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Friends

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Some would call it a blessing. For others, it is something they are not able to attain. Many people need – and want – only one or two. Some think that everyone they meet is a friend.

I call mine a blessing.

This past week, I spent several days with Vicki, a friend I met in high school. I met her brother Bruce before I met Vicki, when I sat behind this tall, painfully shy boy in Art Appreciation Class, my first elective course as a senior at Washington High School in Milwaukee. During our college years, Vicki and I started to hang out together more often. The course of our lives has been very different, but our friendship remains. When we met in Denver – as close to halfway between New Berlin, WI and Oakland as we could figure – we spent the evenings together in our hotel room, talking and talking, until after we’d turned out the lights and lay in our beds.

I remember meeting Joanne for the first time, when she sat down at my desk in Green Bay, Wisconsin, smiled her bright smile, and said, “do you golf?” (My answer: I didn’t, but I could try. I never did). We took road trips together, and we flew together to Montreal and Quebec with another friend, Carla, who is still in Joanne’s life. Joanne commiserated with me as we mourned our lack of dates, until we finally met the men we would marry. Joanne stood up with me in my wedding. Because I was at school in Berkeley, I wrote a prayer for her wedding and posted it in the U.S. mail, instead.

The Bug was my best friend in high school, and we keep in touch via email now. Her sister Bonnie and I stood up in the Bug’s wedding. My heart hurts for the Bug now; her son died unexpectedly – at only 46 – in the past year.

I knew Pat’s family from the time I was little in Milwaukee. Her aunt was one of my mother’s good friends, a friend from her neighborhood in Milwaukee, too. Later, Pat and I, her brother Bobbie and the Bug, and several other teenagers from our neighborhood worked together at the Times Fine Arts Theater on Milwaukee’s North Side. Now, I talk to Pat very few months on the phone, and even now, we’ve got plenty to talk about. And to laugh about.

Later in my life, I’ve continued to make friends. I’m grateful. I met Alexis and Linda, both clergy, through meetings with other United Methodist clergy in Northern California. Staying in touch with them is important to me. A year ago, Judith rode home with me from a retreat where we’d both led small groups of clergy in reflection sessions, and we’ve been friends ever since.

Some of my friends, like Lana, live locally, so I get to have lunch with her, where we discuss books we are both reading, and with Jean, another Oakland person.

I hope their friendships keep me healthy, and I hope I have something to give them, as they do to me. Conversation with each one is different, full of history, often serious, and always interesting.

My life is richer for each one of my friendships. I am grateful.

Vicki and me, Botanical Gardens, Denver, 5/2025

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Me and the cat

Mary Elyn Bahlert

When I married in 1984, I married a man and a cat. The cat’s name was Schatzi – and Schatzi was the best cat in the world. She was cuddly and friendly to everyone. When company came to visit, Schatzi would join all of us in the living room as we sat and talked. When I lay on the couch to take an afternoon nap, Schatzi would cuddle up next to me, her back against my body. We’d take a nap together.

I think Schatzi stayed alive that winter of 2000-2001, even after she spent most days next to the heat register in the dining room, because that was the winter we learned that my mother had inoperable cancer and was put on hospice, and as Mom spent her last days in her little room at the Mathilda Brown Home in Oakland. When I arrived home after a long day at church and then after a long day with Mom, Schatzi would be cuddled up close to the heat, soaking up the comfort she found there. And the spring after Mom died, Schatzi, too, died, on the kitchen floor where Jeff had spent her last hours beside her. She was a good cat. We buried her in the back yard of the duplex on Sunnyslope Avenue in Oakland.

*

Sometimes now, I lay on the grass in the yard of our house on View Place, near the back door. Before I do this, I open the kitchen door wide. Then I call the cat, LiLi, who spends most of her days sleeping on the yellow quilt on our bed. She never fails to jump down from the bed, down the five stairs from the bedroom into the hall, through the kitchen, to rush out the back door to join me on the lawn. As she comes to sit with me, I watch her from the ground, my view of the earth close to hers.

LiLi is not an affectionate girl, but for a few minutes as we lay on the grass, she rumbles next to me, leaning in just so – just so she is in the shade that my arm forms. It seems to me that we must both enjoy the same things in those moments: the smell of the grass, watered for a few minutes before dawn, the sunshine, and the shade, the good company of another being.

I almost hold my breath when she’s with me; soon her nose is moving, down, down, down to the earth, and her eyes narrow into slits as she surveys her surroundings. She moves slowly, but she crawls away, her body close to the ground, her nose down, to the bushes a few feet from where I lay. Someone interesting must have visited that spot during the night, because she spends a few moments sniffing. Then, she places one foot gingerly in front of her, then another, and she moves into the shadow of the rose bushes or the rosemary bush.

She doesn’t come back to me. I’ll have to wait for her another day.

*

I think about these moments with the cat, in the winter, when it’s raining. When I pass the step into the yard, I turn my head to look at our place. I think about the sun shining, I think about the clear air, the smell of the earth, and I see the two of us – me and the cat – lying there, on the grass.

LiLi, who is now in her elder years, on one of her short excursions into the yard. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert

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place

Mary Elyn Bahlert

So much poetry, so many beautiful views, graves of the beloveds at which to stand, roads that are familiar and dear: this is my place.

When I was in my twenties and I lived for a couple of years in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I often drove 100 or so miles north along the shore of Green Bay to Sturgeon Bay, and further, into the part of Door County I knew so well from the time I was a child. I can remember the drive north from Milwaukee as a child with my dad driving, as I lay in the back seat of the ’49 Chevy, sick with the beginning of the measles. I remember the stand of trees north of Jacksonport, on our way to Baileys Harbor, on our way to Sister Bay, on our way to Ellison Bay and Gills Rock.

I remember the faces and even the voices of the beloved family I would see in Door County. I remember Irene, with her giant hugs and never-ending chatter. I remember standing in a cherry orchard, carefully picking the sour cherries, while Daddy – standing by – filled a bucket in a few minutes. I remember exactly where the gas station is in Sister Bay – on the Green Bay side – and where Bunda’s Store – now another department store fills its space – stood across the street from the Sister Bay Bowl.

I know the names of taverns along the peninsula, too, along with memories of stories I’d been told as a child.

Although Door County has now become an “it” place, its two lane roads often lined bumper to bumper with folks from Chicago who’ve “discovered” the Door, I say I know the “old” places, the quiet places to go. And when I’m in Door County, I take the quiet roads to the quiet places.

Folks talk about a sense of place. Door County satisfies that sense of place for me. In my life, I’ve been privileged to travel to foreign places and I’ve been privileged to take many roads across the United States, beautiful places, all. But in my heart, in my memory, in my blood – it seems – I return always to Door County. At some moment in time, I promised myself that no matter how far away I might go in life, I would return to my place. I’ve kept that promise.

Each place I see again holds a memory for me, and as I stand at the graves of my beloved family – the Bahlerts were warm, gentle people – I see the faces of those who have passed. I can hear their voices. I can stand at exactly the places we stood.

When my beloved Auntie Irene was dying, I sent her a card, and included the words: “wait for me.” I wanted to see her again before she passed. And she did wait. I’d arrived in Door County later than expected after a hospitalization in Milwaukee, and I arrived, along with Jeff and my mother, in time to be at Auntie Irene’s funeral in the old, frame sanctuary of the Lutheran Church north of Baileys Harbor, to stand outside the church with many of my Bahlert cousins, to see them once again.

Several times in my life I have returned to Door County as a place to mark a change. I wrote my application to seminary in the autumn of 1981 in a rustic cabin along the shore of Lake Michigan. When I was heartbroken in earlier times, I went to Door County to heal, and in a cottage I pass along the highway to the north of Baileys Harbor – I remember as I drive past – I heard a voice call me by name.

And I am blessed, blessed by that voice, blessed by a sense of place.

I’ve lived many years in the West. I’ve lived a life I could not bring into my imagination when I was a child and a young person, trying to find my own way in life. And through all those years, I have kept my promise to myself: to return to this beloved place, as often as I am able.

Photo of sunrise over Lake Michigan, photo taken by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 10/24. From a window in Baileys Harbor, WI.

memories, reflecting, remembering, Uncategorized

Easter

Mary Elyn Bahlert

When I was growing up in Milwaukee in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the Christian holidays were honored culturally. We sang Christmas Carols during December at school. We had the week following Easter off – always – as spring break – whether or not the weather honored the season. And although my family were not church-going people, we celebrated the Christian festivals along with everyone else.

For weeks before Holy Week, Mom carefully decorated pysanky, the Ukrainian decorated Easter eggs. I had the job of blowing out the eggs before Mom sat at the kitchen table and carefully applied wax and coloring to the empty shells.

I was still small – maybe 6 or 7 – when Mom told me that a man had been hung on a cross to die. The streets were quiet that Good Friday – stores were closed to honor the somber day – when she let me go out to play on the front steps of the flat on Ring Street, alone. I ran up and down the steps. My instructions were to stay in front of house. And as I played alone on the steps, I wondered about that man who had been left on a cross to die. I thought he was somewhere not far away, but out of my hearing, in the quiet city.

Part of me was taken with the story, which in later years I would tell, again and again, to congregations in California, a long way from those narrow, bleak streets. I imagined the man into existence, in a way: captivated, wondering.

On Easter Day, Grandma Markowski would be making her way up the alley to our house, and we’d try to tap each other’s eggs colorful eggs – not pysanky, but regular decorated, hard-boiled eggs – to see whose egg didn’t break. They were the winner!

Later, Auntie Anne and Uncle Harvey, Mark, Patty, and Johnny would arrive for the dinner, ham and all the trimmings. Later still, the women would go into the kitchen to talk and talk as they washed and dried the dishes, while the men sat together in the living room, drinking beer, and waiting for the holiday table to be cleared so that the Sheepshead playing could begin.

Soon enough, Easter was over, and soon enough, the well decorated, hollow eggs that had been carefully decorated and displayed, were set aside, to come out another year. This year, like all the rest, a dish of the beautifully decorated eggs will grace my table, just as they did Mom’s table.

Pysanki by Mary Bahlert (Mom), Jeff Kunkel, Ronn Lass

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Holy Week

Mary Elyn Bahlert 
Quiet now, this early spring into which we fall,
a few days of sunshine and green rising from earth.
Quiet now, we enter the Holy Week
- watch the sombre procession - with unknowing eyes -
unaware of what will pass, what is passing.
We line the streets,
     shake the bells into sound,
     strike the cymbals,
     shout:
"Hosanna!  Hosanna!" 

The people cried out
as we have cried out into the night for Something to Save us:
these earthy bodies,
this pain,
this solid march from life to death - 

All in stark relief against the clouding sky. 
                                      ---Mary Elyn Bahlert, 4/2025

Night sky over Oakland, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 3/2025