She chose me before I knew Her, or maybe - forgetting - I chose Her. Silent, She's kept her peace: Though I have risen and fallen, though I have walked through the dark holding hands with demons, forgetting who I am. She observes, Her eyes deeper than mine: She sees it all - sees clearly, with a wise heart.
She took my hand before I reached out. She spoke: sometimes with words, sometimes in silence: She spoke.
One day - alone and afraid - I said: “Yes." Then, we walked hand in hand. We did not part ways again - although sometimes I forgot Her for long stretches.
She is placid, clear, deep, full. When I am angry, shaking a hot fist at the world, She is placid, clear, deep, full. She holds me then with great gentleness. My breath returns, gentle, too. - Mary Elyn Bahlert, 8/2020
Sometimes with words, sometimes silence, she speaks… photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, Vilnius, Latvia,
Sometimes in the morning or evening, when Jeff and I sit across the room from each other – he in his beloved leather chair, and me on our sofa, I look up to look at him. He is reading, or watching another series on the web. He doesn’t know I’m looking. I look up and take a few moments to look at his face, to study him, to enjoy him.
Jeff’s face has been in my life for a long time, although sometimes it seems as if all the time has gone by so quickly; it has gone by so quickly. We’ve had good times, sweet times, hard times, laughing times, gentle times, shouting times, quiet times. I am grateful to the Powers for having gifted me with Jeff as my partner in this life.
I love that Jeff is a man who makes sure to make time for relationship, time to nourish and be with one another, offering gratitude, remembering together, enjoying one another.
And so, today, this is an ode to Jeff’s face. “From the beginning of my life I have been looking for your face…” – Rumi
I think his kindness shows in his face, and I’m grateful for his kindness, through all of life’s journey.
Sometimes when I think about my life, I think I came from what we called “The Old Country.” The Old Country was how my mother referred to people who – like her parents from Ukraine – had immigrated to the United States. Many of the customs and much of the way we lived then, in the 1950’s and 1960’s – were ways that had strong connections to the Old Country.
Summers in the Midwest can be brutally hot and humid. By the late afternoon, we tried to find respite from the heat by running an electric fan near the screen door that led to the front porch of the upper flat on Milwaukee’s North Side. Even the whirring fan did not change the oppressive heat in the flat. Several days during the summer, after Daddy came home from his job in the steel mill, Mom and Daddy and Suzie and I set off for a secluded, leafy spot on the Milwaukee River. Daddy had changed into bermuda shorts – he’d been liberated from wearing long pants all summer some time in the 1950’s – and the car was quiet except for his talking, all the way across town to our spot.
We carried wooden poles and Daddy carried a silver bucket with water sloshing against the insides, and a package of raw liver – bait for the cray fish we were about to catch.
I never did like to touch the sharp edge of the hook at the end of the fishing line, so Daddy baited the hook with a bit of slimy liver, and I dropped my line into the river, and waited. Soon enough, the line would be pulled down a bit into the brown water and I’d pull up my end of the pole, a crayfish holding tight to the liver on the hook. I’d swing my pole toward the shore – hoping to not hit Suzie or Mom – and drop the writhing crayfish as close to Daddy as I could. He’d pick the crayfish up by sliding his fingers along the fishing line, pull, and drop the catch into the silver bucket.
Then, he’d bait the hook for me again, and I was back at it.
We still made it home to the flat in time for an early supper, after Daddy had carried the silver bucket, now heavy with crayfish, into the basement. One time, a crayfish found its way out of the bucket – how did that happen? – and he had to chase it around the cool floor of the basement until he picked it up again and dropped it into the bucket with its companions.
The next day, Mom boiled a big pot of water on the stove, and one by one, the cray fish were dropped into the steaming water where they stopped their frantic moving and turned bright red. Mom served the crayfish to Daddy while she made supper for the rest of us.
I never did get to taste a crayfish. I didn’t want to. But I can still find the place where the leafy path led to the river, down a few steps from the sidewalk, where the lush trees muffled the sounds of passing traffic.
Now my summer adventures are to the desert in California. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 04/2024, at Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California – where two deserts meet.
I sat in the comfortable chair next to my mother’s bed as she lay in a coma, dying, in the room she so loved at the Mathilda Brown Women’s Residence in Oakland. I was sad. I was not thinking about anything in particular. A friend – a woman who had been an intern with me in the congregation in Oakland – had left the room a few minutes earlier, and so I sat in the silence with Mom.
The end of the day had already come; the hall outside Mom’s room was quiet, except for the soft sounds of one of the nurses or care aides as they passed, or a few mumbled words from somewhere else in the building. I would go home soon, to sleep in my own bed; Jeff and I had decided that he would spend the night in the chair next to Mom’s bed, so that I could get a good night’s rest at home.
I looked across Mom at the window of her room that looked out over the playing field at Oakland Tech. Mom’s breathing was even, quiet.
As I sat there, the words to a song from so many I knew from so many years past seemed to drop from nowhere into my head. When I tell the story, I always say: “the words dropped into my head, whole.” I repeated the words, singing to myself:
“How can I hope to make you understand, why I do, what I do? Why I must travel to a distant land, far from the home I love? Who could see that a man would come, who would change the shape of my dreams? Helpless now, I run to him, watching other dreams grow dim… Oh what a melancholy choice this is – wanting home, wanting him – Closing my heart to every hope but his, Leaving the home I love…” —Bock, Harnick – writers
In the morning, several minutes after I arrived in her room and said: “I’m here now,” she passed.
All that’s left… Mom’s pysanki. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2024
I leaned over the railing of the front porch of the Upper Flat on Ring Street, and I craned my head to look down the alley to the left. A long way down the alley – almost to Burleigh Street – I saw the little figure, long dark coat almost touching the ground – of Grandma. She walked slowly – my Grandma was old – and she looked down at the pavement. Careful. Old. As she got closer, I saw her head was wrapped in a thick black scarf decorated with the bright colors of flowers. The scarf covered her hair, except for the hairline in the front, and she had tied it in a knot at the back of her neck. She didn’t look up, not even once.
When Grandma came up the narrow stairs and into the flat, I watched her from the other side of the living room. She looked at me once, twice, and a little smile came to her face. And then she talked, but only to Mom. They spoke their own language when she came over, and I didn’t understand. So I played on the floor across from the couch and listened. I listened and listened. What did they say? I listened and listened.
Years later, after she died, Grandma would come to me, as if in a dream. And she stayed with me for a long time. “Why did she come to me?” I asked a friend. “Who else would she go to?” she answered, wisely.
My favorite picture of Grandma – Feodosia Machsuda Srebny – shows her with a little smile on her face, sitting with me and Ronnie at the table. Ronnie wanted to be cool, a teenager. I love the picture because she is smiling, and her eyes are smiling. I don’t think of her as smiling, a little foreign woman – foreign even to me – poor, sad. When she was older she didn’t say any words in English. She forgot. Only Mom could talk to her then.
At Easter, we decorated eggs – some in the old fashioned way, pysanke – and some just dipped into colors: blue, pink, yellow. We blew raw eggs out through holes on the ends and Mom took hours to craft hers. Ronnie was good at it, I think. And Mom. But Grandma didn’t make the eggs. She sat on the couch in her long black dress, her dark hair held back in a loose bun, streaked with gray, her fingers bent as she tried to crack eggs with Suzie.
Daddy and I would go to get her at the nursing home and bring her home for Easter dinner. And soon after dinner, she’d look at my mother again and again, asking to go home. Mom did the same thing when she got old.
