I’m always delighted to walk under the Gingko trees in Mountain View Cemetery near our house in Oakland. The branches are full and leaf out over the sidewalk as we pass under them, the shade protecting us from the afternoon sun here in Oakland. And gingko trees hold special memories for me.
When I was a student at Washington High School in Milwaukee, an English teacher gave us the assignment of finding the gingko trees in Sherman Park, a few blocks to the north of the high school, along Burleigh Street. And so I took a walk through the park, looking upward into the trees and finding the ginkgo trees, collecting a few leaves to take with me to complete the assignment.
The upper flat we lived in during my high school years was on North 49 Street, in the block south of Burleigh, and so those trees stood only a few blocks to the east of where my family lived. Many times, I walked through the streets from Center to Burleigh, stamping through the leaves on autumn days, or quickening my pace during the winter as I skirted around icy places on the cement.
The streets were beautiful then, the branches of elm trees and a few maples meeting overhead and over the road, lush green in the summer and bright orange and red in the autumn.
Sometimes, I like to walk along those streets in my memory. They formed an audience to the person I was becoming. And those streets marked the edges of what I knew, even in the years after I stood in a doorway of our flat, looked out into the street, and said aloud: “I don’t belong here.”
I didn’t know it then, but my path would take me far away from those narrow streets, those crowded flats. I didn’t know it then, but I would live for many years in northern California, for many more years than I walked home from school under the trees whose branches covered me, followed me home.
Gingko leaf, from a tree in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland photo by meb, 9/2025
We trek to a place of solitude, this lonely place, to sit, to listen to the water, to the wind, to the silence: the silence speaks to us as we walk, as we sit.
And in this lonely place the loneliness drains from us – from our arms, our legs, our beating hearts – richness fills us: the voices of the pines, the balsam, and the birch which call out to us in the wind. Gentle, the breeze ruffles the needles, the leaves.
We have searched – endlessly – for this place: for the solitude that is in loneliness, for the depth that is boundless, without form.
Here, the emptiness fills us, completes us.
—Mary Elyn Bahlert, “At Solitude Swale,” Door County, Wisconsin, 5/2025
At Solitude Swale, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, May 25, 2025
“So he said to the paralyzed man, “Get up, take your mat and go home.” 7 Then the man got up and went home.” Matthew 9:6b-7
This really happened to me. I swear (if I need to).
In the early 2000’s, I was happily working as a Pastor in downtown Oakland, a perfect place and a perfect, diverse community for me to serve. And then it hit. One day, a pain developed in my lower left jaw. Of course, I went to the dentist to have him take a look, to get the toothache taken care of. I arrived in the doctor’s office early one Saturday morning, and methodically, he numbed one tooth after another in my mouth, and methodically, we both waited for me to announce that the pain was gone. He was looking for the culprit, the one tooth that was causing me pain.
After several hours in the dentist’s chair (and have I mentioned that I cringe even now at the thought of needles?), we both ascertained that the pain in my jaw was not caused by a tooth. There.
And so I was left to go about my life for almost a year and a half, living with the pain that had mysteriously arrived and mysteriously stayed.
I tried massage – neck massage, back massage. The pain persisted. One day, I made an appointment with a Rosen Method therapist, a woman in Berkeley whose work I admired and trusted. Miriam was working on me that day – she had her hands on me -and as she worked, I began silently to pray: “please Jesus, help me!”
Miriam stopped moving her hands and stepped back from the table. “I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this before,” she said. “but have you tried Feldenkreis work?”
Like most of you – I suspect – I had not heard of Feldenkreis work. But I left Miriam’s office that day with the name and phone number of an acquaintance of hers who lived in another city in the Bay Area. And that afternoon, I called and made an appointment with Iren.
I arrived in Iren’s office for my appointment, not knowing what to expect. First she had me walk through the short hall from her reception area to the room where she did her work as she watched. Then she had me – fully clothed – lay on the low massage table in a small room where she worked. She set to work on me as I lay quiet, not hoping, not expecting any particular result.
As she worked, Iren was silent. At one point, though, she stood up straight from her work position, bending over me to methodically move one part of my body, then another. As she stood: “I can help you,” she said.
I made another appointment. I was looking forward to traveling to Paris with Jeff in a couple of weeks, and I made one appointment a week with Iren in the weeks coming up to the day of the trip.
At the last session before my trip, as she worked on me, we were both silent. And when the time for the session was ended, Iren said to me: “Now, go and enjoy Paris!”
I did. Jeff and I did enjoy Paris together. And I was pain free for the first time in many months. And the pain, the mysterious pain, has not returned. Ever.
photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, Art Museum of Estonia, Tallin, Estonia, 2024.
I expect that most of us who have lived through – or are living through – the “Covid Years” since March of 2020 have stories to tell. Some of the stories will be about times of isolation, times when holidays were lived through with phone calls instead of dinner around a table with loved ones, times when groceries were delivered to the door, when the PBS Evening News on Friday afternoon included the number of recorded deaths across the country that week, times when people discovered new ways to work, to connect, to cope.
Jeff and I remember fondly those long evenings when we would get into one of our cars and drive somewhere in Oakland we had not seen before, a new neighborhood, a new view, perhaps. And we remember those early days of 2020 when we sat in a circle, scarves thrown over our shoulders, in our yard, with good friends. We had a way to see each other face to face, and we were grateful for those times, for those friends. Each day seemed the same: the alarm beside our bed going off at 5:30 am, coffee together as the sun came up, an early morning walk in St. Mary’s Cemetery, where we came to know some of our neighbors for the first time, the streets – once filled with lines of cars waiting at the stop light – quiet. We discovered for the first time some of the treasures of living here in the Bay Area.
And we discovered a place we love to walk even now, a place we like to take friends, as we introduced our friend Ron to that place today: the Martinez Slough. Martinez is a small city about 20 miles to the North and East of Oakland, through the tunnel and past the satellite city of Walnut Creek, along the highway that runs through the Valley and on to the Sierra, several hours to the east. Martinez is an industrial city, and the hills which surround Martinez often fill with steam from the petroleum refining and chemical manufacturing companies that surround the city proper. Martinez, on the southern shore of the Carquinez Strait, sees the tide come in and go out, marking the days, marking the passage of time.
And along the Strait, we discovered a walking path that is home to the shore birds and other creatures as well as to the humans who walk there along the level path. People are often friendly when we pass them on our walks, and we stop again and again at the site of a ship wreck – more of the ship visible to our eyes as the tide goes out. The paths further from the water are rutted and uneven, but along the water, the path is most often free of debris, easy to walk.
In the spring of the year, the kites of people from the area go up in the Park that lines the shore of the Strait, colorful kites, and the children and daddies holding the strings are colorful, diverse, too.
During the COVID years, we liked to leave our house early on a Sunday morning – free Sunday mornings remain a luxury to us, two retired preachers – to drive to a small parking lot across the railroad tracks from downtown Martinez, to leave our car there, enjoying one another’s company, and to walk the paths, chatting with one another, greeting other human beings, enjoying the air, the green, the blue of the Strait, the ships coming and going, docked for a day or two, the sound of traffic on the Martinez Bridge – we can see from the shore! – just a soft buzz in the air.
There’s a new train station in Martinez, a block away from the parking lot where we leave our car, and sometimes we wait to cross the tracks as a passenger train makes its way to the East, on its way to the Valley, to the Sierra. Every time we pass the train station we remind each other that we’d like to take the train from Oakland to Martinez – some day (we haven’t, at this writing!).
As the COVID years continued, we discovered a Farmers’ Market on Sunday mornings in downtown Martinez. Jeff made sure to take a cloth shopping bag from the car to fill with goodies – fruit, fresh vegetables – at the market. Caramel popcorn, a favorite for me, is fresh-popped and sold by the bag, which I carry with me to the car, and which both Jeff and I devour, all the way home.
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Ron, our companion today, is an experienced hiker, having hiked with his wife on paths around the world, but the Slough was new to him; we like to introduce this gem to friends who visit us from other places. Each person we take finds something in particular to like at the Slough, as we have.
It’s been over 5 years – 5 long years – since the world was introduced to COVID, a staple in our experience now. Our lives have changed, and our lives have remained the same in many ways, over those 5 years. Still, it’s always a new pleasure to walk the trails at Martinez Slough, enjoying the path, enjoying the air, the light, the shore birds that fly away when we come near, enjoying one another.
At Martinez Slough, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 8/11/2025
At home, I was the big sister. And so I was thrilled when my brother Ronn brought home a friendly and fun young woman – Sue – and introduced her to the family as the “girl” he was going to marry (this was the early 60’s, when young women were still referred to as “girls).” And I was thrilled when Sue, who was the middle of three sisters in her own family, took an interest in me.
Sue was the big sister I had never had. She listened to me and she made me laugh. (Sue and me laughing would play a big part in our lives as the years unfolded). I cherish a vivid memory of Sue and me together in the cramped bathroom of my family’s upper flat on the north side of Milwaukee. We sat together as she cried about an argument she was having with Ronn. More often those days, Sue made Ronn laugh, and Ronn made Sue laugh. As I bring Sue to my memory now, I can see her wide smile and the light in her eyes. She liked me, just as I liked her. And – she would never fail to tell me the truth. Never.
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Early in their marriage, Ronn had had an accident as he drove alone on a Milwaukee street; he ended up in the hospital for several weeks. As the years unfolded, he would need to be hospitalized again and again. And so one summer, as Sue was Mom to three children under five already – David, Alicia, Vicki Sue – she was about to give birth to her fourth child. I stayed with her in their house in the suburbs of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, slept in her bed with her as she tossed and turned, unable to sleep a full night in the last days of this pregnancy. Ronn was hospitalized again.
Most nights, the two of us would sit together on the screened in porch, talking and laughing in the dark. All night long. That year, the cicadas arrived to fill the air with their loud screeching calls, early in the mornings, just before daylight. The children were still asleep, although we didn’t know when that would change, and our world was just the two of us, facing one another in the dark. Sue was a smoker – she smoked until she died in 2015 – and I listened and laughed to her deep voice as I watched the light of her cigarette go up and down in the dark, sitting there together until the morning light broke the silence that surrounded us.
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The last time I saw Sue was in the spring of 2015. I’d taken a trip to visit the family in Northern Florida on my own that year, and the day before I left, I went to lunch with Sue and Alicia, her older daughter, who was her caregiver. It seems that a medication that Sue was taking was also taking her memory, and from time to time, she’d stare at me quizzically, trying to recall who I was. Then, at one point in the conversation, a moment of clarity, she said to me: “you’re a minister.” Yes! She did know who I was.
After lunch, I drove Sue and Alicia back home. I got out of the car to give them each a hug, and Sue held on to me for a long time. As I drove away a few moments later, I watched in the rear view mirror as Sue stood, waving and waving.
*
“Sue, Sister, Sweet”
I remember when I first knew you were my sister – you, sitting on the edge of the claw footed bathtub in the crowded bathroom of an old Milwaukee flat, crying. I listened to your tears, and then, I knew: You are my sister, Sue.
I remember you, 8 months pregnant – again (!) I remember your voice all night long in the dark Carolina night, the light from your cigarette, up and down, up and down, the two of us, laughing, laughing: We laughed until dawn. During the day, you were Mom.
Years later (in my new life) you brought me a home-baked goodie while I was still in bed – insisting that I accept this gift of love! I remember you marching me to the classical music CD’s in the back of Barnes and Noble: You bought me Beethoven. I listened, all spring long, to the minor notes, mourning another Sue.
Now, these notes, this mourning, is for you. I mourn for you.
I remember – I will remember always – you waving goodbye (I watched you in the rear-view mirror), as I drove away from you – for the last time. “I don’t know when I’ll see you again, Sue,” I said into your silence.
You knew, you knew, you knew, my sweet, sweet sister, Sue. (poem by meb, 2015)
