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The gladdest thing

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I will be the gladdest thing
    Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
    And not pick one. — “Afternoon on a Hill,” Edna St. Vincent Millay

For a couple of days – for a few hours this week – my husband and I and two good friends were, indeed, “the gladdest thing under the sun!” We drove and we hiked up hills and we walked among the hills at Carrizo Plain National Monument in South Central California. The long drive was worth it!

Enjoy this tiny sliver of the beauty that was ours to savor, to enjoy, just for a time:

Carrizo Plain National Monument, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, April 11, 2023

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Walking Through the Pandemic

Mary Elyn Bahlert

When the “shelter in place” began in California in 2020, I expect that most of us thought that if we just closed down for a few weeks, we’d be able to get back to our real lives. And so we sheltered. Here in Northern California, the winters are often mild, and many winters, there is not even much rain – until this year, of course, a record-setting year for rain. So in the late winter and the spring of 2020, we stayed close to home, enjoying our yard in the city. In the evenings, before sunset, Jeff and I would often drive through Oakland, seeing neighborhoods we rarely saw, enjoying the one freedom we had. We ordered our groceries delivered to us. We felt privileged – which we are – with a studio in the back of the garage for Jeff, and the room I call “my little study” down a flight of stairs from the kitchen.

Still – how to pass the hours, multiplying into weeks and months? We didn’t take to going to worship online, and so we began to leave our house early on Sunday mornings to find places to walk. Both being retired, a Sunday morning to spend as we wished was a luxury. And we counted: over the course of many months, we walked at least 15 neighborhoods in San Francisco. We walked up hills. We walked down hills. We walked through streets that were mostly empty of other people. We walked and we talked.

We walked, again and again, on the paths that line the Martinez Slough, high tide and low tide. We walked and we talked.

As time went on, we invited friends over to enjoy our yard with us. We brought dinners out to them on paper plates, and we often sat, dressed in sweaters and even coats, until the light of the day was passing away.

I had a large plastic box of decades of photos from my lifetime – and from the decades before my lifetime – on a high shelf in the garage. Jeff brought the box out to me in the yard, and I sat in the sun and sorted almost a centuries’ worth of photos, some black and white, some formal, some taken on a whim. I looked closely at each one, the time stretching before me into some unknown future, and then, the past stretching behind me. Some of the photos I mailed to my sister in Hawaii, others I sorted again into large folders that now fill a drawer of the wooden file cabinet in my study.

Like so many others, we think back on three years of the world’s living with COVID-19, and it’s hard to believe we did it. We learned to live with the virus, and we are grateful that we didn’t contract the virus until it was less severe than news reports talked about in the beginning, when health care across the world struggled. And our own world grew in a way, as we discovered places in our own community.

It’s a relief that the world has moved on to a different place, with COVID-19 a regular resident of the planet, along with the rest of us.

Walking through the Pandemic: San Francisco 11/2022

photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert

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Sitting behind Larry…

Mary Elyn Bahlert

In every class at Peckham Junior High School on the North Side of Milwaukee, I sat behind Larry Axxxx. It followed that I’d sit behind Larry, as our classes were arranged alphabetically. I liked sitting behind Larry, and I think he liked having me behind him. We weren’t exactly friends, but he was a presence in my life.

Larry could get me to laugh. And he knew that. In fact, I think that’s why he liked having me as the person at his back. And Larry could not only get me to laugh – his antics could bring on a fit of giggles. Since I wasn’t a kid to get into trouble at school, I expect I didn’t get caught giggling when I should have been listening intently to the teacher. So I giggled and giggled, while Larry grinned at having brought me to this place again. And I kept up with my classes.

Larry was a fixture in my life in Junior High, a part of my surroundings, one of the kids I felt comfortable with. I was shy and mostly quiet in classes, a girl who could go unnoticed, since she didn’t cause any trouble. And through Junior High, Larry got me laughing. We were in a program of classes with the “smart kids,” which isolated us in a way from the other young people, since our curriculum was laid out for us, our classes, a year ahead than others our age, from the time we entered Junior High. I’d be in classes with the same group of kids in high school, too, although our group got bigger in number.

I said I kept up with my classes. I got good grades. I’m not sure Larry did, because he disappeared from the seat in front of me in high school. Word around the class had it that Larry’s father had placed Larry in a boarding school for boys, not far from Milwaukee. He’d been worried that Larry’s inability to stay focused on his classes would shape his future, and his father wanted another future for him.

I few years ago, I was thinking about Larry, and in these days of “googling,” I googled Larry’s name. I found his name on a business in northern Wisconsin, and I went to the website. There, I found a personal note from his family. Larry had passed, just a few months before I’d been looking for him. I sent an email to his family, who still owned the business, telling them about how Larry had made me laugh. The kind email I received in return came from his wife, who said that Larry had loved to make people laugh as an adult, too.

I think often of those people in my past who were present for part of my life, then moved on into their own lives, forgetting, I expect, that nice, quiet, smart girl who loved to giggle. My husband still likes to make me giggle, and his face lights up when he gets me to do that. He especially likes it if we’re in a public place and I can’t stop giggling.

And it’s fun for me to know I can still go to that silly place in me.

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I wish it would snow once…

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Mom was diagnosed with cancer early in December of 2000. We took her home from the doctor’s office, Jeff and Mom and I silent as we made our way from his office to the elevator. We had all agreed to hospice care. When we took her back home to Mathilda Brown Home, the staff went into full gear as we all received an explanation about what hospice would entail. Jeff and I were grateful that Mom could stay in her little room, in the place she loved.

I visited daily then, and most days, I’d find Mom in her room, sitting in her chair, crowded next to her bed, or lying on the bed, resting. One day when I arrived, I found her on a wooden chair in the hallway, her bathrobe over a nightgown. She’d forgotten to change that day, so we went into her room and chose clothes more suitable for the day. “ I must be losing it!” she said.
Another day, Mom was sitting on the edge of her bed, facing the window that overlooked an alley and the playground of Oakland Tech. When I came into the room, Mom said, without turning her head: “ I wish it would snow once, just for me.”

I wished it would snow, then, too. As tough as winter can be in the Midwest, we Midwesterners love its beauty, those days when the snow falls silently and without a wind to rustle it, to the earth. That winter, in the days before Mom died in mid February, weather reports on local radio announced that there had been a sprinkling of snow high on the hills over Oakland. I wished I’d been able to take Mom to see it, but by then, she was confined to bed.

Mom on her wedding day, 1948
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Every day, a melody

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I’m grateful that I love all kinds of music. And I love to sing – to myself, when I’m in worship, when I listen to the radio in the car. I love the melodies. I love the words. I love to pretend that I’m onstage, singing to an audience. When I’m in the house, I love to move my body to the rhythm of the song that I’m singing to myself. A little joy, a little gift that is part of my life.

My husband still teases me when he sees “Mar” coming out – the me in my imagination who stood in front of the bedroom mirror as a teenager and belted out the latest Beatles’ song.

youtube is a gift to someone like me. I can spend hours scrolling through youtube, watching videos of rock and roll stars, of country western concerts, of duets and bands from the 60’s, when I was in high school, until now. I’ve watched the Vienna Orchestra and the Rolling Stones in the same day – maybe even the same sitting.

Dancing is good, too. I’ve always loved to dance. I dance through the house to the tunes in my head, moving from one room to the next. “The body likes to move,” a wise person once told me. (Dancing is good exercise, too!)

A melody a day counts as a good day, to me. Hum it to yourself…

The trees love to dance, too… photo my Mary Elyn Bahlert, 10/2014