Tag: connection

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Grandma and Me

Mary Elyn Bahlert

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.  

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Thanksgiving

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I love the holiday season, which begins with Thanksgiving Day. When I was pastor in downtown Oakland, the congregation marked the day of thanks by offering a wonderful, complete Thanksgiving Dinner to anyone in the community who wanted to join. Homeless folks, people who did not speak English, people without family or even friends, joined the day’s gathering to sit at a table and to be served by other grateful folks. For many years, that tradition became part of my personal Thanksgiving, as I looked out at the gathered people and said to myself, again and again: “these are my people!”

And Jeff and I mark the holiday every year now by arriving at Norman and Cheryl’s cottage on a hill in San Francisco, climbing the narrow stairs to the top of a hill, our arms filled with pies – our contribution! – and to sit at the long, narrow table filled with an assortment of Bahlert-related people every year. As the day progresses and the dusk and darkness come, families with little ones begin to gather their belongings and leave, with much ado. The tiny kitchen which produced the feast we’d all enjoyed is full of helpers bumping into each other, cleaning up, continuing the dinner-time conversation. And then – just like that! – we all descend the steps and walk to our cars on the quiet streets and drive home, mentioning to one another moments from the day, who had grown, who talked to who, how much older everyone is (except for us, of course!), and probably feeling a bit of sadness that another holiday has passed.

In the Midwest, the shorter days and long evening of dark and cold have begun by this time of year. There’s a sense of “cocooning” that we don’t know in the same way here in California. And missing now, also, is the childhood sense of a quiet and light filled season, beginning with Thanksgiving, that won’t end until after Epiphany, in January.

My mother honored the season of holidays each year by hosting Thanksgiving Dinner at our upper flat, and by creating for my sister Suzie and me a holiday tradition. In the 50’s and 60’s (of the last century), the holiday season did not officially begin until Thanksgiving. On the day after Thanksgiving, my mother and Suzie and I took the 23 bus from the North Side to downtown Milwaukee, now mysteriously decorated with lights and ribbons along Wisconsin Avenue, still a booming shopping district at the time.

We’d step off the bus at 3rd and Wisconsin to walk through the Boston Store, which anchored the downtown at that time. My mother held tightly to each one of us as we walked through the crowded store, the lights and music having followed us from the street into the store.

Then, we’d walk, first to the Wisconsin Electric Company, and then to the Gas Company, to take in the cookie displays at each one. My mother made sure that at each place, she was provided with 3 copies of the new cookie book published by each company each year. She loved to try new recipes, and she loved to re-create those that had been her favorites – or dad’s favorite, or mine, or Suzie’s. Unknown to me, she wrote notes as she baked: “a favorite,” “takes a bit less powdered sugar than called for,” “makes a big batch!”

I didn’t discover the notes until years later, when I had my own apartment in Green Bay, and when Mom presented me with the collection of cookbooks she’d saved, just for me.

I’m not a great baker, although the family in San Francisco allows me to bring pies as my contribution to Thanksgiving. My mother loved to bake: “that’s the fun of it,” she’d say. And I expect she envisioned some sort of future for me and for my sister, based on her own life. Neither of us grew to have quite that future, I expect; it was her dream for us, regardless. The year after I retired, I baked a few batches of cookies, looking for a new way to fashion my life after an adulthood of work, often in a “man’s world.” That’s the year I reached high onto the kitchen shelf reserved for our cookbooks, and retrieved the cookbooks Mom had saved so carefully for me. And that’s when I saw her notes, in her particular hand-writing, written with me in mind, written with the relationship between the two of us holding us together.

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Michelle

Mary Elyn Bahlert

From the time I was small, I knew that I had family – uncles, aunts, cousins – in California. They were the people who peopled my world, although they lived far from us. From time to time, one of my mother’s brothers would visit, and I would hear about my cousins, those strangers who were yet part of the community that made up my life.

Michelle has been in my life forever. When I was five, Uncle Pete and Aunt Athalie and Michelle came to Milwaukee, and now I look again at the photo of Aunt Athalie and Michelle and me on the front lawn of our flat at 1115 West —- Street in Milwaukee. Michelle has her hair covered in a scarf, tied under the chin in the style of teenage girls of the day. I’m happy. I was thrilled, to be in the presence of my cousin Michelle. She was a hero to me.

When I was a teenager, Michelle was already married. For a few years, we were penpals, and I read with interest each letter about her life, so different from mine, in California. In one letter, she told me about the ending of her marriage. She wrote about her life, and I had to conjure up what her life might look like, in that place so far away, a place I had never been.

Now, I’ve lived most of my life in California, and I’ve lived most of my life not far from where Michelle grew up. By a strange turn of events, I was called to be a pastor in the neighborhood in South San Francisco where Michelle had grown up, and at the time when her father, my Uncle Pete, was already suffering from Alzheimer’s. Then, I visited my aunt and uncle from time to time, and for the first time, developed a relationship with Aunt Athalie. She was the aunt who never forgot a birthday, she was the aunt that had sent a care package of Michelle’s well worn clothes to our family from time. As I spent time with Aunt Athalie, I learned about her and her life, separate from my uncle and cousin. One day, she told me the story of where she was on Sunday, December 7, 1941. A young woman, she was getting payroll ready for the Navy Fleet, working alone – in Pearl Harbor. My blustery, extraverted Uncle Pete – who’d fought in three wars – had always commanded the attention of the room when he told stories. Her own story – more dramatic than his – had stayed, quietly, within her.

As the years passed, Michelle settled into her life in Riverside, California, and our connection became birthday cards and Christmas cards with a short note: “Love, Michelle.” Her hand-writing was dramatic, flourishing.

A few years ago, I was at home in the afternoon when the mail arrived. When I opened the box, I found a hand written note from Michelle. On her latest trip to Hawaii – always her home – she and her beloved, Tony, had been married! As soon as I read the letter, I called her. She’d been surprised – and disappointed – that she had not heard from me, that I had not reacted to learning her news. But the mail had been slow, and now, we were connected again. I was happy for her, as I watched and imagined her life from afar.

Three years ago, Michelle called to say she’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. For three years, she bravely battled the disease, working with her excellent doctors to discern the next steps forward. Then, early in September, she was sent home to her little house on Larchwood Place, on hospice. I did not talk to her again. I noticed one day that her Facebook posts had stopped, and a few friends offered sad messages instead. She had posted a photo of the mantle of her home, and on the mantle I can see the birthday card I sent to her this year, her birthday one week before my own.

Last weekend, as Jeff and I were preparing for a short trip to the mountains, and on to Sparks, Nevada, Jeff and Michelle’s beloved, Tony, called. The days were coming to a close now, and Michelle drifted in and out of consciousness. He was tired. Tony had been a stalwart, fierce companion and protector of Michelle in these last days. As I prepared to meet a friend for lunch on September 26, Jeff’s cell phone rang, and Tony spoke the words we all knew would be coming soon: Michelle had died. I went to lunch with my friend, mentioned Michelle’s passing. And that was that.

The memories are here, now. And Michelle is gone.

Michelle and cousin Dennis. From my collection.

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Auntie Irene

Mary Elyn Bahlert

My father was extroverted and his sister Irene was extroverted. Really extroverted: the kind of extrovert that spoke everything that passed through her mind. And I loved her.

Auntie Irene and her husband, Uncle Erdreich, lived on a road off the State Road 57 going north along the shore of Lake Michigan, north of Baileys Harbor. Their road led into a swamp, a mile or so past their house, their house with the cottage behind it – the cottage that Uncle Erdreich had built for my grandparents to live in in their elder years. The door of Auntie Irene’s house led to a hall that led to another door into the kitchen, the table directly ahead as you walked into the house. I suppose that house was strange by modern standards of “footprint,” as rooms had been added on by Erdreich, a carpenter, as the need had presented itself over the years.

I spent many nights in a second story bedroom at the top of the winding stairs that led from the living room to that unused space; unused, since Irene and Erdrich’s two sons were a generation older than me, and were long past away from Baileys Harbor, making their lives in other places. When I was living in Green Bay for a couple of lonely years in my twenties, a few times I made the trip to Baileys Harbor to spend a day or two with Auntie Irene and Uncle Erdreich. I slept in that cozy bedroom with its old fashioned pictures on the wall many times.

Irene was “the hugger” to my sister Suzie. That’s how Suzie remembered her as being different from Edna, a quiet Bahlert, who lived twenty miles to the north, near the tip of Death’s Door at the end of the Door Peninsula. And Irene did welcome us all with a hug, as her mother had done, a generation before, when she welcomed my reserved mother into the family as she met her for the first time. My mother never forgot that hug of kindness and acceptance.

Irene and Erdreich rarely went more than a few miles from their home, but they did come to Milwaukee to visit my family when my sister was still in a stroller. The Big Sister (as Irene had been to her Bahlert siblings) took the baby and Auntie Irene for a walk, Auntie Irene anxious, talking non-stop as soon as we were out of sight of the house where my family lived.

Irene hugged and Irene talked. Is it a truth about extroverts that they say exactly what comes into their mind? I think that was true of Irene. She was kind; she was gentle; she was warm and she had a humor about her. When my parents and Suzie and I had been greeted on the lawn with hugs, we were given a tour of the garden that was full of vegetables and fruits every year, and then we walked into the kitchen of the welcoming house for a treat at the table, something home baked by Auntie Irene.

On one of the trips to Door County during my years in Green Bay, I invited a friend to join me for the weekend, and we were the guests of my loving aunt and her home cooked meals. As we drove away, my friend turned to me in the car and said: “there’s no excuse for a person to be like that.” Her comment surprised me, and it still surprises me that I did not feel shame at her judgment of a person I loved so completely. Years later, I introduced another friend to Irene and Erdreich, and she told me that she had never met people like them before. Her comment reminded me of her kindness and gentle acceptance.

When Irene was in a nursing home, already past 90, dying, I wrote a note to her. I’m sure someone must have read it to her as she lay in her bed, that lonely bed away from the double bed she’d shared for 70 years with Erdreich. As I signed the note, I remember writing: “wait for me.” Jeff and I made the trip to Door County again on our visit “home” to Wisconsin that year, just in time to be present at Auntie Irene’s funeral in the Evangelical Lutheran Church along the highway, the church where, years before, I’d sat in the pew after receiving communion, next to my aunt who fell to her knees, head bent, before she sat back in the pew. I’ve always thought that Auntie Irene had waited for me return, for me to be present alongside my Bahlert cousins, some who came from a long way to be at her funeral, on that summer day.

Irene, circa 1926

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When Grandma Died

Mary Elyn Bahlert

My Grandma Bahlert, my father’s mother, died when I was five years old. I remember when the phone call came, when Mom called Daddy into the hallway to learn the news. And I remember my Dad, then, crying as he sat in his chair in the living room, my mother and I looking on. I was little then, and although many years later I would still miss my Grandma Bahlert’s kindness and playfulness, death had no meaning to me.

I was nineteen years old when my Grandma Markowski died, and her death was the first that touched me, when I began to understand what this all meant, especially to the rest of us, the living, whose lives went on. By the time she died, Grandma Markowski spoke only her native Ukrainian, and my time with her was spent silent, listening, as Mom and Grandma talked, sitting next to her bed in the smelly front room of a house fashioned into a “nursing home.” A nursing home for poor people. Once a month, my mother took my grandmother’s Social Security check to her, and I watched grandma sign her wobbly “X” on the back so that Mom could cash the check to pay the home.

Grandma died in Milwaukee County Hospital, the place where the poor went to die. And I wondered about her. Was she aware? Did she hear the voices of those who came to her bed as she died? Was she alone? Had they rolled her bed down the hall, trying to save her, to allow her to live another day? I wondered.

A few months after Grandma died, Auntie Anne, my mother’s only sister, died. Now, I look at her pictures and I wonder about her life, as I have wondered about my Grandma’s life. I know Auntie Anne suffered violence in her life, and when I look at the pictures, I look at her eyes, wondering if her fear and sorrow showed in them. Years later, my cousin Mark, her son, told me that he thought his mother – who was already suffering with cancer – gave up after Grandma died.

For as many questions as I asked my mother while she was alive, as many questions remain about them all. So many questions – unanswered – followed them all to the grave. And I suppose it will be that way when I am gone, and Jeff, and all those that we love and have loved.

Grandma, circa 1969