering-in-place, in March, 2020, through the long months that followed, Jeff and I had a morning routine. We’d rise from bed at 5:30, make two dripped cups of coffee, and sit together in the living room. After a time, we’d get dressed for the day and head outside for our morning walk: St. Mary’s Cemetery, just a block away from our home, has beautiful views of San Francisco Bay from the top of the hill. Each day, we’d pass the same graves, by the same route, talking with neighbors, stopping to play with someone’s dog, greeting those who passed by – some for the first time. We made friendships on those walks, and we heard plans change as a young couple purchased their first home in another neighborhood, some friends only people who passed us with a nod and a “good morning,” never to be seen again. This poem is from the time of COVID, in 2020.
“Mornings, I count the years of the beloveds as we walk among the graves. I reckon those whose lives I now outlive, some by many years… ”
