Tag: memories

Uncategorized

for the love of poetry

Mary Elyn Bahlert

From time to time, I reach into my mind and bring out the lines – sometimes many lines – of poems that I memorized during my Junior High years at Peckham Junior School in Milwaukee. I’ve written that I lived – literally – on the other side of the tracks, and I walked the mile or so every day with other kids from my neighborhood.

As I walked that mile, I left one world and entered another – I entered the world that would enlarge my world view even more than the excellent teachers who had been mine in Elementary School. School teachers in that time – the early 1960’s – all seemed to wear, every single day, a navy blue dress with white polka dots, the hem long, almost to the tops of their black, low heeled shoes. At least that’s how Miss Ross dressed.

For three years, Miss Ross was my English teacher. And the great gift she gave me remains with me to this day. Every week, we were assigned a poem to memorize. The poets were American poets, of the old school, poets who wrote in rhyme – iambic pentameter, I learned – educated people of the last century or the early years of my century.

Every Friday, Miss Ross called one of us to the front of the room to recite the poem we’d been assigned to memorize. One by one over the course of a semester, a student, shy and afraid, calm and sure, bumbling or not, walked to the front of the class and spoke the words of a beautiful poem aloud.

Quiet and a bit shy, I did not tremble or even fear that I might be called. I had an inner assurance that stayed with me as I walked to the front of the class, stood in front of the row of seats close to the window, and recited aloud the poem I’d learned by heart.

Now, I hold onto the gift that Miss Ross gave us all. I can be with a small group of friends and begin to recite aloud the rhyming lines of a poet from another time. As I recite aloud, my friends are silent, listening. We all know something beautiful is being offered to us all in that moment – to me, enjoying again the rhythm, the carefully chosen words, the image that comes to mind as those words are repeated aloud, to my listener, who knows they are receiving something grand, something well-crafted.

During the holiday times, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, I make sure to recite for some small audience “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” a poem I memorized after I’d moved on from Miss Ross and into High School. The joy she’d brought me by making an assignment I was sure to complete is mine, to this day. And the joy belongs to others, to those who listen.

One Christmas Eve, as we ended the candlelight service of carols and the reading of scriptures that told the ancient story, once again, of the Holy coming into the world, I closed the service to the rhythmic stanzas of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (Robert Frost). The gathered worshippers listened as we held our candles high above our heads, silent, listening. We have no snow here in the Bay Area, but the words, the sentiment, were silent and deep, too, as the poet writes:

“the woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep…”

“I will be the gladdest thing under the sun. I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Afternoon on a Hill,” photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 4/24

Uncategorized

Crabbing

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Sometimes when I think about my life, I think I came from what we called “The Old Country.” The Old Country was how my mother referred to people who – like her parents from Ukraine – had immigrated to the United States. Many of the customs and much of the way we lived then, in the 1950’s and 1960’s – were ways that had strong connections to the Old Country.

Summers in the Midwest can be brutally hot and humid. By the late afternoon, we tried to find respite from the heat by running an electric fan near the screen door that led to the front porch of the upper flat on Milwaukee’s North Side. Even the whirring fan did not change the oppressive heat in the flat. Several days during the summer, after Daddy came home from his job in the steel mill, Mom and Daddy and Suzie and I set off for a secluded, leafy spot on the Milwaukee River. Daddy had changed into bermuda shorts – he’d been liberated from wearing long pants all summer some time in the 1950’s – and the car was quiet except for his talking, all the way across town to our spot.

We carried wooden poles and Daddy carried a silver bucket with water sloshing against the insides, and a package of raw liver – bait for the cray fish we were about to catch.

I never did like to touch the sharp edge of the hook at the end of the fishing line, so Daddy baited the hook with a bit of slimy liver, and I dropped my line into the river, and waited. Soon enough, the line would be pulled down a bit into the brown water and I’d pull up my end of the pole, a crayfish holding tight to the liver on the hook. I’d swing my pole toward the shore – hoping to not hit Suzie or Mom – and drop the writhing crayfish as close to Daddy as I could. He’d pick the crayfish up by sliding his fingers along the fishing line, pull, and drop the catch into the silver bucket.

Then, he’d bait the hook for me again, and I was back at it.

We still made it home to the flat in time for an early supper, after Daddy had carried the silver bucket, now heavy with crayfish, into the basement. One time, a crayfish found its way out of the bucket – how did that happen? – and he had to chase it around the cool floor of the basement until he picked it up again and dropped it into the bucket with its companions.

The next day, Mom boiled a big pot of water on the stove, and one by one, the cray fish were dropped into the steaming water where they stopped their frantic moving and turned bright red. Mom served the crayfish to Daddy while she made supper for the rest of us.

I never did get to taste a crayfish. I didn’t want to. But I can still find the place where the leafy path led to the river, down a few steps from the sidewalk, where the lush trees muffled the sounds of passing traffic.

Now my summer adventures are to the desert in California. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 04/2024, at Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California – where two deserts meet.

Uncategorized

“How can I hope to make you understand…?”

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I sat in the comfortable chair next to my mother’s bed as she lay in a coma, dying, in the room she so loved at the Mathilda Brown Women’s Residence in Oakland. I was sad. I was not thinking about anything in particular. A friend – a woman who had been an intern with me in the congregation in Oakland – had left the room a few minutes earlier, and so I sat in the silence with Mom.

The end of the day had already come; the hall outside Mom’s room was quiet, except for the soft sounds of one of the nurses or care aides as they passed, or a few mumbled words from somewhere else in the building. I would go home soon, to sleep in my own bed; Jeff and I had decided that he would spend the night in the chair next to Mom’s bed, so that I could get a good night’s rest at home.

I looked across Mom at the window of her room that looked out over the playing field at Oakland Tech. Mom’s breathing was even, quiet.

As I sat there, the words to a song from so many I knew from so many years past seemed to drop from nowhere into my head. When I tell the story, I always say: “the words dropped into my head, whole.” I repeated the words, singing to myself:

“How can I hope to make you understand, why I do, what I do? Why I must travel to a distant land, far from the home I love? Who could see that a man would come, who would change the shape of my dreams? Helpless now, I run to him, watching other dreams grow dim… Oh what a melancholy choice this is – wanting home, wanting him – Closing my heart to every hope but his, Leaving the home I love…” —Bock, Harnick – writers

In the morning, several minutes after I arrived in her room and said: “I’m here now,” she passed.

All that’s left… Mom’s pysanki. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2024

Uncategorized

Grandma and Me

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I leaned over the railing of the front porch of the Upper Flat on Ring Street, and I craned my head to look down the alley to the left.  A long way down the alley – almost to Burleigh Street – I saw the little figure, long dark coat almost touching the ground – of Grandma.  She walked slowly – my Grandma was old – and she looked down at the pavement.  Careful.  Old.  As she got closer, I saw her head was wrapped in a thick black scarf decorated with the bright colors of flowers.  The scarf covered her hair, except for the hairline in the front, and she had tied it in a knot at the back of her neck.  She didn’t look up, not even once. 

When Grandma came up the narrow stairs and into the flat, I watched her from the other side of the living room.  She looked at me once, twice, and a little smile came to her face.  And then she talked, but only to Mom.  They spoke their own language when she came over, and I didn’t understand.  So I played on the floor across from the couch and listened.  I listened and listened.  What did they say?  I listened and listened.  

Years later, after she died, Grandma would come to me, as if in a dream.  And she stayed with me for a long time.  “Why did she come to me?”  I asked a friend.  “Who else would she go to?” she answered, wisely.

My favorite picture of Grandma – Feodosia Machsuda Srebny – shows her with a little smile on her face, sitting with me and Ronnie at the table.  Ronnie wanted to be cool, a teenager.  I love the picture because she is smiling, and her eyes are smiling.  I don’t think of her as smiling, a little foreign woman – foreign even to me – poor, sad.  When she was older she didn’t say any words in English.  She forgot.  Only Mom could talk to her then.  

At Easter, we decorated eggs – some in the old fashioned way, pysanke – and some just dipped into colors:  blue, pink, yellow.  We blew raw eggs out through holes on the ends and Mom took hours to craft hers. Ronnie was good at it, I think.  And Mom.  But Grandma didn’t make the eggs.  She sat on the couch in her long black dress, her dark hair held back in a loose bun, streaked with gray, her fingers bent as she tried to crack eggs with Suzie.  

Daddy and I would go to get her at the nursing home and bring her home for Easter dinner.  And soon after dinner, she’d look at my mother again and again, asking to go home.  Mom did the same thing when she got old.  

Uncategorized

walking alone

Mary Elyn Bahlert

My father was diagnosed with colon cancer within the year after he retired from 40 years of work in the steel mill at A.O. Smith Corporation in Milwaukee, retiring as an inspector. He and my mother had looked forward to retirement, and now, something intervened to make that retirement less assured than they had expected.

My father was not a man to speak up to someone, to offer his own opinion, if that opinion was different. While he was very extraverted – very extraverted – he kept his feelings to himself, and within his family. Being diagnosed with cancer changed that in some ways.

For one thing, he questioned his doctor more, eventually giving up on his physician when he failed to see the signs that the cancer had returned, in later years. But his voice came to life in another way, and what he said has stayed with me.

He told me that as he was being wheeled into the surgery to have the cancer removed, and to be fitted with a colostomy – which he had to the end of his life, ten years later – the nurse who walked beside him, being kind, said to him: “we’ll be in there with you,” as a word of assurance. “No,” he told her: “I’ll be in there alone.”

How true of what he was facing, what he faced.

I was reminded of that as we sang the words to an old song today in worship:

“Jesus walked this lonesome valley;
He had to walk it by himself.
Oh, nobody else could walk it for him;
He had to walk it by himself.

We must walk this lonesome valley;
We have to walk it by ourselves.
Oh, nobody else can walk it for us;
We have to walk it by ourselves.” – words and music, Eileen M. Johnson, public domain

Finally, we each walk our path alone. Community is a great gift on the journey along that path, but the final leg of the journey, the final act, is ours alone.

photo, Murnau, Germany, 8/3/20323 photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert