Tag: reflections

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Charm School

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Suzie didn’t go to Charm School. I asked her. She said that she could have used Charm School, but I guess Mom only decided to send me. I can guess the reasons for this, but I don’t know for sure.

Once a week, the year I was 13, Mom enrolled me in Charm School, which was held on Saturday mornings on the top floor of the Boston Store in downtown Milwaukee. I rode the 23 bus line to Wisconsin Avenue, where I got off at the stop in front of the Boston Store and took the elevator to the top floor. There, I learned how to be charming.

I learned a lot of things that were important to know in Charm School. For example, I learned how to greet someone, to extend my hand, to look them in the eye as I greeted them. I learned how to hold my legs when I stood, so that I looked proper – lady-like. I learned how to wear white gloves. I learned how to speak properly in public, how to introduce myself, how to be presentable when in public. Maybe Mom wanted me to go so that I would be presentable in public; I’m not sure.

As it was, the charms I learned in Charm School would be called into question within a few years, with the country in turmoil over the Vietnam War, the protests that accompanied that turmoil, and the demonstrations on University campuses all over the country. I wore skirts and garter belts with proper stockings all the way through High School, but the world was about to change.

The world did change, the year I graduated from high school – 1967. We’d seen the assassination of a President and of his brother, and we’d watched, again and again, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. We were witnesses to the world changing; the world we lived in changed – quickly and with no turning back – and so we changed, too.

Soon, I’d be wearing blue jeans all the time – even to school – tank tops in the summer time, and I’d give up teasing to get my hair to stay up high in the air. I’d give up rollers at night, too. While I learned about how to wear the proper amount of makeup in Charm School, I gave up makeup, too, in college.

And I read Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong, signaling to my mother – who couldn’t read past the first few pages, though she didn’t say a word to me about reading it – that I was part of a new generation.

Charm School had opened doors for me, even doors that led to places I couldn’t have imagined. And some of those doors that opened for me led me to places my mother could not have imagined, although she had dreamed a different future for me. A future different from hers.

Charm School had its limitations in my life during changing times. However, I do know how to stand correctly, how to introduce myself (who goes first, etc.), and how to show interest in what someone else is saying. Maybe that’s what’s left over in me from Charm School.

Me and Suzie, in my pre-Charm School days, circa 1954.

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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

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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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It’s Easter

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Very early this Easter morning, a couple of hours before sunrise, Jeff and I were both awake to hear the screeching sounds of a “sideshow” somewhere close to our street in Oakland. Young people connect with one another via text to set a time and place to come together at an intersection in the city, where bystanders watch as the fast moving cars in the intersection screech around and around the circle formed by the intersection itself. One disturbing memory I have of having served as a pastor in Oakland is of the day I received a distraught phone call from the mother of a teenage girl who had been killed the night before while she watched a sideshow from the side of the street, a bystander, an observer. The sanctuary was full the day we held the teenager’s funeral, her casket open as the community gathered to mourn her passing.

When I heard the screeching tires last night, I was reminded of that day.

Last night Jeff and I listened as the screech of tires on pavement made its way into our bedroom through the open windows, open to bring in the beautiful night air of spring. The sound of a sideshow is another thing: the tires of the cars screech as they circle the chosen intersection. Today as we drove home from church, we looked carefully at each intersection until we saw the one with tire marks that marked the activities of the night before Easter. The sideshow last night was only two blocks we from our house.

And we honored Easter today by going to Mass at a parish in North Oakland, where the people sang and shouted: “Christ is Risen!” And Christ, indeed, was risen in that place, a colorful group of worshippers remembering and honoring the High Holiday of the Christian faith. In worship we remembered the people of the world who are struggling to survive in the midst of horrific wars: Ukraine, Palestine. We like this parish for its diversity: class diversity, racial diversity, diversity of acceptance of Catholicism – or not. To us, the people there represent the diversity that is Oakland, which has been an important part of our making our home here for many years.

We chanted together with the other worshippers, laughed and sang with them, and when we left, we felt as if we had, indeed, worshipped on this day, on Easter Day, remembering the old, old story, so badly abused and harmed by well-meaning and damaged human beings. Even so, the story remains. We have known its message to be true in our lives.

It’s Easter.

Easter time in the desert, Joshua Tree Park, Mojave Desert. photo by meb: 3/2024

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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