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
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
When I left Milwaukee to go to seminary at the end of 1981, I took 2 suitcases of clothes and a portable Royal Typewriter.
I had used that typewriter in high school after I learned to type. All the girls took a mandatory course in which we were taught how to use a typewriter in the 1960’s (that along with being required to wear a skirt). Being able to type with some proficiency – and accuracy, which I can prove now, as I write these words – was expected. And so, using index cards with carefully written notes, along with sources, properly described, I wrote my first term papers on that Royal typewriter. I was good at the writing, which came easily to me.
And I used that typewriter in college. I majored in English literature, and my typing skills came in handy. I was quiet in classes, but I made up for being quiet by being able to write sentences and paragraphs. And I made up for being quiet by being interested in literature: my interest showed in the papers I wrote.
It was Mom’s typewriter. Most of the time, the typewriter sat, covered and locked, on the desk Mom used when she wrote checks or did other business – until I took it over. If I needed to use the typewriter, it was mine. Most of the time, the typewriter took up what was left of the space on the desk – the desk which now sits in the small office my nephew Rainier has for himself at his home in Seattle. When his little girl, Celeste, was an infant, the desk served as a changing table in her bedroom. I’ve told Rainier that his Grandma would be happy to know that her desk was still in use – and by her grandson, of whom she would be proud.
When I left to go to seminary, the typewriter became mine. It sat on the desk in my dorm room, and later in my studio apartment, a third floor walk up in North Berkeley, where my kitchen window overlooked the patio of the Franciscan Seminary next door. On Friday nights, the smell of alcohol drifted up to my window, along with the sounds of laughter and muffled conversation of the aspiring monks below. When I used the typewriter in my studio, I moved it to sit at the table in the kitchen.
When I left seminary and started to serve as a pastor in downtown San Jose, the typewriter moved with me and my husband to Pleasanton. There was a typewriter – an electric typewriter! – in my office in downtown San Jose, and I used that when I was in the office. But shortly after our move to Pleasanton – this being the 1980’s – we purchased our first computer – a little box that had a separate keyboard, and a printer that used a roll of paper to churn out our writings.
And that first computer signaled the end of a long and worthy life for the little Royal typewriter that had served me so well.
Now, that little Royal portable typewriter sits on a shelf in the garage. I rarely take it out, and if I did, it would be to take a look at it again. Instead, it gathers dust. I expect that little Royal portable typewriter to outlive me. It’s a relic from another time, for sure.
Mom and I stood together in the checkout line of the local supermarket where she shopped in her neighborhood in Milwaukee. I was home on a visit from the Bay Area of California. We always loved those days together, two “Milwaukee girls” who explored the city, finding new and revisiting old sites.
She didn’t say it to me; she said it to herself. In the line ahead of us, an elderly Asian woman and a little boy, who appeared to be her grandson, stood in front of the checker. We heard the checker ask for some amount of change, and the elderly woman, her hand full of coins, turned to the little boy, extending her hand toward him. He peered into her the palm of her hand and chose a coin or two. She handed the coins to the checker.
“And now he feels ashamed,” I heard Mom say to herself. She had seen the moment, just as I had, and I knew then that it had brought forth a memory of some distant moment in her life. She would have been standing at the checkout with her mother, Feodosia, who had never learned to read, and she would have been the child she saw now, looking into her mother’s hand and choosing the right coin. And she had felt ashamed.
I understood then that my mother had a heart for those who are the “other” in our country. I had always known it, having grown up in a house where we did not speak slurs about those who were/are “other.” I grew up learning to respect those who had gone before and to respect those who were different than us, those whose lives had been difficult in ways I could not imagine, those who had left their land and their people so that I could be standing in that aisle that day, a witness.
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.
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“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)
