Category: memories

Some people have uncles that were awful people, creepy people, uncles that no one liked, uncles that were hard to be around.

Not me.  I had wonderful uncles, and I remember them, along with all the rest of the ancestors, often.  While they did not say it – ever – I knew that there was love, or at least affection, in them for me.  

Uncle Pete, my mother’s youngest brother, was full of himself.  Like all the others who are full of themselves, he took up all the space in a room.  He had a large presence, a sort of charisma, I suppose.  His dark eyes danced as if he had a joke to tell.  He could tell stories from three wars – “Pete fought in three wars,” the men in his neigborhood said as they made room for his wandering, his memory loss, in his later years.  Pete, my handsome uncle Pete, who walked silently to the car with me on a visit I made to the military hospital in Oakland to see Aunt Athalie, his wife.  Then, he seemed shy even, as he carefully saw that I was in my car and had driven safely off.    

Sometimes as I got older, he’d ask me a question he should have asked my mother; “ask my Mom,” I’d say, without saying more.  He didn’t press me further.  Did he ask my Mom?  I don’t think so!  Like many families, differences were not worked out directly between the siblings.  They had to trust in the passage of time to take away old hurts.

Uncle Johnny was the eldest brother, a hero to my mother and her other siblings, Mike, Anne, Pete.  He was older than the next one in line – Mike – by 9 years, and it was safe to say that he had been born in the Old Country, Ukraine, although the family lore held that he was “born on the boat.”  When he went off to work, he showed up at home to bring Christmas to his siblings, knowing that his folks would not come through for them – ever.   

Uncle Johnny was smart, well-read, an atheist:  an uneducated intellectual, the condominium he shared with Aunt Dani filled with piles of magazines and books.  His brother’s eyes were full of pride when Johnny spoke; my mother’s, too.  He was a quiet one – like Mike and my mother, to Anne’s, to Pete’s extraversion.   In his later working years as a machinist, he was a union man, his democratic socialist leanings lived out in his own life.  He was our hero, too. 

Uncle Mike was so quiet, so much part of the background that I have few memories of him.  Did he ever speak to me?  He married Alice, a British woman he’d met when he was a motorcycle-riding soldier in England during the War.   When I was a young woman, Alice would call me from time to time, and she’d take me to dinner, where she talked and talked.  After Mike died, Alice finally got a phone for their little home in a town north of Milwaukee.  I last talked to Alice when she happened to call my mother in the days before we moved Mom to live out close to us in the Bay Area.  My mother’s memory was already poor, so when my Aunt Alice identified herself to Mom, she handed the phone to me, probably thinking the call was for me.  

**

Dad was one of nine siblings, one of only two who’d left Door County, Wisconsin, to live in the city; Dad settled in Milwaukee, Uncle Norman, his youngest brother, in Queens, New York, where he worked as a police officer.  And so I had a string of aunts and uncles on the Bahlert side.

Clarence and Ray were Dad’s older brothers, Ray, a farmer, Clarence, a retired Coast Guard officer who worked the wild waters of Lake Michigan, all the way north to Washington Island, off the tip of Door County.  When we stopped at Clarence’s house in Baileys Harbor – a cottage close to the shore of Lake Michigan – my Dad and Clarence stood outside talking for a long time, two brothers, separated by time and distance, by different lives.

We stood on the grass outside of Ray’s house, too, Ray, a quiet man – “one of the quiet Bahlerts,” with a quiet wife and a quiet daughter, my cousin Terri.  By the time I remembered seeing Ray and his place, my cousin Roger, Terri’s elder brother, was married and gone, with a daughter of his own.  Not until years later did I come to know Roger, after I’d retired.   After a time of talking – my Dad did the talking, Ray the listening (I’m sure) – we’d walk around to the back of the property, to see the raspberry bushes, to taste a few, and to take a quick look at the outhouse, still in use, on the property.  My family in northern Wisconsin were rural people, kind, gentle people.  I loved them – love them – for that.

My dad told us a story about Ray and him, the two of them riding a Model T down the Sister Bay Hill that wound right down and into the main street of Sister Bay, on the Green Bay side of the peninsula.  Young men, they yelled “Betsy Ross!” – a slang of the day, as they started down the hill, and as the driver shouted, he pulled the steering wheel right out of the steering column and held it high in the air until he realized what was happening, then poked that steering wheel right back where it belonged, and continue to navigate down the long Sister Bay Hill!  Every time I go down that hill now, I think of them on that day, and I think of my father’s face, his voice rising, as he told the story – as he’d lived to tell the story.  

Uncle Fritz was next in line, younger than my father.  He was Dad to my cousin Bobbie, like Terri, a bit younger than me.  Like the rest of the Bahlerts, Fritz was a worker, coming home from a day in the shipyards in Sturgeon Bay to butcher at the store he and Aunt Goldie operated near the north point of the Door County Peninsula.  The only time I went as fast as 100 miles an hour in a car, I sat with Bobbie in the front bench seat of my uncle’s pickup, watching that speedometer go faster and faster!  Fritz was quiet, too, and I don’t remember a conversation with him, although he was closest in age to my Dad.  

Uncle Norman, the youngest, married a woman from the East Coast and raised his family there.  My only memory of Uncle Norman was when he stayed with us overnight on the way to Door County to see his mother, my Grandma Bahlert, in the days before her death.  I was a little girl, and I watched with big eyes as my handsome Uncle Norman came into the kitchen.  Every year at Thanksgiving now, Jeff and I celebrate the holiday by sitting around the table with Uncle Norman’s eldest son, Norman Bahlert, and his family – children and even grandchildren now, and Cheryl, Norman’s wife.  Pictures of the Bahlert’s from generations past look down on us all, seated around the long table, as if guarding their progeny.  

So these were the uncles, distinct, kind, a part of the framework of family who peopled my life, then – and even now.    

Vlas Markowski (Srebny) with Mike to his right, Johnny standing behind, and Pete, the little boy with the hat, at his mother’s knees. Photo, circa 1921-1922, Milwaukee, WI.