Tag: memories

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“tis the season…”

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. Jeff and I will gather with my cousin Norman’s family around a long, long table in a very small house on Potrero Hill for a Thanksgiving feast. Every year, we each make time to visit again with extended family to hear a few words about the past year, to hear what family life is like at this age, to mention how good everything that everyone has brought is, to hear laughter and conversations that don’t always make it all the way through – there are too many of us to catch up with! I bring the pies – pumpkin, apple, and two cherry pies made with cherries imported from Door County, Wisconsin, where my father and Norman’s father grew up.

Before we start to eat, Norman will undoubtedly turn to either me or Jeff – the resident clergy – to say a blessing. The room will be quiet for a few moments, and after the Amen! the chatter will rise up again.

Since tomorrow is The Day, I’ll be at work in the kitchen after dinner today, baking the pies. Cheryl, Norman’s wife, has spent most of her week getting ready, cooking whatever she can that can be prepared early. She’ll have empty glasses and full bottles of wine on the kitchen counter, along with snack foods for us, in case we arrive to the fest hungry. Norman will roam around the tiny house with his camera in hand, snapping pictures of his grandchildren. And when we sit down to eat, a portrait of the Bahlert family of Sister Bay will look down on us as we eat, maybe offering an unspoken blessing to the gathered voices.

It seems to me that getting ready for Thanksgiving Day holds as many joys as the day itself. After all those hours of preparation, soon one family after another will be at the door, donning coats, carrying goodies of leftovers from the feast, saying goodbye.

*

Holiday time in the Bay Area has a different feel to me than holiday time in the cold and grey Midwest, where Jeff and I both grew up. Holiday time in the Midwest followed days of already cold weather and winds off Lake Michigan, days when winter coats and gloves were already out for the long season ahead. And holiday time as a child, when there was a sense of magic in the air, ended a long, long time ago. But these days are a good time to remember those who are no longer here, but who have never left us, in a way. I’m sure they are with us: in our voices, in our laughter, in our smiles and in the curls in our hair.

And these days are a good time to be grateful, for all that life that has passed, all the beloved ones who are gone, and for the long table of young voices that gather to help us celebrate the holiday, again.

And autumn does come to the Bay Area… photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 10/2025

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Meeting Volodymyr

Mary Elyn Bahlert

In the mid-2000’s I had my dna researched by several services to see if/how they overlapped. It was no surprise to me to learn that my dna was mostly connected to Eastern Europe, with a fair amount in Western Europe. And through dna research, the websites offered the names of others who share some of the same dna. There are ways to walk back through the generations to discover the exact connections, although I have not ever done that.

Many of the folks who have their dna work completed do so and then disappear, their curiousity apparently satisfied. I had thought to possibly connect with others who were interested in meeting others. But for the most part, that thought was not satisfied. One day, however, a message appeared for me – from a distant, distant – distant relative, a cousin. He was from the same place in Ukraine that my grandparents were from (I’ve written about them, both illiterate, in other posts).

And so, through the magic of the Internet, I met Volodymyr. For several years, we stayed connected with numerous messages on Facebook. If I’d text him, he’d respond. In these days of internet connections, I consider that a miracle! We learned about one another’s politics – and agreed to simply disagree with no more conversation!

In August, Jeff and I made a trip we look forward to each year. In the months leading up to our few days away with Rainier, Lia, and Celeste, who live in Seattle, we talk about places we’d like to see. This year, we traveled from our home in Oakland to Seattle by plane, and then we drove two cars from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C. Vancouver, where my cousin Volodymyr lives with his wife, Olesia, who had lately returned from a visit to Ukraine. In some (covoluted) way, Rainier is also related to Volodymyr.

Jeff and I, Rainier and Lia were all happy to meet our cousin and his wife, Olesia. When the seven of us met in at their high rise condo in downtown Vancouver, my cousin and I stood a few feet from one another, uncertain. He looked pleased to finally meet me. I felt happy, too. We stepped forward and gave one another a wam, welcoming hug! For this moment, I am grateful.

Volodymyr, Olesia, Rainier and Lia and Celeste, and Jeff and I spent several hours together, walking through downtown Vancouver, ending up on the shore of the West End of the city. Sometimes I walked alongside my cousin, and sometimes his wife. We chatted about our lives, about their trips to Ukraine. We shared photos from our phones. My cousin and his partner were generous with their time spent with us. We were happy to meet them and so happy to have those several hours together.

Volodymyr tells me that our common relatives were from (anglicized, of course): Buzifka, or probably Sabadash. He had on his phone a photo of a babushka, like my grandmother, a relative distant to me.

And so, I made a connection to that distant place. I had hoped to travel there again – I’d been in Ukraine in 1988, in the last years of the USSR – but the continuing war and the struggle there now prevent me from traveling, although Olesia had just returned from Ukraine. I am grateful for their generosity, and for their interest. Before we parted, we took a picture of us all along the water. I cherish this memory.

With family in Vancouver, August 24, 2025

community, memories, remembering

Meeting the Bishop

Mary Elyn Bahlert

The year was 1981. That was the year I declared my intention to be ordained as a minister in the United Methodist Church at my local congregation, Kenwood United Methodist Church in Milwaukee. I had plans to attend the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. Marjorie Matthews, the first woman to be consecrated a Bishop in the Church – the whole Church, across the world, across history – was Bishop of the United Methodist Church, Wisconsin Annual Conference.

At the time, I was still working as a Public Affairs Officer for the Food and Drug Administration, a position I’d taken the year before, after an early career with the Social Security Administration. Through my Sunday attendance and activity at Kenwood UMC I had learned about a trip to England, the “birthplace of Methodism,” where John Wesley, known as the founder of Methodism, had been born, in autumn. I signed up for the trip. I hadn’t been part of the United Methodist Church for very long, and I knew little of the history of the denomination (having been confirmed in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, I knew a lot about Luther and I had even memorized Luther’s Small Catechism) and I thought the timing of the trip was perfect for me as I prepared to leave my career to go to seminary. I signed up for the trip to visit Wesley’s England after securing a passport. I’d never traveled outside of the United States before.

And so the thought of the trip was exciting and well-timed for me. I would be traveling alone, and I hoped to meet a few folks who were also part of the tour. I had learned that Majorie Matthews, the Bishop, would be traveling on the first leg of the trip to London. Knowing this, I’d teased several friends that I’d be traveling with the Bishop, as if she and I were friends.

Apparently, Bishop Matthews was on my flight from Chicago to London Heathrow. When the flight landed, I made my way to the bus that waited for the group to take us to our hotel. As I stepped into the bus, I saw Bishop Matthews standing at her seat. I nodded to her, and she reached out to touch my arm. “Sit with me,” she said. She explained that she’d be in London overnight, as I would, and she asked if I would be interested in being her roommate for the night, to spend some time seeing London. After that night, her obligations would begin, and she would no longer be traveling with my group.

Bishop Matthews loved beautiful clothes. In our free hours that first day, we shopped together in London. I purchased a beautiful black skirt and matching blouse with a floral print that was more elegant than anything else I owned. Bishop Matthews served as my encourager. I was learning by being with her that as an ordained woman, who I was now would be part of who I would become. I could still enjoy the beautiful clothes I loved. I owned that outfit for many years.

And – I had a story to tell my friends when I returned home. Yes – I had traveled with Bishop Marjorie Matthews, the first woman Bishop – ever in history – in the world. I had an outfit to prove it!

*

The following Spring, when I was in Berkeley as a student at PSR, I received a note from Bishop Matthews that she’d be attending a meeting of the Council of Bishops in the Bay Area. She invited me to come to see her. When I did, she introduced me to the Bishop of the Northern California-Nevada Annual Conference, a kind and politic action. I was beginning to learn about the importance of community and how we can be generous to one another.

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Gingko Trees

Mary Elyn Bahlert

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

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On Martinez Slough

Mary Elyn Bahlert

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.

*

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