Tag: memories

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what comes to mind

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I walked under the railroad tracks at Fond du Lac Avenue and Burleigh Street on the North Side of Milwaukee from those neighborhoods of frame flats, home to two families, up and down, and into another world. I didn’t know it then, but the world I was walking in to when I came out from under the viaduct at 35th Street – across from Master Lock Company – would become my world. My world is different from the world I left in those rented houses. My world is different in so many ways.

I was introduced to other students, students who actually lived on the other side of the tracks, when I walked under those tracks. I was a student at Peckham Junior High School, and so were they, those other students. Many of them would become my friends. At least one teacher made the mistake of thinking I was one of those students, but I was always painfully aware that I was from the other side of the tracks. I never forgot that. I noticed the clothes my classmates wore. I knew that many of them came from families where at least Dad – and sometimes Mom, too – were educated beyond high school. Some of my classmates were the children of professional people. Maybe I felt shame among those students; I saw the differences between them and me, with raw clarity.

Something else happened when I walked under the railroad tracks. I was tracked into the college bound students, the smart kids, based on the IQ tests all students had dutifully taken during grade school. And that changed my life.

Some people along the way would become important to me, to my life. I would never forget their names, how they looked, things they said. For three years I sat behind Larry Atlas, who made me laugh, in English classes taught by Miss Ross. How old was she? As a student of middle school age, she certainly looked very old to me. She always wore black old-lady shoes, and she always wore a navy polka-dotted dress that hung long, between her knees and ankles. I’m pretty sure she went to the hairdresser once a week to get her hair done, cut and permed. I knew this: she was not cut from the same mold as the women I’d known up to then.

I’m grateful to have been educated by the teachers I was privileged to have in the Milwaukee Public Schools in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Not one of them knew it, but they changed my life, changed the trajectory of my life.

In Miss Ross’s class, we studied the American poets. Every week, we learned about a poet, read their poems, memorized a poem, and put our learning into a book of our own, poems carefully rendered in my own hand. I filled a pocket folder with sheets of paper that included carefully printed poems and pictures I’d cut from the magazines my mother received in the mail. Sometimes, I was called upon to stand in front of the class on Friday and recite the poem we’d been assigned to memorize that week. My own love of poetry was fertilized and grew in Junior High English Class taught by Miss Ross. I can still recite most of the poems I learned over those three years. I love to recite the poems I had memorized, so many years – so many decades – ago.

I learned to love poems then. I began to write my own poems then, too. Sometimes I still find a poem in my childlike handwriting, a few words of my own fashioned into my own poem. And sometimes – often – the words of a poem I memorized under the strong and wonderful guidance of Miss Ross comes to mind.

Reciting a poem from memory is a great joy – to me. Later, after Junior High, after High School, somewhere along the way of my now long life, I memorized “Twas’ the Night Before Christmas.” Every year, I make sure to break into a recital of the entire text for someone else’s enjoyment – and for my own enjoyment.

*

Jeff was the one who encouraged me, this past year, to have a collection of my own poems published. Without his kind encouragement, I expect I’d never have sent my poems out to be published. It’s an accomplishment of my life. Its genesis, I think, began on that walk under the viaduct at Fond du Lac Avenue and Burleigh Street, on the North Side of Milwaukee.

***

Moments, Mary Elyn Bahlert, Balboa Press, 2026. Available on Amazon.

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memories, remembering, Uncategorized

“That’s the fun of it!”

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Mom liked to have fun. So did Daddy. In my Middle School years and beyond, while I was still at home, Mom would quickly clean the kitchen table after supper – we always had supper, except on holidays, when supper became dinner – and they’d get out the cards to play canasta all evening long, loudly calling to one another over the table.

And it wasn’t until many years later that I learned the other things that Mom thought were fun. Volunteering at the hospital, where she made good friends among the other volunteers. Spending a whole day with me whenever I returned from moving West to Northern California. We’d spend the day driving around Milwaukee, looking again at the old neighborhoods on the North Side where we’d both grown up. Then we’d end up at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where Mom stood silently in front of her favorite painting -“Le Pere Jacques (the Wood Gatherer)”, looking closely, as if she was seeing it for the first time. We always had at least one meal out at a restaurant of our choosing. We had our favorites.

And Mom especially liked to bake. Every winter, in Christmas season, she’d bake the cookies we liked best – meringue dots filled with chocolate, Kris Kringles, sugar cookies in all shapes, carefully decorated and sprinkled with chocolate chips or plain cookies sprinkled generously with nonpareils. She loved to try new cookie recipes, too. She had her assortment of recipes – a collection of cookbooks across many years, holiday gifts from the Gas Company and Electric Company – and marked, with comments – i.e. “a favorite, try this one!” The comments were meant for me, for the time I’d be baking my own cookies at Christmas. An event that has never happened: ask my husband.

I’d add my own comments now: “I’m not a baker, but I’definitely try this if I was a baker!”

And Mom had her own way of talking about those days of playing Canasta, about the days of baking cookies to be enjoyed by the whole family: “That’s the fun of it.”

I’m a different temperament from my mother. Gratefully, my own path has taken me through University and Seminary, following the leading of my temperament. And so, my comment holds: “I’m not a baker.” Every year, though, I bake three kinds of pies – sour cherry, pumpkin, and apple – to contribute to the holiday feast at Norman Bahlert’s and Cheryl Rouse’s long table on Thanksgiving Day. Mom would be proud of me, I’m sure.

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My poor photo of a print of “Le Pere Jacques.” This print hung above the desk in my mother’s small room at Mathilda Brown Home in Oakland, 1998-2001.

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Moving – again

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I’ll always count the North Side of Milwaukee as my home. When folks ask where I’m from, I tell them: “Milwaukee.” And that was my home until I left Milwaukee to start my first job after college, when I trained in Minneapolis and was sent to Green Bay, Wisconsin as my first assignment in the Social Security Administration.

Now, when I return to Milwaukee for a visit to family or old friends, I skirt that part of the city, although I long to return again. I’d like drive down the streets I walked every morning on my way to school. But Milwaukee is a city that has suffered from its own racism, and after being deliberately bumped from behind in a rented car at a corner on the North Side, I don’t want to return again. I remember the days of Father Groppi marching from my neighborhood to the South Side of Milwaukee, across a viaduct, during civil rights days. Milwaukee was and is very racially segregated. The people have a right to be angry, but I no longer have a need to prove that I can do certain things.

Over the course of my childhood, my parents rented flats on the North Side. As an infant, I was taken home from Mercy Hospital to 9 and Juneau Avenue on the near north side, and over the years, we lived on many other streets – Ring Street, where I started school at La Follette Grade School, 2 short blocks away, 28 and Center, Medford Avenue at 26 street, which ran parallel to Fond du Lac Avenue, a major artery, and then a flat on 49 Street South of Burleigh, across the street from St. Joe’s Hospital School of Nursing. From there, I walked to Washington High School. And that’s where we lived when I graduated from High School and began university at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, on the East Side.

A city kid, I was familiar with buses and took them everywhere, until I got my driver’s license at 17. Then, I shared the Bel Air coupe with my parents – after Mom had driven Dad to work at A.O. Smith on Capital Drive – when I needed it to get to classes at UW-M.

When I was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the streets were still lined with majestic maple and elm trees until Dutch Elm disease cleared out the elms. And except for the months of winter, the trees met magically overhead across streets. For all its simplicity and even modesty, the streets were beautiful then. In the winter time, children – myself included – walked all the way to school along the top of snowbanks formed when city trucks shoveled the snow onto the narrow strip of concrete that marked the edge of the sidewalk. We’d climb the snowbank at the end of a block and walk clear along the top to the other end, which marked an alley or street.

But we moved a lot. I think it’s tough on a kid to move to another home, another school. And I think it was especially tough because my mother, who shouldered most of the responsibility for finding a place and for setting the move into motion, was anxious, always, about our safety. We always moved to a beautiful upper flat in a building that we called a “flat.” Another family lived below us; below the first floor was a full basement and above the upper flat was a full attic. Our flat was always beautiful because Mom preferred that the wooden frames around windows and doors not be painted over. And those flats – built some time after 1900 – had small rooms with a tiny inner hall with cupboards and where the doors to two bedrooms and the bathroom gathered together. We’d move when Mom had some beef with the landlord, the landlord, the person Daddy called, “Boss,” with a smile.

I shared a room with my little sister, Suzie, and until my brother Ronnie moved away to be married, and we always had a place with three bedrooms. Those old flats had a pantry with a window, cupboards on two sides. At Medford Avenue, the place had a lovely butler pantry.

We’d move when Mom was angry at the landlord for some reason, or we’d move when Mom wanted us to study at a different public school. In memory, it is always Mom who made the decision. I expect that’s accurate. Dad was a hard working, strong, union man, but he left the decisions to my mother. And if anyone could carry out what was needed, it was Mom. When Suzie was still in the stroller, I have a memory of walking in the neighborhood when Mom spotted a “for rent” sign on a house, and when she left me at the curb with my baby sister in her stroller. Mom marched angrily down the steps after the woman who answered the door spotted us waiting on the sidewalk and told Mom they didn’t rent to families with children.

I expect I felt a kind of shame at the simplicity, the poverty of those places. Once, walking to school with my friend Nancy, who lived down the street from me with her grandparents, on Medford Avenue, asked me why my parents rented their house. She had a way of saying things that are better left unsaid, I think. I don’t remember my answer, but I remember how I felt. I didn’t know the answer to her question. Now, I think that my parents had both grown up poor, although both were hard workers, and Dad was grateful to have landed a union job in the steel mill after the War. It would have been too big a stretch for them to own their own place. That was that.

In the summers, my family sat together on the front porch of our upper flat – wherever it was – after supper. Sometimes, Daddy would make popcorn, and we’d pass around the big round dish, taking big handfuls of the treat. As the sky grew dark, fireflies would pop into the night, and once or twice, a bat flew from the eves of the windows over the attic, into the night, and back again.

*
Was it hard on me, to move again and again as a child? I have never considered that. It was hard on me, I think, to see – to feel – the anxiety that filled the air that I breathed as a child. Like most kids, I didn’t know what I lacked, although as a child, I noticed the differences in social class of my teachers and the other kids, once I got to Junior High.

My long life has passed since I lived in those humble, crowded flats. Jeff and I own a beautiful Craftsman House in Oakland, a house that is the same vintage as those flats.

That’s where I am from.

Sturgeon Moon over San Francisco,
August, 2026, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert

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“All great and precious things are lonely”. – John Steinbeck

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I see what is beauty to me:
A few warm days in spring,
the smell of lilacs in the house,
the wetness that comes at night,
red sunsets.
Loneliness.
“Beauty to me,” from Moments, Mary Elyn Bahlert, published, 2026

I am not often lonely. But I have known loneliness, hard and deep loneliness. In my twenties, I worked in my first professional position, finally moving into public relations in both the Social Security Administration and the Food and Drug Administration. I had good friends. I lived in Milwaukee, where I’d grown up; I knew Milwaukee well, and I liked the life I had there. But I was lonely.

I was lonely, and it hurt. Some times, I’d come home after a day at work to my one bedroom apartment, furnished with furniture from the 1940’s, books lining the full bookshelves. This was the 1970’s; this was in the time before the Internet. Sometimes, in my loneliness, I’d call a good friend – a friend I’d called more than once that week – and chat for a time, until something else called to her to attend to. Was she lonely, too? I never told her I was lonely, and I never heard her talk about loneliness. But I was lonely.

During those years, I began to learn about the ministry. I’d been drawn to ministry since my late teens, when the thought arrived on its own, one day: I could be a minister. I had not seen or heard of such a thing as a woman minister; in the Lutheran Church in which I’d been confirmed, women were not allowed to speak in church. That – among other things – did not sit well with me. I started to learn about the ministry by reading books I’d borrowed from the library. I read about denominations. Until my mid-twenties, I did not find a church in which to connect. I began my learning in my own particular, introverted way.

And then, I did do some searching. I’d attend a church service at some congregation. More than once, as the unknown person – and as an unmarried, un-partnered woman – I’d be ignored. That was enough for me to not return. In my searching, I was led to visit a United Methodist Church across from the University I’d attended, on the East Side of Milwaukee. There, a kind older woman – Verdell de Yarman – looked right at me, asked if this was my first time at Kenwood United Methodist Church, and, after church, walked with me to the coffee fellowship, where she introduced me to the Rev. Harvey Stower. And it was Harvey who warmly invited me in, the way he warmly invited everyone in, to a circle of young people. And it was Harvey who asked me one day if I ever thought about seminary. And I told Harvey that I did – often – but that I just didn’t talk about it. After all, I had never seen a woman minister (although they did exist!).

I was grateful for Harvey and the community that formed around him. That community became important to my life in the years that followed. I’m always grateful.

The loneliness remained, until the mysterious and wonderful day I met Jeff Kunkel, my husband. In our marriage, I have not been lonely. I’ve heard about people who are lonely in their marriage. How hard that must be. Jeff is my true companion, my life partner.

As I reflect now on those times, many years ago, I look back at the quote of John Steinbeck that serves as the title of this blog post. I expect that Steinbeck knew loneliness, that he knew loneliness well enough to have clearly described it. And although he did not write of loneliness as I have – as a painful companion, a companion that brings tears and a complete emptiness into the mix – I expect he knew that of loneliness, also.

When I was a pastor, I spoke of loneliness in one sermon. And I have not forgotten: after worship, as people greeted me and sometimes commented on what they had heard (which is not always what I thought I had said!), a young woman shyly said to me: “thank you for talking about loneliness.”

“All great and precious things are lonely…”

At Walden Pond, Massachusetts, where Henry David Thoreau lived in a small cabin, relishing his alone-ness. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 8/2026

memories, nostalgia

Those summer nights

Mary Elyn Bahlert

As a child, it seemed to me that summer was long. And as a child, the summer was not only long – but languid. That’s a word I’d use for the particular sense of summer in that humid climate. Humidity ruled summertime, until the day that gave way to a spectacular lightening storm. And then the air shook and the sky was grey and the sound of another clap of thunder after the brilliant lightening eased the languid air.

Summer evenings, my family would gather on the front porch after supper. We always had supper, except for major holidays – Christmas, Easter – supper, not dinner, which is what Jeff and I have together each late afternoon now. I’ve taken to using the word supper, sometimes, to describe the late afternoon meal we share. Each time I use the word “supper,” I notice. Over the course of our marriage, we’ve always sat together at the table at dinner-time. And we do now, too.

But we had supper at five in my family as I grew up. We always had a home-cooked meal, except for those very special Fridays when Daddy would go to George Webb to pick up hamburgers – 7 hamburgers for $ .99.
Yes, that’s it: 99 cents. Sometimes we had borscht – always a favorite for me – and other times we’d have holubtsi, stuffed cabbage, as it is known in other cultures. A good search tells me that holubtsi translates to “little pigeons.” I suppose it takes some doing, some mind-shaping, to imagine the cabbage rolls as little pigeons. I did not favor holubtsi. And so, even though I have the recipe in my mother’s own hand, with personal notes describing her preferences – I have never made holubsti.

After supper, after the dishes were washed and dried and put away, we’d gather as a family on the front porch of our upstairs flat. At one flat, I remember leaning over the porch railing on the side next to the alley to see my Grandma Markowski (Srebny) coming slowly up the alley. There were always several foldable lawn chairs on the porch, and a chaise lounge that I came to enjoy as I entered my teen years. In the 1950’s, when both my parents were still smokers, Daddy nailed an empty coffee can to the railing to use as an ashtray. But after a winter of bad colds, both he and Mom stopped smoking, and at a time when the bad effects of cigarette smoking were becoming common knowledge.

Some evenings during the summer, Mom would head back into the house to the kitchen, and we’d have drippy slices of watermelon as a treat. When Suzie and I were little, Mom gave us each a slice of bread to eat with the watermelon, to assure we would not wet our beds because we’d had watermelon slices in the evening. Mom had a few “old wives tales” that she believed, maybe even into her elder years. And those beliefs are beliefs that I have never held.

Summer evenings were still humid – even languid – in the Midwest, until a thunderstorm gathered overhead and boomed us into the house. I remember lying in bed, listening to a storm go overhead from the west to the east; we lived only a few miles from the shore of Lake Michigan, where I expect the storms were gathered up and disappeared – other weather patterns formed across states to the east.

When Daddy had his two weeks of vacation from the steel mill each summer, we’d head up to Door County for one week of the two, staying with an aunt and uncle and cousins, or renting a modest cabin for the week. Kellstrom’s in Sister Bay had a cottage to the west of the highway, on a small rise, halfway up the road. I always look up that road when I pass it along Wisconsin Highway 42. The cottage has been gone for many years now. Those modest cabins have been replaced by 4 star hotels along the whole length of the village of Sister Bay.

But there has not been anything to replace those languid summer evenings in the Midwest, for me. When I arrived to live in the Bay Area in 1981, I was surprised that the East Bay’s summers were grey with fog in summertime, fog that didn’t clear until late afternoon. Along with those hot summers, which brought their own kind of living along with the short season in Wisconsin, the humidity that plagues the Midwest often is not present here along San Francisco Bay. And we have a lot more sun now in the summertime which makes me much happier than the long grey days the sunny days have replaced.

What I miss most about summer days in the Midwest – other than my family, so many who have passed now – is the preciousness of the season. When we knew that we’d be facing a long, gray winter, each day of summer, we knew to cherish the time. We cherished the time because we understood that it was short, and that soon enough, the seasons would bring gray skies and cold winds off Lake Michigan for months.

Suzie and me, circa 1955-1956, Milwaukee.