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Waking up

Mary Elyn Bahlert

In March of 1973 I left Milwaukee for Minneapolis to be trained as a Claims Representative for the Social Security Administration. I lived in Minneapolis for three months until I was sent to my permanent station, the Green Bay District Office. At the time, I was happy to be sent to Green Bay; I had marked in my mind Rhinelander as the least happy assignment, and I had dodged that bullet.

And so I began my career in Federal Service. When I arrived at the office, I was the first woman to be assigned to that position in Green Bay; several months later Joanne Tlachac would return to the office after being promoted to CR from being a Service Rep. We immediately became friends, a friendship that continues to today. I was in training status for three years as I learned the ropes of government service, and as I adjusted to life in Green Bay. Finding my way around Green Bay proved easy for me; Green Bay is a small city that sits at the southern end of the Green Bay. I lived a few blocks from Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers; I’ve never been a football fan, and it seems my life in that small, cold city took the rest of whatever interest in the sport was in me away. I was often lonely in my small apartment in Ashwaubenon, but I made friends and explored that area of the State of Wisconsin while I lived there.

Google tells me that the first issue of Ms. Magazine was published in Spring of 1972. Later that year, I subscribed to the monthly magazine. In my lonely apartment I read each issue as it arrived – cover to cover. The rebirth of feminism in the 20th century had sparked something in me.

*

Some time later, the office of the SSA moved to a brand new building in Green Bay. That’s where we worked as my evenings were spent in my small apartment, reading and reading and raising my consciousness (I wish this description was in usage today). Feminists attribute the consciousness of white women as having been affected by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. A rebirth was occurring in many of us. I didn’t know it then, but I would be changed forever.

*
Working at my desk in the Social Security office, interviewing claimants, adjudicating claims, I wasn’t aware of how women working as hard as men were underpaid. That was a fact that was entering my consciousness. In my position, I would reach journeyman status and have the same pay grade as the men I worked with. But something in me was coming to life. One day, a the slip of paper arrived on my desk again, several months after it had last landed there. On the paper were the names of all the women in the office, along with dates; every week, a woman was assigned to clean the break room on Friday afternoon.

Hmmmm…

I was ready. I waited for the next time that the paper with assignments would show up on my desk. I waited without saying anything to anyone else, including the woman who was the District Manager’s clerical worker. The paper originated with her and would end up on her desk after we’d all seen our date of service.

When the paper arrived on my desk, I picked it up without adding my initials, which would indicate my acknowledgment. I walked to the front of the office, to the desk that sat in front of the District Manager’s Office. I threw the paper on her desk and said: “I’m a CR. I have the same job as the men in the office. Unless their names are included in this list, until they are given assignments to clean the break room, my name doesn’t belong on this list.”

I walked back to my desk. I’d experienced a “feminist click,” that moment of what was called “consciousness raising.”

I wish I could say that the men in the Green Bay Social Security Office had their eyes opened with my small act of defiance. That didn’t happen. Instead, in negotiations with management (in which I did not participate… ahem…) it was ascertained that the woman who cleaned the office once a week would from now on also clean the break room on Friday afternoons.

One (very) small step for human kind…

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The saddest day

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I’ve always loved the Christmas season. I love the lights, I love unwrapping the ornaments from their paper shelters each year, I love the ritual of hanging each precious ornament on the tree. With the hanging of the ornaments come memories. Jeff and I remember where the oldest ornaments came from. We remember those we love so dearly who have been gone for many years. We tell each other, again each year, as if it was our first time decorating the tree with these colorful balls, the story of this ornament, the person who comes to mind as we hang another. We like the presence of the decorated tree in the room, the colored lights that circle the branches, lit for most of every day.

And then the day comes when the lights come down, and the window that looks over the street will be in view to us again. The day the lights come down must be the saddest day of the year. As each year passes, the decorated tree becomes more important to us. We’ve taken its presence in our lives for granted for a long time now, but as we see our friends’ and colleagues’ lives changing, we know our own are changing, too. There are fewer of these colorfully lit evenings ahead of us than are behind us. There are fewer precious holiday times when we enjoy so many friends at our table, when we play the Christmas carols again and again. Even in the mild climate of northern California, we manage as best we can to bring “cozy” into our house. The Christmas tree provides a sampling.

“And we’ll all sing hallelujah, at the turning of the year,
and we’ll dance all day, in the old-fashioned way,
’til the shining star appear…” – Richard Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight,” 1974.

Today is Epiphany, the festival of the Three Kings, a tale that is central to the Christmas story. My mother called this day “Russian Christmas,” her way of acknowledging the Orthodox celebration that follows our own holiday by two weeks. When I was young, my mother didn’t begin to take down the ornaments and the tinsel, the “icing” on the tree until Epiphany.

By the calendar, the days are already beginning to lengthen, and the celebration of Christmas marks that return to the longer days. We’ve begun to light the colored lights on the tree less, and tomorrow, we’ll take the ornaments off the tree, one by one, carefully covering each one with tissue and placing it gently in its storage box. Even the storage boxes and the tissue papers are old, having seen many Christmases past.

Just as we have seen many Christmases past, and passing.

And tomorrow, the tree will be gone. photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 1/6/2026

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Jesu

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I met Jesu 15 years ago. He arrived to worship on a Sunday, and after church – like so many refugees who came to church – he asked me for a Bible to take with him to the small apartment he shared with several other men, also refugees, separated from their families. I gave him a Bible – a King James Version – and then I fretted about it all week, the fact that I’d given him a Bible in archaic language. I understood he’d want to learn to read and to speak English well. He showed up again the next Sunday with the Bible I’d given him in his hands. Jesu had realized quickly my mistake. We traded Bibles that day. This time, I handed him a Revised Standard Version, the better to learn a new language.

I learned that Jesu had had to flee his country overnight after being threatened with death by the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group who was active in Sri Lanka at the time.

My memory of Jesu in the early days of knowing him is that he looked like a deer in the headlights. I am often reminded of what I call the “greater wisdom” of the United Nations to have sent him to such an expensive part of the country. But he adapted well, and quickly, and to becoming a citizen of the United States.

Jesu was a fast learner. And he also worked quickly to bring his wife, Letchumi, and first born daughter to the United States. They arrived some time later. When Simiya stepped off the plane at San Francisco International Airport and walked with her mother to her father, she was surprised. From pictures she’d seen, she had thought that everyone in the United States was white, and there stood her waiting father – as dark-skinned as could be!

Jesu, Letchumi, and Simiya moved into a one bedroom apartment in a neighborhood not far from Lake Merritt United Methodist Church. And from that one bedroom apartment, they have built a new life in their new land. A year later, a second daughter arrived. Letchumi had been surprised when the women of the church gave her a baby shower after worship one day. In her country, the family that was having the child gave the gifts! And so, Saumiya joined the family.

In Sri Lanka, Jesu had been a pastor. He had met Letchumi in the village in which he had his church. In the United States, he is pursuing another path. He has nearly completed his education to receive his license to be a Certified Public Accountant. His elder daughter, Simiya, also attends University to become a CPA. Having been raised so poor, she has her sights on another life for herself. I could see it unfolding in her even before she finished high school. And Jesu and Letchumi see their life now as the stepping stones for the life their daughters will live.

When the new baby girl was still in a car seat, I picked Letchumi up at the apartment one day and drove to the Jamba Juice in my neighborhood in North Oakland. I had spoken to the manager, who I’d come to know, as a regular customer. He agreed to meet Letchumi, to give her a job. While she went to meet with the manager, I walked up and down the sidewalks lining the Safeway parking lot with little Saumiya toddling at my side. And so, Letchumi – who has several degrees from her own country – started at Jamba Juice. That was almost 14 years ago. Since then, Letchumi has become a manager at Jamba Juice. And her beautiful, smart daughter, Simiya, has joined her as a worker at the same store.

*

Jesu and I share a birthday – August 2. In the years since he and Letchumi and their daughters have been here, we have celebrated our birthdays together each August. We also gather during the Christmas holidays, when Jesu and his family bring us a complete, generous, home-cooked Sri Lankan meal. As we sit around the table, we catch up on the activities of Jesu and Letchumi and family, we hear about their hard work and studies to make a new life in a new land. Soon, Jesu will have completed the test to receive a CPA license, and he’ll be looking for a firm in which to work. Letchumi sees her daughters’ futures ahead of them, and she and Jesu watch with pride as their daughters make their way successfully in this place.

Jeff and I think of Jesu and Letchumi and their family as part of our extended family. As we talk around the dinner table at holiday time, we talk about the day in the future when we might travel to Sri Lanka to meet the family there. This year, Jeff teased about our getting too old to make such a trip!

Who knows where our paths will lead us? – Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 12/2025

reflecting, remembering, Uncategorized

At year’s end

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Together, Jeff and I share several traditions. Many years ago – before we were married, I worked as a Camp Counselor at a camp led by the Rev. Lincoln Hartford, who had been my pastor at Kenwood United Methodist Church in Milwaukee. At the end of the week at camp together, Lincoln invited the young people at share a memory – good or bad – of their week together. He asked that each one of the campers share the memory by saying, “I remember,” and then sharing a memory of the time we’d all been together. Whatever the memory – good or bad, happy, sad, confused, upsetting – the response to the memory by all who were gathered was: “and God was with you.” Since then, Jeff and I begin our meal times with the “I remember” prayer, as we invite any guests to participate. I always go first, to demonstrate (!).

This past year, Jeff and started a new tradition. Each night, before we go to sleep, we share with one another something we appreciated about the other one that day. Over the months, Jeff has reminded me – sometimes – that my appreciation was about a meal he’d prepared. (I’m trying to do better when I offer my appreciation each day!)

As long as we’ve been married, another tradition has been part of our ritual as a couple. At year’s end, we name the experiences that stand out to each one of us in the past year. I think Jeff prepares more carefully than I do for the time we sit together in front of the Christmas tree, after Christmas has passed, and share with one another our list of the past year’s events. It’s a good practice, as we recall moments – some good, some not so good – that the last year has held, and as we recall moments that have stayed in memory to be mentioned.

Sometimes the memories are times of travel, and sometimes of particular places we’ve seen. Sometimes the memories are memories of tiny moments that might be unnoticed by the other.

And this year, I want to be more prepared than I sometimes have been, to come to the sharing time in front of the tree, still lit with the lights of Christmas, as the year comes to a close. I’ll have to start early. I’ll use my trusty hand-written calendar, set aside a special page, and make my list. There’s a touch of sadness in me as I think about the closing of this year, as I remember that so many years have passed, so many loved ones have been gone from us for a long time, and as I remember that some things are changing and some things never change – not even as the calendar moves along into another year.

Happy New Year!

Even the neighborhood trees seem to know it’s the end of the year… photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 12/2025

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Sweet, sad music

Mary Elyn Bahlert

The tree is always beautiful,
the lights – magical, too.
Night comes on soon and stays for the magic.

Sitting close, we look into the branches, deep, 
remembering as we do
            those who are gone –
            now for many years.

Quiet, we hear them whisper 
as the ornaments swish along the needles:
sweet, sad music.


– Mary Elyn Bahlert, December, 2025

O Christmas tree, 12/2025, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert