Tag: memories

memories, remembering

My uncle Pete

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I guess some people would call Uncle Pete a “blowhard”. He did have a tendency to talk loudly in a room filled with people, and to lend his certain extraverted charm to that room.

Even so, Uncle Pete was a favorite of mine.

I watched him as my Uncle Johnny – the smart one, the sibling with the “interesting” past – spoke. Then, Uncle Pete was quiet and listened, with a certain reverence, to every word. I’m not sure how I learned the secret, but word was that Uncle Pete only rose to the rank of Sergeant First Class in the Army because of Uncle Johnny. As I write now, I can see the look in Uncle Pete’s eyes as he listened. He held Uncle Johnny, his eldest sibling, in the highest regard.

Uncle Pete was handsome. In my eyes, anyway, Uncle Pete was handsome. And Uncle Pete knew how to be an Uncle. That’s a difficult quality to explain. But Uncle Pete had it. When I was dating Jeff – who would go on to be my life partner, my husband, Uncle Pete quietly spoke to me one day: “I can see he’s showing more affection to you now.”

After I had moved to the Bay Area from Milwaukee, and after Jeff and I had moved around a fair amount, we lived in San Leandro. At the time, The Oak Knoll Navy Hospital operated in Oakland. My Aunt Athalie – Uncle Pete’s wife, the mother of their daughter, Michelle – was being operated on for the serious arthritis she suffered. I went to visit her, and when I arrived, Uncle Pete was there with her in the private room. He was quiet as she and I talked. After I’d been to seminary, I think some members of the family held me in some suspicion, and I count Uncle Pete among them. And so Uncle Pete – usually a boisterous presence in any room – stayed silent.

Still, after I’d visited with Aunt Athalie, as I left the room, Uncle Pete walked beside me to the elevator, then walked with me from the hospital to my car. He was quiet the whole way. He made sure I drove out of the parking lot safely before he returned to the hospital.

*

In 1995, I was sent by the Bishop to serve a small, half-time Church appointment in South San Francisco. I’ve always considered it a quirk of fate that the church to which I was sent was in a development of single family homes built in the hills of South San Francisco after World War 2. I say “quirk of fate” because the church had been built in the development where Uncle Pete and Aunt Athalie’s modest home stood. I can recite the address today. I’d known the address since I was a child, and had arrived at exactly the place where I’d arrived in my early teens; in a hot, humid Wisconsin summer, I’d taken an imagined trip from my family’s upper flat clear across the country to — Alta Mesa Drive, South San Francisco. The people of Aldersgate United Methodist Church (the church has since built a new building and changed its name), who made sure I had a nice lunch waiting for me every Sunday, would sometimes give me a meal to take over to Uncle Pete and Aunt Athalie.

My mother had never liked Aunt Athalie. I knew that, although I expect no words to that effect were ever spoken. And I think – again, these thoughts are my own – that my mother was jealous of Uncle Pete. Pete had been my grandmother’s youngest child and her favorite. My mother had grown up in a home filled with drinking and parties, their own kind of chaos. And while she loved her father, her relationship with her mother was more complicated. Maybe Mom had expected her mother to protect her from the abuse she suffered in her mother’s house. Still, the way these things happen, Mom was the one who carefully cared for my grandmother in her final years. But in my years getting to know Aunt Athalie, I came to love her. I miss her now.

When Uncle Pete developed Alzheimer’s, he would wander around the housing development. He might have been a nuisance, or worse, to other people. Instead, the men of the neighborhood, who knew Pete was a veteran, accepted and explained his wandering: “Pete fought in three wars,” they’d say. He was safe.

Aunt Athalie called me the day Uncle Pete turned violent – a symptom of Alzheimer’s – and asked for reassurance that if I called the police to help her, they would not take Uncle Pete to jail. I called the police local to the neighborhood and had their assurance. And so they came to take Uncle Pete to the hospital, and later a facility, where he would die.

And I have a fond memory of a visit Jeff, my mother, and I made to see Uncle Pete in the facility. He was safe there. His caregivers brought him into a small room where my mother, my cousin Michelle, her husband, Jeff, and I sat around a table. I don’t think Uncle Pete knew us at all, although he was loud and boisterous. When the visit was over, we walked outside together into the beautiful Bay Area day. As we walked away, my mother turned back. The rest of us waited as she stood again in front of her little brother, Pete, and as she gently reached up to touch his face.

“I can think of younger days, when living for my life was everything a man could want to do. I could never see tomorrow, for I was never told about the sorrow…” words and music by Barry and Robin Gibb, 1971

reflecting, remembering

Watching the Sky

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Fourth of July has passed for another year. On Saturday night, Jeff and I fell asleep to the sound of booming skies, carried to us from around the whole Bay Area. For several years, we’d climbed to the strip of land that attaches itself to our property to the South East of our property – a strip of land that is almost sold to the people whose house behind ours faces a different street – to watch the fireworks from what we had come to call “The Panhandle.” Not this year. We started to go to bed earlier during COVID – waking earlier each morning, too – and so we were in bed at the end of daylight.

The booms from all over the area filled the air as I lay awake, always falling asleep later than Jeff, who falls into sleep soon after his head hits the pillow. I listened for a while before I, too, fell asleep. As I listened, the sounds took me back to a Fourth of July many years ago.

Some memories shine, as if lit by a magic light from within.

I was little, probably four or five. I lay on a hill in Washington Park on the North Side of Milwaukee, next to my Dad. I expect that my mother and the baby, Suzie, and probably my big brother, Ronnie, were with us, but they did not show themselves in the memory. It’s as if Daddy and I were alone on the hill. Of the five of us, Dad – I later took to calling him FRB, a nickname which stuck with the whole family – holds center stage in the memory. He was the one in our house who talked the most, an extravert who lived with four introverts.

Daddy watched the fireworks with his extraversion on full display, along with the fireworks. “OOOOOH,” he said, loudly. “AHHHH,” the sound followed. With each burst of light, a new sound escaped from Daddy. “OHHH…” he claimed, again. I lay close to his side on the side of the hill. While the fireworks flashed overhead, I turned to watch Daddy as enjoyment and wonder flowed from him.

*

Why do some memories stick, and not others? I’d like to know. Every Fourth of July, I think of those moments, moments now over 70 years old, as the fireworks boom overhead. I’m still there on that hill, laying close to my Daddy, his joy spreading along the grass to me.

*

For many years now, the dry days of summer in Northern California surround me. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, Mt. Shasta in the distance, from the Warner Valley, CA, 06/9/2026

memories, Uncategorized

Driving Through Chester

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Rainier was going with Lia, a young woman who lived in the same apartment that they rented together with several other young women in San Francisco. At just the right time, Rainier and Lia started dating each other – and that was it. They were a couple. It was 2012.

Rainier lived with us in Oakland for the first few years of his studies at San Francisco State University, before he’d moved out to live in the City during his last year of school. He’d come to live with us almost from the day he’d graduated from High School on Oahu, calling to ask us whether the offer of a home with us we’d made some years before was for real. It was for real, and we were glad to have him. He lived in a small porch-like area with windows on two sides in a second story duplex before we moved into the beautiful Craftsman Style home we’ve owned and lived in since. In our home, Rainier’s space was down several steps from the kitchen, a small room with a low ceiling and access through sliding doors to the garden. During the move to our new house, he’d offered a strong helping hand. He’d joined us as we gathered a few friends to our new home for a house blessing.

While he was in college, Rainier had taken up bicycling, first using a second hand bike he’d found in the basement of the duplex on Sunnyslope Avenue, graduating to another bike and into a group of cyclists in San Francisco, competing for Mike’s Bikes by traveling to races. Now he’s got a stash of bicycles and parts in his workshop in the yard of his home in Seattle.

When the time to go out on his own came, Rainier moved to San Francisco, where he shared part of an old house with several young women.

We knew from the start that Lia was Rainier’s true partner, and we have enjoyed their company together ever since. Jeff officiated at their wedding. During COVID, we’d made the trip from our place in Oakland to their home in Seattle several times to spend time with them and their baby girl Celeste, born on the first day of COVID sheltering in place – March 17, 2020. Rainier and Lia and Celeste became the children of our own we did not have.

*

After they became a couple, we invited Rainier and Lia to join us at our friends’ Paul and Lana’s place in the Warner Valley, 5 hours north of the Bay Area, for a few days. The four of us had fun together: we watched the budding romance. When our visit was over, we packed up Jeff’s Forester and headed back to the Bay Area. We stopped in Chester, at the southern end of the Valley, dropped off a few days’ worth of garbage in a big garbage can in a driveway, and started West out of Chester toward Highway 5. We left the town limits of Chester. Jeff noticed first. He didn’t say anything to us, but he watched a police vehicle driving along behind us. Jeff is not one to speed, but he watched the speedometer anyway.

Just as we left the town limits, the red lights of the squad car went on and we pulled over. The four of us sat silent in the car as the officer came to the window and asked to see Jeff’s license. I’m sure the officer could read the faces of anyone he pulled over, because that day, he took his time to explain that we’d been seen dumping garbage in town. “I’ll give you a choice,” he said. “You can go back and get that bag of garbage, or I can take you jail.”

“We’ll go back to pick the garbage up,” Jeff said.

We were silent as Jeff turned the car around and watched as he didn’t go a bit over the speed limit as we returned to Chester. We found the garbage container where we’d deposited our garbage less than an hour before. Jeff stopped the car. Rainier got out to get the bag of garbage. We were silent, but I’ll bet we were watched by the neighbors who’d – apparently – watched us before.

And we were mostly silent on the long ride back to San Francisco.

When we drove into San Francisco, I’d taken the wheel, and we were almost at Rainier and Lia’s place. At the same moment, we all burst into laughter, unable to contain it any longer. We all burst into the laughter that followed our entanglement with the Law in Chester.

And you can bet we’ve told that story to one another many times since that fateful day…

A view of Warner Valley now, Mt. Shasta in the distance. After fires several years ago, damaged trees stand amid trees that had escaped the fire. Paul and Lana’s first cabin was destroyed in the fire; the homes on either side of the cabin that burned still stand. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 6/9/26.

memories, remembering, Uncategorized

“There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed…”

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I could say that Sue and Bill have changed. Sue passed in 2003, and Bill passed in 2024. For many years, Sue and I had been the best of friends.

I met Sue in December of 1978. At the time, I was a Claims Representative in the Social Security Office on the South Side of Milwaukee. My supervisor, Larry Alt, had told me that I should meet his wife. He thought we could be friends. When I arrived at the Social Security Office on Fond du Lac Avenue on Milwaukee’s North Side to help adjudicate a back load of SSI claims, I managed to scout out Sue, hard at work at her desk. One day, after the rest of the office had gone home and both Sue and I were working on claims at our desks, I sat down across from Sue. She and I started a conversation that day; in my mind, that conversation was the beginning of one long conversation that ended with Sue’s death in 2004.

When Sue and Larry moved to the Chicago Area a few years later, Sue would come up to spend a weekend with me from time to time. Those weekends had a familiar routine. From the moment she sat down in my living room in the red velvet chair that faced the couch on Friday night until she left early on Sunday afternoon, we talked and talked. At the time, Sue was a smoker, and I’d sit across from her as she lit cigarette after cigarette, the smoke rising in the room along with our laughter. When the evening had come, we’d go to dinner at some good restaurant and sit there, too, talking and talking some more. On Saturday, Sue would sleep in, and I’d rise early to do some weekend cleaning in the apartment until Sue was up. And then – the conversation continued. Sometimes we’d teach one another a new makeup trick, or try on one another’s clothes.

All dolled up again in the evening, we’d find another good restaurant where we’d have dinner and talk – and talk.

I think Sue was surprised when I decided to go to seminary, and left Milwaukee in late December of 1981 to move to Berkeley. But her surprise and my move didn’t matter; the conversation continued. I listened to the details of her life as she divorced Larry and as she moved up in positions in the Federal Government, eventually becoming District Manager of Social Security Office. That position suited her political instincts and her intellect – and her ambition. As I sat down to write about her now, I googled her name and discovered other local community positions she held when she later moved to Milwaukee to be head of staff in a large District Office.

A few years later, after she had dated many men in the years following her divorce from Larry, she met Bill. I knew something was different about Bill from the way Sue talked about him. She had a lift in her soft voice with its Southern nuances. And I was right. A couple of years later, they were married. I flew from the Bay Area of California to Midway Airport in Chicago, where Bill picked me up to drive me to where I’d stay for the weekend. I had the honor of officiating their wedding ceremony. On our ride through the city, I remember Bill saying: “I’m standing on solid ground.”

Indeed. Sue was finally happy. Bill was happy. Together, they formed a large blended family.

On Friday, February 6, 2004, I received a message on my answering machine from Sue’s mother. She happily relayed the news that Sue was in recovery from surgery, and that she had done well. I was surprised. I had not known about a surgery. Later that day, I received news that Sue had died. I don’t remember who relayed the news of this second announcement.

That spring, I returned to Milwaukee to take part in a Memorial Service for Sue. Bill had taken care of the details. I led the service, delivered a eulogy. Her daughter Meredith said a few words. Then, the room opened to the people who were there to remember and honor Sue, her life and achievements. I sat and listened for a long time. When the service had ended, Larry Alt came up to me in the narthex of the church. Larry said, “Sue would have liked this.” I hope he was right.

*

A couple of years after Sue’s death, Jeff and I were staying with Randy and Michael in their home in Pewaukee. Bill took the opportunity to see me again. As he and I sat together at the kitchen table, looking over the beautiful yard, Bill turned to me and said, “I have to get on with my life, Mary Elyn.” I looked into his eyes: “I know you do, Bill,” I answered. Later, a friend suggested that Bill’s announcement to me had been important to him.

From time to time, I saw pictures of Bill in his new life with a new wife – also Sue – in Florida. My warmth for Bill remained. I had hoped to see him again. One day in 2024, he left a message for me on Facebook. “I’d like to see you again, Mary Elyn,” he wrote. “I’d like to see you again, too, Bill,” I answered. My reunion with Bill did not happen; Bill passed in December of 2024. Meredith, Larry and Sue’s older daughter, left a message for me on Facebook.

“There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed,
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain.

All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends, I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved them all…” words and music, John Lennon and Paul McCartney

“All these places have their moments, with lovers and friends I still can recall…” photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, 2026.

remembering, Uncategorized

More about Dad

Mary Elyn Bahlert

My dad had worker’s hands.  His hands were broad, wide, the nails often broken from his days in the steel factory, the veins pushing blue against his light-colored skin.  When I was little, those hands would lift my little sister by her feet straight up into the air on the living room floor after Daddy came home from work.  Until the days before his death, I didn’t know how my father identified with his strong, worker’s body.  In the hospital, he said with a mournful look in his eyes:  “I was always so strong.”  Then, he was ravaged with cancer.

Some days, Dad came home from the steel factory with a steel splinter in those strong hands.  That hurt.  Each time, he would call on Suzie, my sister, to remove the splinter.  And she would, working slowly and carefully with a needle, her eyes close to this outstretched hand, intent.

Dad was a gentle man, in spite of his strength, maybe because of his strength.  Of the two – my mother and my dad – he was the most able to express his feelings.  If Dad’s feelings were hurt, it showed on his face.  If he was happy, we saw that, too, his eyes sparkling.  When he was angry, his voice rose to a deep shout.  I was afraid of his power when he was angry, although he did not take it out on any of us.  He was rarely angry. I saw him lift a chair in anger once, and I remember that moment, my fear, I expect, completing the memory.  Many times, I saw my father cry.  One of my dearest memories is of my Dad sitting in his chair, watching “I Love Lucy,” his favorite.  Dad roared with laughter at her silliness, looked over at one of us, and said  “fun, isn’t it, honey?”  Not once, but every week!

Whenever I smell beer, I think of my Dad, sitting in “Dad’s chair,” drinking four bottles of beer, every night.  I never have liked beer; I suppose that’s why.  For all that is given, when alcohol is present, much is taken away.

In our house, Dad was the most extroverted of us all.  In the days before his death, the minister visited.  I don’t remember his question to my father, but I do remember Dad saying:  “the girls are quiet, like their mother.”  This strong, sensitive, extroverted man who spoke in a rural Wisconsin dialect was surrounded by introverts!

When I was a teenager, I invented the nickname that would be his for the rest of his life.  I invented the name that we all called him, the one that stuck:  FRB.  His initials.  We still refer to him as FRB, in my house.  I still make up nicknames for my loved ones, too.  Always have, always will.

One day many years ago, I had lunch with a male colleague.  Sometime during our conversation, he remarked:  “you’re comfortable around men.”  I don’t know that I had ever thought of it, but I expect it comes from having a strong, gentle hearted man love me from the time I was born.  Even more, a strong, gentle hearted man liked me.

In my first apartment, the inside of a hall clothes closet was my place to post inspirational quotes.  I cannot remember the source, but one was a quote:  “The best thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother.”  For all my father lacked – education, refinement, a profession, assertion – he loved my mother.  He said so, often and out loud.  He told us he loved us, too, with great glee and feeling.  My folks did not go out on dates.  From time to time, they would be invited to the wedding of a friend, one of his co-worker’s kids, probably.  Then, my father, always proud of his good looks, got dressed in his one working-class dress suit, and waited for my mother.  When she came into the living room from the bedroom off the dining room, my father would purse his lips:  “woo-hoo!” he would say, his eyes alight.  Then, my mother’s face shone.

Us: Ronn, Suzie, Mom, me, and Dad.