Tag: memories

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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.

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“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

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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.  

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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

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Woman’s work

Mary Elyn Bahlert

My mother was a product of the 30’s – when she came of age.  When she and my father married – her second marriage, my father’s first – she quit her office job at Cutler Hammer to stay at home to work as a housewife. She had been well regarded at her work, crafting a life for herself as she navigated being a single mother to my brother, Ronnie.  

From the beginning, my life had taken a different shape than my mother’s, whose parents kept a sort of “rooming house” for men who arrived in Milwaukee alone, without families, from Ukraine.  Her first language had been Ukrainian, and she made her way through the 9th grade before quitting school to go to work.  Like many of the children of immigrants, she taught her father to read and write English.  She would have been a great teacher, I’m sure.  But that path was not open to her.

My parents – who both valued education, although that path had not been theirs – supported me as I lived at home and commuted to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to get a degree in English.  I graduated in the winter of 1973 and worked for several weeks in the offices at A. O. Smith, the steel mill where my father worked as an inspector on frames.  Then I interviewed with several other young people – also new college graduates – for an entry level position as a Claims Representative for the Social Security Administration.  In 1973, SSA was bracing itself for the coming of the Supplemental Security Income, which offered benefits – not livable benefits, but benefits, just the same – to the disabled and elderly.  And so I was hired, along with other college graduates from all over the country, and left home to train as a CR at the Social Security Administration in Minneapolis.   At the end of training, we all waited anxiously for news of our assignment, and I was relieved when I was sent to Green Bay, Wisconsin – a city, at least – to begin my career with the government.  

When I arrived in the office in Green Bay, I took my place at one of the desks in the long row of desks, separated by a center aisle, in the offices of SSA, on the second floor of a government building in downtown Green Bay.   I was the first woman to work as a Claims Representative in that office, although a woman who had been promoted from her current position – Joanne – was away at training to hold the same position.  Five days a week, we interviewed, completed applications, followed up to back up the applications with photocopies of the necessary documents for each applicant, and adjudicated the claims that came with the people we’d interviewed.  The SSA and SSI laws were constantly changing, and week after week, we received pages and pages of material that needed to be read and filed in the proper place in the copy of the SSA Law that each one of us had at our work stations. 

It would take three years for me to achieve journeyman status as a Claims Representative.  I’m grateful for the additional training I received in public relations and management through the government, traveling from time to time to Chicago to take a class (I’ve written about my trips to the Big City in another post), offering training to the other CR’s, receiving training.  A year or two into my work at the office in Green Bay, the new building in downtown that would house only the Social Security District Office was complete, and we moved – files, machines, desks, and all – to the new office.  I commuted each day three miles to my little one bedroom apartment in Ashwaubenon – home to the Green Bay Packer stadium, Lambeau Field.  

My apartment was simply furnished with a telephone on the wall.  I had a black and white television and a turntable and speakers for my LP’s.  Mostly, I watched PBS shows, one or two nights a week.  A small round table with four chairs filled the small space between the kitchen and the carpeted living area.  Sitting on the second hand couch I’d found – somewhere – I read a new magazine I’d heard about and subscribed to:  Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem, publisher.  I was hooked.  I read those monthly issues of Ms. from cover to cover, reading articles that opened my mind to a new way of looking at the world.   

Looking back now, I can say it this way:  my consciousness was raised.  I had a “feminist click,” a way of looking at my life and the lives of other women that shed light on the second class status that women had – have – in our society, and in the world.  

The work world continued in my day job.  Every few months, a paper would appear on my desk, passed from one person to the next, asking the women in the office to sign up for a week to clean the break room at end of the week.  Like the other women in the office, I signed my name dutifully, not thinking more about it.  Until.  Until what?  

One day when that sign-up sheet arrived on my desk, I picked it up, walked to the desk of the Administrative Assistant, outside the office of the District Manager, threw the sign-up sheet that already boasted some signatures onto her desk, and said:  “until the men have to sign up too, I’m not going to clean the break room.  I’m a CR, too.”  Usually easygoing and fun, I could see that the AA was stunned. I walked back to my desk.

I suppose something had to be done: the District Manager consulted, discussions needed to be held, opinions shared (I’m sure) – all behind closed doors.  

A few days later, we learned of a new policy regarding the clean-up of the break room:  the cleaning folks who came after hours to vacuum and get rid of the endless papers would be cleaning the break room from here on out. 

*

To me, it seemed like a half victory – still, I’d stuck my neck out to say “no more.”  To this day, I’m disappointed at the result, because I realize allowance had been made to make sure the men – who held the same position and grade as I did – did not have to clean the break room.  I’m sure they retired without ever having to do the job.

Years later, when I was pastor at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church in downtown Oakland, I told the story as an illustration in a sermon.  I wish I could at least remember the text!  What I do remember is that after I’d told the story, the gathered worshippers had a reaction:  they applauded!