Tag: connection

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remembering Verdell

Mary Elyn Bahlert

In my mid-twenties, I was searching for a community. At the time, I didn’t know what that community would be for me, but I was drawn to go to church, since that was what I understood to be community. And, as I’ve written before, deep inside me – not spoken aloud – was the seed of a call to ministry, to a particular vocation.

And so I visited churches, one Sunday after another. My only experience of “church” had not been positive – even as a young teenager, fundamentalism did not make sense to me. But I was looking for community, for a community of people with a heart for social justice, activism. I set out to find that place – a place I did not know existed.

And so I visited churches, one Sunday after another. As a natural introvert, it is difficult for me to enter a community. Maybe I was shy. I know I was uncertain. But I must have known what I didn’t want, as I visited one church after another. I made sure to sit in the last row of the pews, so that I could make a safe and fast exit – which I did, regularly. Or I might find myself in the Narthex of the church, the hall from which the sanctuary is entered, looking for someone familiar. Again and again, when I’d see someone, when I’d catch their eye, they would turn to look for someone they knew. Not for me, not a newcomer, longing for a community.

Years later, as a pastor, I would repeat this story, again and again, to the congregations I served. I would repeat the story because I knew the people who came to those places were like me, longing for a community, longing to be gathered into the community they were visiting.

My looking took me, finally, to Kenwood United Methodist Church on Kenwood Boulevard in Milwaukee, across the street from the Student Union of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I’d received my Bachelor’s Degree. And so, one Sunday, I held my breath again as I entered the sanctuary, and found a safe place to sit – a place that could assure a fast exit when service was over, if needed.

The woman who was already sitting in the pew to my left was an old woman, to me. But she noticed me. She looked at me! She told me her name – Verdell xxxxxxxx. Later, I would learn Verdell’s nickname in the community – “the grandma who went to jail,” for protesting issues that were important to her, civil rights. I didn’t know that then, when Verdell looked right at me and welcomed me. She told me that after church, she’d take me to meet Harvey Stower, the Young Adult Minister.

And so she did.

I have repeated that story to many congregations over the years, and each time, I put out my arm, my hand, and I tell the people that on that day, Verdell reached out her hand to me, and brought me into Church. When I arrived, lonely, looking for a community, Verdell was there, reaching toward me.

I’ve spent more time in my life in “Church” than is necessary, I’m sure! But at that point, I needed a welcome, a warmth, a connection. Apparently, when that connection was missing, I knew it, and I moved along. Apparently, when that connection was made, I knew it, and was gathered in.

Verdell introduced me to Harvey Stower that day. Over the course of my lifetime, I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone who was more extraverted than Harvey Stower. Years later, he’d take his extraversion into service as a Representative in the State of Wisconsin. But at the moment I needed to meet Harvey, he was there. And if Verdell reached out her hand to me and brought me in, Harvey helped me to connect. He saw me. His wisdom and his work on behalf of justice shaped my own call to ministry, a call that was rolling around in me, silent, at the time we met.

*

Jeff and I have just returned from three weeks in Germany. We’ve returned from our first cruise, which began our trip, and from four days spent with friends in Nuremberg, where we walked the city and saw the site of Hitler’s rallies, the site a warning to all of us to never forget what began there, and ended there. In Nuremberg, our friends made sure we visited several churches. Jeff and I have spent a lot of our lives as pastors. And we like to see the churches in Europe, hundreds of years old.

The simple, kind, warm gesture that Verdell offered me that day continues to ripple in my life. I don’t know if I ever told her. “Thank you, Verdell.”

memories, remembering, Uncategorized

Auntie Edna

Mary Elyn Bahlert

“There are places I’ll remember. All my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better; Some have gone and some remain…” Lennon and McCartney

Our yearly trips to Door County seemed to have a pattern, and the pattern included visits to various aunts and uncles – my father’s siblings – who lived close to where they had been born. At some point during the week, we would drive for a visit to Auntie Edna’s house, close to the tip of the Door Peninsula, at Gill’s Rock. The road that ran to the north of Auntie Edna and Uncle Werner’s (we said, “Verner”) place led to the dock to the ferry to Washington Island.

Edna and Werner had lived in that house for many years longer than I had been alive. My cousins Donna and Dean had been born in that place. On my trips to Door County now, I always drive past the brown-shingled house with the cherry orchard to the East. On the edge of the property on which their home stands is a plaque: “Johnson Homestead 1904, Leonard and Selma” the names of their children with years of birth, below. My Uncle Werner, who spoke as if he’d come straight from Sweden, had been born there! Years later, the thought would come to mind that his first language had been Swedish.

For a living, Uncle Werner had fished the tumultuous waters of that part of Wisconsin, Green Bay, Death’s Door to the North ( the native people had named that passage between Green Bay and Lake Michigan). He also raised the sour cherries that grew abundantly in the rocky soil of Door County.

The visit to with Auntie Edna and Uncle Werner began in their living room, with both Edna and Werner seated in their large, comfortable chairs. I sat in the same place each time, also, and I would look to that part of the long, narrow room toward the places we did not sit. Did they ever go into that part of the house, I wondered? Did the Christmas Tree go there?

Dad and Mom, Suzie and I sat formally in that living room, Dad with his cap in his hand, doing most of the talking. Of the lot of us, he was the most extraverted. Uncle Werner seemed to have a twinkle in his eye; I always thought that in his way, he was laughing at us. Auntie Edna was one of the quiet Bahlerts, and so she sat quietly in her chair, asking questions. Gentleness radiated from her presence. After awhile, we’d all get up, and Auntie Edna, Mom, Suzie and I would move to the small, dark dining room, where she served us juice and cookies. I remember her kindness, her ability to listen. When I went to the bathroom before we left the house, I’d glance into their bedroom, and always wondered why they slept in two single beds. At home, Mom and Dad slept together.

Years later, I would come to know my cousin Donna, who worked in Milwaukee and made the trip to the Door Peninsula every week to get her clothes washed, to be home again. Her life was much like my father’s had been, a generation before. While I was in college, I made the trip to Door County with Donna for a weekend, and she took me to her lifelong haunts. After she retired, Donna would marry Jim Thorp, who had lived his entire life on the Door Peninsula. They would live in their double-wide trailer, a short walk away from Donna’s folks.

On the Sunday of our week in Door County, we’d go to church at the Moravian Church just down the road from Werner and Edna’s place, and there she would be, my beloved aunt. In her quiet way, she was a presence.

Once a week, Edna wrote a column for the Door County Advocate about happenings in that place, so beautiful in the summer, with long bleak winters. When we had had our yearly visit, our names were mentioned in her column.

When we are a child, it’s hard to imagine these elders as being young, but sometimes I try to piece together the bits and pieces I heard, often repeatedly, into a pattern. I knew that Edna had graduated from high school, something not all of her siblings had done. She spoke as I spoke, not in the dialect of that place that my father had. Her father, Ginter Bahlert, my grandfather, had wanted her to go to college to be a schoolteacher, but that was not to be. She worked for a time at Bunda’s Store in Sister Bay, an establishment that lasted there until at least the 1970’s, on the West Side of Highway 42, on the South end of town, before she married Werner. I think of her every time I pass the building that once housed Bunda’s Store, the Sister Bay Bowl across the street, still standing.

It is odd, in a way, hard to understand that these places are still there, and the people I loved gone now, so long.

Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, October, 2021

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A night visitor

Mary Elyn Bahlert

My Grandma, Frances Markowski – Feodosia Machsuda Srebna – had been born in Ukraine and came to the United States in 1914, before the Soviet Revolution that took that land and swallowed it into itself. A picture of her as a young woman with her young son, Ivan/John, and her husband, Vlas/Alex sits on the cabinet under the window in my dining room.

As a little girl, I looked over the railing of the porch on the second floor of the flat on Ring Street to see my grandma walking slowly, head down and covered by a scarf – she was a true “babushka” – her long dark winter coat covering her legs, up the alley to sit with my mother in the kitchen, to have a talk in the language that was native to both. In later years, Mom would often forget much of her Ukrainian first language, only speaking a word or two, sometimes with humor, with her sister, Anne, or one of her brothers.

Grandma died when I was in high school, and her funeral was the last that my parents went to without me and my sister, Suzie. A few months later, my mother’s younger sister died, as if to follow her mother. Years later, her son, my cousin Mark, would tell me that he thought his mother – who was already battling cancer – gave up after her mother died.

After Grandma’s death, my mother went to the cemetery a few times a year to clean up the graves of her father and mother, a sort of homage. When I went with her, she’d send me off with a bucket to the water spout on the road that ran past the graves and I’d come back, the bucket filled with the water, so that she could tend to the dead. A few years ago, Jeff and I returned to the cemetery in Milwaukee, and when we drove into the gates, I provided directions that took us right to the graves. I have not forgotten.

***

I wasn’t thinking of Grandma at all when I entered seminary in 1982 in Berkeley. One early morning, before sunrise, as I lay sleeping in my small room in the dormitory apartment that I shared with two other women, I was awakened by a presence in the room. I knew it was Grandma. I knew. She came into me that early morning. Frightened by this unbidden presence, I called out to Jesus.

Was I haunted? Why did she come to me? I asked the questions, longing to know, in a conversation with a friend. “Who else would she go to?” Her answer.

Jeff speaks of that time as a “haunting,” but I’m not sure. I do know that she lived with me, in me, for a number of years. And over the course of that time I wrote the series of poems I call “The Feodosia Poems.” They are her poems, not mine. She was an illiterate woman from the Old Country, and I am a woman of the New World, privileged, educated.

My mother told me she did not remember her dreams. But she remembered a dream one morning when I was visiting in her apartment. Just before she awoke, she dreamed she was standing looking at the back of a truck. The back of the truck rolled up, and there, looking at my mother, was a Matryoshka doll, a nesting doll. The doll’s face was her mother, my grandmother. She winked at my mother! And Mom woke up. She recounted the dream to me when we talked over coffee that morning.

A black and white photo from the 1950’s is the only photo I have of Grandma with a light in her eye. She sits between me and big brother Ronn, already a teenager, trying to look “cool.” Maybe we brought some joy to her.

How I wish I knew her better, my Grandma, my babusya. And maybe, I do.

Me, Grandma, Ronn, circa 1955

beauty, memories, reflecting

the cat

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I married a man and a cat. Schatzi had been in Jeff’s life for several years when he and I were married in 1984. Part Maine Coone, she was a beautiful creature with long gray fur. After we were married, she took to sleeping at our feet, making room for me. Schatzi will always be my favorite cat (sorry, LiLi).

Schatzi was my first cat, and she became my introduction to cats. She was a good role model. I’ve discovered since that not all cats have the same people-loving, generous disposition that Schatzi had. If I pushed her too far, she warned me gently, stretching one leg, claws showing, in my direction. I always paid attention! I studied her closely. One day I announced to Jeff: “this cat doesn’t have any eye-lids!” Welcome to cat-hood!

When I took long naps on the green couch in our living room, Schatzi would lie next to me, her back stretched out along my body, an extra layer of warmth. When we had visitors, Schatzi made sure to find her way to the center of the action. While she was a house cat, she was allowed outside if she chose, and being female, she didn’t ever go far from home.

In December of 2000, I recall a Sunday during the liturgical season of Advent when I recounted three things in my sermon that had happened to me during the prior week: I’d received a phone call that my friend and colleague Bruce had died of a heart attack, a doctor’s appointment with my mother had revealed that she had terminal cancer, and the cat had spent the week sick, lying close to the heat register in the dining room of our flat off Grand Avenue in Oakland. As she passed me after church, Phyllis turned to me and said: “I can’t get that cat out of my mind.”

A few months later, Mom passed, in February of 2001, at her beloved home at Mathilda Brown Women’s Residence in Oakland.

Schatzi stayed awhile longer that year. She seemed to know that I was grieving, that I needed her cozy and comforting presence. In the autumn of 2001, Schatzi spent her last night with us on the floor of the kitchen, not able to move, not able to eat. Jeff lay on the floor next to her, all night long.

LiLi, our current feline housemate. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert.
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O, the Places You’ll Go!*

Mary Elyn Bahlert

These days, O’Hare Field in Chicago is just another airport. Since many flights have changed over the course of the years we’ve all been living with Covid-19, Jeff and I fly into O’Hare and drive to Wisconsin on our trips “home.”

Flying into and out of O’Hare Field is a sort of home-coming – and a home-leaving – to me.

O’Hare Field stands in my mind as a character of its own. O’Hare Field holds a particular place in my memories. I was in my late teens before I flew in an airplane, and I was in my early 20’s before I met O’Hare Field. As I walked through the terminals – everything so much bigger than in Milwaukee, 80 miles to the north – and I observed the people in that crowded, crowded airport – I was transported into another life, a life filled with a kind of diversity that I had not seen in my coming up life.

I loved it! I loved all the different people, people traveling from other parts of the world, distant places that I was not sure I would ever see. Turks, their heads held proud, covered, and women, long skirts around them as they herded their children from one gate to another. Strangers with their eyes focused ahead of them, focused on where they were going, eyes and hearts reflecting where they had been. I didn’t imagine my life at that point, a life that would include trips to foreign places, distant places that I was not sure I would ever see! And I have seen some – many – of them.

And so my world was opening, before I knew it was, before I was aware. The life that someone had dreamed for me – maybe I dreamed it myself – was beginning to lay itself out before me. I’ve lived most of my life in the Bay Area, a long way from Milwaukee, a long way from O’Hare Field. I often say that the weather is more interesting back in Wisconsin, but the people are more interesting here, the diversity of people who land here in the Bay Area from around the world.

*thanks to Dr. Spock