I came up with a nickname for my Dad during my high school years. I began by calling him, “FRB,” his initials. And then the nickname stuck, as others in my family began to call him FRB.
FRB loved his family, loved his work, and FRB loved “I Love Lucy.” Every week, we all watched the episodes – repeats, after the late 1950’s – on our little tv screen in the living room, FRB’s comfy chair directly across from the screen. FRB would laugh and laugh at the ridiculous and wonderful scenes of Lucy and her cohorts – all over-the-top silly folks. And vivid in my mind in those moments, FRB would turn to one of us – Suzie, Mom, or me – from time to time as he exploded again with laughter at scenes he’d seen before, and, his eyes sparkling, say: “Fun, isn’t it, honey?”
Over the years, I saw FRB angry, I saw him enjoying life, I saw him have fun, I saw him being nervous and serious, and I saw his eyes – one blue, one brown – sparkle as he looked at one of us. And I saw him cry, as he realized that the cancer he’d been diagnosed with at 65 had returned in his early 70’s, and as he realized that the cancer would take his simple, kind, and quiet life.
I’m grateful. When I think about my own life, and as my world has expanded to be able to get intimate views into the lives of many, many other folks, I know that I was raised in love. For as many things I did not receive, I received love – not always unconditional, but a good dose of love.
After he retired, my father, Frank Bahlert, dreamt about his work in the steel factory for a long time. After he retired, he spent part of each day reading. And in those years, before his death from colon cancer in 1986, he enjoyed time with my mother. He loved to talk, and she was a listener. So in its own way, it worked.
When the weather is warm in Wisconsin, the people are outside! Long, cold, grey winters give way to a late spring and then hot, humid summer days, the humidity often broken by a thunderstorm. The best time to be out on those hot, humid days is early in the morning. And so, Mom and Dad would go out for a walk and ride in the mornings. Mom would walk, and Dad would ride his bicycle. “He follows me everywhere,” she joked at one point.
Dad had fun in retirement. One summer day in August, when the Wisconsin State Fair was on in West Allis, a suburb to the south of the city, Mom and Dad went to the Fair on Senior Citizens’ Day. They enjoyed the free entry to the Fair that day, and I can picture them, eating fresh-made cream-puffs – a Wisconsin State Fair specialty – skirting the midway to look at the animals in the rows of barns, talking to the children from towns and country-side outside the city who lived with their animals in the stalls during Fair Week. On Senior Citizen Day during Fair week in the late 70’s, the “Who’s Legs Are the Best?” contest was held at State Fair. Retired Men stood behind a curtain, their legs lined up in a row.
When I came home from work that day, I opened the evening paper, “The Milwaukee Journal”. Centered on the front page was a photo of 5 pairs of legs – men’s legs – bare below their bermuda shorts, in white socks and black shoes. The headline: “Whose Legs Win the Best Legs Contest?”
I took one look at that line of legs and saw Dad’s! He hadn’t won the contest – who cares? – but he’d had a bit of fun that day. I called my parents’ number immediately, and we had a good laugh together, the kind of fun Dad liked to have.
***
A few years later, Dad would lie in St. Joseph’s Hospital, Milwaukee, for many weeks, dying of the cancer that had struck him ten years earlier. He was grateful for those years, years he hadn’t expected after the heart attack and cancer diagnosis. But one day when I visited him that early spring of 1986, he looked at me, grief in his eyes. “I wish I could be out riding my bike,” he said.
“Feels like home to me Feels like home to me Feels like I’m all the way back where I belong…” words & music, Randy Newman
Were someone to ask me the question: “where’s home?” I would say, Milwaukee, the city where I was born, went to school, and where I lived until I was in my early thirties. I suppose in a way, Milwaukee is home to me. But another place holds my heart: Door County, Wisconsin, 200 miles north of Milwaukee, the peninsula between Lake Michigan to the East and Green Bay to the West.
My father, born in Upper Michigan, grew up in Sister Bay, a village on the Green Bay Shore of Door County, the place where his mother had been born – though several of her older siblings had been born in German speaking Prussia, now Poland. And because Dad had his roots in Door County, when he had vacation weeks from the steel factory in Milwaukee, where he had gone to find work after the Depression, and during the War Years, we traveled to Door County. And I expect my love for that place settled in me during those early years.
In my early twenties, I was assigned to Green Bay, Wisconsin, in my first career as a Claims Representative for the Social Security Administration. Brown County was a short drive north to Door County, and I grew to travel that highway north many times. Sometimes I would stay with one of my beloved aunts and uncles. Sometimes, over the years, I’d rent a small cabin – one right on the shore of Lake Michigan, north of Baileys Harbor – to spend a few quiet days alone. Every time, I promised myself I would return.
And I’ve kept that promise, even as Door County has changed over the years to become a popular, populated place of exodus for folks from all over the Midwest, in particular Chicago. I’ve kept that promise – as I moved from the Midwest to live most of my life in the Bay Area on the West Coast.
I know the “old” places and I know the roads that lead through the center of the Peninsula, with its rolling hills and orchards – luscious green in the summer – where not many tourists drive during their few days in Door County. I remember the places where members of my extended family lived, and as I drive past those places now, I can see us gathered on the lawn, talking, laughing, playing.
Because so many of the people I have loved my whole life are gone now, I use some of my time in “the Door” to drive the cemeteries, to walk again among the graves to find the names of those I loved – and love.
There is a love of place. I know that love of place. As I write this now, a gentle kind of homesickness comes to me. In my mind – and in my heart – it’s been too long since I’ve driven the roads of my beloved place. My own longing brings to mind my ancestors, those who traveled so far from their beloved homelands to come to a new country, a place where they were strangers with a strange language, a place where they could only remember, but never see again, their true home. In my life of privilege and these days of fast transport, my longing can be satisfied again. Some day – soon, I hope! – I’ll drive those roads again.
Johnson Homestead marker – Gills Rock, Wisconsin, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2021
I am part of a small group of fellow spiritual directors that have met faithfully since the beginning of 2014. Of course, the presence of COVID in all our lives beginning in 2020 prevented us from meeting for many months, but for the past year, we have come together again as regularly as we can.
Our lives have changed over time, of course. One member is full time caregiver now for his spouse; another member is slowly moving toward being caregiver for her spouse. One of our friends has just completed a “Swim Across the Bay” as a way to support cancer research; she shares her disenchantment with “church” as she has known it, disenchantment heightened by having the forced break of COVID as time to reflect. Another shares honestly with us all his changes as he grows older. I remind the group, often as we meet, that they are my “church.”
The group’s purpose has evolved since our journey with COVID. Sometimes now, we do not have a presentation for our listening and wisdom. Sometimes, now, one person will bring a reading or a topic to us for us to think about and to consider aloud what it means to us.
At the beginning of 2023, a member of the group suggested that we choose a Word for the Year. When we met in January, we spoke aloud our word to the group. My word, however, didn’t resonate deeply and well with me. I did not take it with me as the days and weeks lengthened into this year. But as we met this past week, a quiet, simple statement arose from the group, and I had it! I had chosen my word – two words, really – to be my guide as the days and weeks now flow gently to the end of 2023.
And so I ask: “What now?” I ask, “what now?” of God, of the Holy, of my Deeper Self, of the gathering dusk of each day, of the quiet moments I cherish early each morning. I have written on each page of my calendar until the end of the year those words: “what now?”
At dusk you fly over our place, coasting on the graying sky - your number rising from the shadow of the trees, a strong battle-front: a murder of crows squawking your firm presence on the wind: a soaring chant. You ride your voices and your wings into the sun as it dips into the Bay.
Each evening at dusk, I wait for you.
Each evening at dusk, a murder of crows. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 10/2023
