nostalgia, reflectin, reflecting, remembering

Dinners with the Bug

Mary Elyn Bahlert

In my late teens, after the Bug and I had graduated from high school and I started college at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she and I often met to go out on weekend nights. Bug and I had been friends in high school, and we worked together at a movie theater on the north side of Milwaukee, where I was a “vendette” – selling popcorn and sweet treats to the movie patrons – and where the Bug was the cashier who sold tickets at the front window. Several of the kids who worked there were also friends of ours from high school – Pat, who I still talk to on the phone from time to time, now that we’re in our seventies – her brother, Bobby, who died from complications of Crohn’s Disease, a few years ago, and my cousin, Mark. That was my first job, which apparently led to my adult addiction to popcorn (which continues today). Bobby and the Bug dated a few times; he was the one who gave her the name: the Bug.

The Bug and I had many adventures together during my last year of high school and my college years, which ended when she married in her early 20’s. Bug’s wedding and marriage and motherhood were the fulfillment of her dreams, which included her and her husband building a house exactly like her parents’ beautiful home. As far as I know, they still live in that house, outside of Milwaukee. Bug was hysterically funny. I can’t remember anything that she said that was funny, but I do remember one time, when I was driving, with her in the passenger seat, that I had to pull over to the side of the street because she had me laughing so hard.

After we started college – the Bug stayed a year or two, then left school to go to work – she and I had a routine that I remember today as an opening to a way of life that I hadn’t experienced in my working class family. I had my own money then, the money left over after paying tuition and books and transportation to school on a city bus. About once a month, Bug would come over to pick me up at my house. She was always welcome there – all of my friends were welcome there – and my folks loved to see the Bug. When she arrived, we wrote the names of several of Milwaukee’s fine restaurants on slips of paper, and gave them to my Dad, who sat in his chair across from the television, put the slips of paper into his cap, and chose one. Dad would read aloud the name of a restaurant. Then, the Bug and I set out for the evening to the place he’d picked out of the hat.

At first, I felt awkward. My life experience had not included places like these. I had grown up with supper at five in working class flats and small, crowded kitchens, had been raised on home cooked meals, often Ukrainian peasant food. I carefully observed the other patrons on our evenings out, chose something I hadn’t eaten before, and the Bug and I enjoyed the ambiance and our friendship. I know we laughed, and talked about things as only young women do. Over the years, I’ve eaten in many fine restaurants, and I’m comfortable. At first, I wasn’t comfortable, as these evenings out with a dear friend had opened a door in me and outside of me – to another world. The Bug’s father owned a small company of his own where he made toys for carnivals, and her home was very different than mine, which I observed, carefully. Her parents honored the weekend by going out to dinner, the two of them, on Friday nights. My awareness of class, to this day, shapes my world, and it shaped my world then.

Thank you, Bug.

Borscht, photo and soup by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 11/2022

nostalgia, reflecting, remembering, Uncategorized

Like a Thief in the Night

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I don’t remember when Dad began to talk about it, but he said many times in the years before he died: “I hope the Lord comes like a thief in the night.” I expect he thought about it more after his diagnosis of colon cancer at 65. At the time, he had a colonoscopy, and he was always grateful for the next ten years of his life, before he died at 75.

He’d learned to live with the colonoscopy, he and Mom able to enjoy many years of retirement together, years that were the gift at the end of all those years in the steel mill. Dad had a union job and a retirement income as a result of that union job. I expect he thought he was living on borrowed time. In the years after he retired, there were trips to Hawaii to see his grandson, Colin. In those years, there were trips to North Carolina to see the older grandchildren. And there were trips to California to see Uncle Johnny and Uncle Pete, my mother’s brothers, and to see my husband and me. Using maps charted out via AAA, they traveled together, Dad the driver and Mom reading from the guide books, pointing out the sites.

Now, I’m grateful that they had those years together, to be able to travel together, to enjoy. They had fun. When Dad had symptoms of cancer again, the traveling stopped abruptly. He suffered again under another regime of chemotherapy, his illness made worse by the effects of the drugs. He spent his last days in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Milwaukee, never leaving the bed, the room often filled with friends he’d known from his days at A.O. Smith, union friends, and family from various parts of the country. My sister, pregnant with her youngest, and Colin were there every day. A few days before he passed, his sister Edna traveled from Gills Rock on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin to see him once again, and for the last time.

On my last visit, as I sat in a chair next to the bed, I asked Dad to talk. He said he was tired; I should talk, instead. I sat silent, not sure what I wanted to say. Dad had always been in the talker in our house, my sister, and I quiet, “like their mother,” Dad had told their pastor. I was sitting in that chair when Dad looked at me and told me – the night before, when he’d had an episode and the hospital staff rushed to bring him back – he had seen Christ, and he was not afraid.

Thankfully, the Lord came like a thief in the night, not many nights after.

Sunset over the Pacific, 1/24/2023, Mary Elyn Bahlert

Uncategorized

Dinner with Dad

Mary Elyn Bahlert

When I’m talking to friends about our families, how we grew up, where we were from, about our siblings and our education, many of my friends refer to their parents in “formal” ways. I hear them speak about their “Mother,” and their “Father,” as opposed to how I refer to my parents: Mom and Dad.

Dad was an old school guy. Educated to the eighth grade in country schools, he was a worker. He was strong and he loved to work. When I describe him now, I say that he spoke in a dialect that is common to the northeastern part of the State of Wisconsin. When I travel to Door County now – a pilgrimage I like to take every year or so – I hear other folks who speak in the same dialect, even in my generation.

Dad was a Steelworker, a proud union man, proud of his strength and his long seniority at A.O. Smith Corporation in Milwaukee. The site of A.O. Smith remains to this time, but the place has changed names. Last Christmas, I received a large black coffee mug from my sister in Hawaii; across the sides of the mug, in big white letters: “AO Smith.” Most days, I use it now to have my morning coffee.

Dad was an old school guy, and in that era – I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s – that meant that he went to work and Mom stayed home to take care of the house – the flat – to cook, to tend to the children. Dad loved us, and he loved my mother. When I think about that now, those facts form a certain framework around my child, which like most childhood’s, had its share of losses, of sadnesses, of things lacking, even with my parents. In my middle years I had to take those relationships – mother to me, father to me, siblings to me – apart in therapy, but I came away with the love intact. I’m grateful.

When Dad retired at the age of 65, he left behind forty years of hard work as an inspector in a steel factory. He had been grateful to return to work after he suffered a heart attack in his early 60’s, and he credited his doctor with giving him that gift; Dad loved his work, hard as it was. When he’d been retired for several years, he told me that he still dreamt about his work at A.O. Smith from time to time.

Dad was an old school, hard-working laborer, and he loved us. His love and his pride for his family shone in his eyes – one blue, one brown. He loved to laugh, to share something fun with us. For all I lacked in childhood, love was not among the lack. He loved to talk – an extravert in a home of introverts.

A few years after Dad retired, I was living on my own on the other side of Milwaukee. Mom was away for the day and evening, and Dad invited me to dinner. He talked and talked as he and I sat in the kitchen, waiting for the chicken he had baking in the oven. I saw how he’d set the table for the two of us, and for the only time I remember, I sensed a formality about this invitation, about this dinner. For him – as it was for me – this was a special time.

A few weeks ago, I preached at a retirement center just out of the Bay Area. When the worship service was over, a man in a wheelchair came up to me to say a few words, to introduce himself and to thank me for being there that day. He had some thoughtful comments to say about my sermon, and then he surprised me by saying: “You did a lot of research to preach that sermon. You must come from a family of researchers.” Surprised, I simply told him that I was the first in my family to receive an education. I felt proud.

beauty, nostalgia, remembering

Quiet

Mary Elyn Bahlert

“There’s a kind of hush, all over the world, tonight, All over the world tonight, people just like us are falling in love…” Les Reed and Geoff Stevens

The rain has been falling for days here in California. Notoriously dry, the weather here has brought storm after storm this winter. We are grateful. And also, we are hearing news reports of mud slides in the Santa Cruz Mountains, people without electricity for day, highways closed when lanes become impassable to traffic. When I first moved to Northern California from the Midwest, I expected sunny skies – every day. In the winter of 1981-1982, though, it rained day after day; I’d arrived to this sunny place in an El Nino year, famed for bringing storms.

But this year is different. Weather forecasters describe these storms as coming from an “atmospheric river,” or the “troposphere.” Moisture starved farmland is now flooded. Ever since New Year’s Eve, a parade of showers – even thundershowers, a rarity here – have me checking the weather app on my cell phone by the hour to see if it’s safe to go for a winter’s walk. Most days, I manage a few walks during breaks in the storm.

Rainstorms don’t bring the kind of quiet that accompanies certain snow falls in the Midwest, which I remember nostalgically every winter.

One New Year’s Eve before I arrived in the Bay Area, a group of friends and I – women and men – gathered at a friend’s apartment on the East Side of Milwaukee, a beautiful, flat area of the city whose streets are lined with homes and apartment buildings built early in the last century, to call in the New Year together. That New Year’s Eve, it snowed. The snow came down in a particular, quiet, soft way – no wind. And so the lot of us put on our coats and boots and went for a walk before the passing of the year at midnight. As we walked, the snow covered the sidewalks and our boots made dark patches on the sidewalk where we’d passed. Our voices were muffled by the snow. We left our mark, but only for a few minutes, as the snow gathered – gentle – again, covering our path behind us. Our voices were dimmed by the presence of the snow, covered, also.

When it’s cold out – really cold out, not Mediterranean cold, like here in the Bay Area – it’s pleasant to sit inside a warm, cozy house to gaze out at the quiet snow falling. Not many storms come in like that, most accompanied by strong winds and ice forming as quickly as the snow falls.

Quiet. Like cozy, and like the heart rending moments of Indian Summer, I miss that certain quiet.

Shadows, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 12/2022

Uncategorized

Epiphany

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Epiphany, 2015

I started to follow in my sleep,
touched by the star.
The star paraded over my dreams,
night after night.
One night, I sat on a hill and watched the star
until the morning.
Then, I knew it would lead me if I chose to follow.

I followed.
I followed the star.

The route:  circuitous.
The country:  rugged.
The ruler:  vicious.
The companions:  odd - and wise.
The nights:  cold, colder than in my land.

I followed.
I followed the star.

Stories say the Star led to a child, The Child.
This I know now:
The star led to Light.
                                                                                                                                                                 Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2015