Monks in their cells in the Middle Ages rose before dawn to pray. Instead, they walked that narrow room, back and forth, back and forth, all day. Some called this a sin, this rocking in their stiff chairs, the unwillingness to kneel, to pray.
The days of cloistering went on eternally, it seemed.
We’ve been sheltering for months, the agitated monk inside us growing, growling, longing to be free. Still he paces, frantic and passive. Call it a sin. Call it malaise, a fever. Acedia has risen from the ashes to mark this time.
As the months and then years of the COVID-19 pandemic entered our lives – and then stayed – and stayed – and stayed, we all found ways to deal with the time of social isolation and the range of activities we had come to take for granted: visits to museums, concert venues, movie theaters. And we all survived – for years. As I look back now, it seems a dream. I wonder: how did we do it? how did we journey for those long months that stretched behind and ahead of us?
Jeff and I began a tradition that we did not know would become a tradition, early in 2020, after the quarantine – “sheltering in place” – began in March of 2020. Every Sunday morning – we felt so free of our long years of pastoral ministry, when every Sunday was filled, with worship, with meetings, with visits. Sunday mornings rose quiet and free of schedules. We woke and got our first cups of coffee at 5:30 AM for most of the pandemic, a habit we hold today. On Sundays, though, we thought about where we could go for a walk, a change of scenery, a gift to us as we looked to the long days ahead of us that week.
We walked in San Francisco. We drove to the shore of San Francisco Bay at Brooklyn Basin and walked amid the growing development of apartment buildings there. We walked on the beach at Half Moon Bay. And we discovered the Martinez Slough.
The tide comes into the slough, which is something still new and strange, something note-worthy, to this Midwestern raised couple. When we first drove the 30+ miles to park at the ranger station at the slough, we discovered paths, some along the water, some further in toward the City of Martinez, whose downtown was less than a mile from the shoreline. Some times, we’d watch the water lapping along the beach, the tide in, the tributaries filled to the brim. Sometimes, we’d see the wetlands with the muddy shores and the sea flowing outward toward the Bay. Some days, we’d catch sight of a ship coming through the passage from San Francisco Bay and into the inlet, on the way to Stockton seaport. A train often roared past us after we’d crossed the tracks to the edge of Martinez and parked in the small lot near the water.
One Sunday in May, the sky was filled with kites and the voices of children and happy adults accompanied the floating delights, the holders of the kites’ strings on the shore nearer the Martinez Strait. Every time we walked, we were delighted again, as we passed early morning dog-walkers who greeted us, happy, as we were, to see others out during this difficult time. And every time we walked, we noted the tide – in or out – and called out to one another as we watched the sea birds, the geese.
We talked about going to the slough again today, and we left our home early to drive on the quiet highways, east out of Oakland and north to Martinez. We talked the whole way there, and we talked as we walked. Today we stood on a walker’s bridge and saw the pussy willows; we were reminded of Wisconsin, then.
So this time, when the world seemed to stand still for a time – did that really happen? we wonder now – is behind us. But we continue to go out early some Sunday mornings to that place, where walking and talking comes easily, where the sea breeze accompanies us as we walk.
Martinez Slough, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, May 27, 2024.
When I was a young teenager, I began to long for the days when I would be 17. I had a “calling” to 17. Of course, 17 came and went, and my life went on and on until I am writing to you now, from the wisdom years, the elder years.
When I walk down the street now – and I walk often in my “walkable” neighborhood in Oakland – I know that I am a senior citizen: one young woman, pushing to get past me in a parking lot walkway, called me: “granny.” OK. I’m old now, or elderly, or “getting on in years,” as my Dad used to say. Jeff once heard the couple next door – overheard them over the tall fence that separates our yards – tell a friend that there was a “nice older couple” next door.
But I know that I’m stuck at 17 – inside. I’ve done the work: years of therapy, growing pains, coming to terms with my family of origin, self-help groups, classes in personal growth. I’ve done all that; maybe I’ve done too much of “that.” So I’ve done the work I needed to do to become an adult. I’m grateful for the work I had in life that required me to grow, to always grow, to look deeper into myself to find who I am. I’m truly grateful.
And I’m still 17.
Many years ago, I gathered a group of women to a meeting room in the church where I was Pastor, to see our way forward to begin a new women’s ministry. I started the group by asking everyone to think about how old they were inside. Around the table we went, listening to one another’s answers, nodding at what we heard. An “older” woman – probably about the age I am today – said: “I’m 18.” She looked at me. I looked at her. Yes, I thought, she is 18. I’d found a friend!
Sometimes now when I’m with friends, I wonder how old they think they are – inside. Through the years, I’ve asked. And the answers they have given resonate with who they are to me.
I haven’t asked him, but my husband is older than I am, by a few years. I know he thinks, probably even knows, that he isn’t, but he is. He’s in his late twenties. And I’m 17 – although I might not look it!
How old are you – inside?
Jeff and Me at the Alabama Hills, Lone Pine, California, April, 2024
In the fall of 1990, Jeff and I traveled to Guatemala to meet for the first time a baby girl, Anali, whose mother had given her up for adoption, unable to care for her baby girl herself. Many women living in poverty in Guatemala had taken the same path with and for their children.
We returned home and waited until the proper paperwork was complete. Every day in our home in Tracy, I worked along with Jeff in the church we pastored together, and I told the story again and again of our meeting little Anali to curious folks in the congregation. They were waiting, it seemed, along with us.
And so we met the attorney who would facilitate the adoption of Anali – and many, many other children. We spent Thanksgiving that year around the dining table with other prospective parents – mothers-to-be from the United States, also in the country to meet their adoptive children
And every morning, as soon as I arose, I carried with me in my mind the baby girl we had met. We prepared a room for her in the big parsonage, and we told our friends the story of our meeting.
One day, we received a phone call from Guatemala with the news that little Anali’s birth mother – her mother – had decided to not give her baby up for adoption, that she had reclaimed her child. At the time, Jeff and I didn’t seem to have time to process the grief we felt. We set about completing forms again to receive a child. This time, we didn’t travel to meet the baby again. We waited at home for the news that our baby was ready to come with us to the United States.
A second time, the baby’s birth mother reclaimed her child, and so we took new adoption papers to the courthouse in Stockton. The day I drove to Stockton to deliver the papers, I felt as if I held a heavy weight in my arms. A woman from the congregation – whose adult son had disappeared many years before – kindly rode with me as I traveled to complete the transfer of papers – again.
After we received news that the third baby girl was not coming, I did not carry another heavy load of papers to the Courthouse in Stockton, and when Jeff and I announced to the congregation that we would be leaving that spring, the woman who had ridden with me to Stockton – came up to me, grief in her eyes, and said: “I can understand wanting to leave a place where something bad has happened to you.”
*
I remember distinctly the morning after we had received the news that little Analie’s mother had reclaimed her child. As soon as I rose from bed, and as I prepared for the day, a thought came to my mind, a thought I’d held for the months since we’d met the beautiful baby girl we’d awaited. “Little, little, little, little, little Analie,” I repeated to myself. And on that morning, when I began to recite the lovely refrain, I stopped, noticing my thoughts. Usually, I followed the refrain with images of the two of us as we grew together. I reminded myself that little Analie would not be coming to live with us. That was that.
Little Anali and me, 1990, Guatemala City, Guatemala
At the Center Street Library Larry Bartis and I Strained our necks To read the titles on the row of books At the top.
“A Man’s Journey,” Larry said. “Rising to the Moment,” I read. “At the End,” he whispered.
As each book introduced itself to us We giggled, louder and louder: Gleeful, happy, Shoulder to shoulder – I felt joy in my whole body And shyly looked at the laughing boy:
