Tag: reflections

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George Webb

Mary Elyn Bahlert

To folks from Milwaukee, George Webb will not need an introduction. Most of us will remember a time, sitting at the counter or in a crowded booth in the neighborhood hamburger parlor, going back to at least the 1950’s. I googled George Webb Restaurants and learned that the first restaurant had, indeed, opened in Milwaukee in 1948 – the year before I was born.

Most days, my family ate Mom’s home made dinners, often peasant food recipes that she had grown up with. We had borscht – still my favorite – a couple of times a year. And Holubtsi, Ukrainian stuffed cabbage. I can firmly state that I have never cooked that dish – since I tried my best to peel the cabbage off the ground hamburger meat, to eat the best part, to leave the boiled cabbage on the plate, as a child. That didn’t work; as children, we were expected to eat what was on the plate. Remembering, I have to think that my Dad liked those meals, or we would not have eaten them. He was not a fussy eater, in my memory – although I learned that my mother’s order at the local bakery – “dark rye without caraway, sliced” – was free of seeds because Dad didn’t like caraway. Maybe she did cater to his tastes, the bread earner in the family.

“Once in a great while (a favorite expression that my Dad used, and which Jeff repeats to this day)” Mom cut the coupon to George Webb’s Hamburger Parlor out of the Green Sheet in the Milwaukee Journal, and we had a trip to the closest George Webb Restaurant to pick up the bag of 7 hamburgers – for 99 cents. That’s right: 99 cents! Hamburgers were a special treat; I expect that Mom had carefully figured that splurge into her weekly budget, just as carefully taking the cash from the folder that held the weekly food allowance, as well as other budgeted items: rent money, Christmas savings, utilities.

In the 1950’s, Mom still cashed the paper check that Dad brought home from work on Friday afternoon – his union wages enough to raise a family, and enough to set aside something for a rainy day, and elder years – at the local grocery store, standing in line with the other housewives whose families waited for shopping to begin. Before Mom learned to drive in the 1960’s, Daddy drove us all to the grocery store after work on Friday, and we followed Mom through the aisles as she carefully read from her shopping list. The end of the week had come, and the weekend was beginning.

The shopping cart included bacon and eggs for Daddy’s daily breakfast, and cold cereal and milk for Ronnie and Suzie and me. The shopping cart included ice cream, always, and necessary ingredients for holiday baking before Christmas. Sometimes, the shopping cart carried a ham for a special holiday meal, and the necessary makings for holiday cookies, when the time came.

All of these memories point to the memory that our meal of George Webb Hamburgers was a special meal.

When I can, I like to find my way back to a George Webb Hamburger Parlor in Milwaukee, not to satisfy my taste, but as a way to remember. And I like to sit at the counter, where the cook staff still makes sure that each coffee cup is full, and where a line of workers still sits, enjoying the ambience (!), saying a few words to the person on the next stool at the counter, and quickly pulling out a newspaper or cell phone to get the local news.

Some things never change – in the midst of lots of other things changing!

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Jeff’s face

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Sometimes in the morning or evening, when Jeff and I sit across the room from each other – he in his beloved leather chair, and me on our sofa, I look up to look at him. He is reading, or watching another series on the web. He doesn’t know I’m looking. I look up and take a few moments to look at his face, to study him, to enjoy him.

Jeff’s face has been in my life for a long time, although sometimes it seems as if all the time has gone by so quickly; it has gone by so quickly. We’ve had good times, sweet times, hard times, laughing times, gentle times, shouting times, quiet times. I am grateful to the Powers for having gifted me with Jeff as my partner in this life.

I love that Jeff is a man who makes sure to make time for relationship, time to nourish and be with one another, offering gratitude, remembering together, enjoying one another.

And so, today, this is an ode to Jeff’s face. “From the beginning of my life I have been looking for your face…” – Rumi

I think his kindness shows in his face, and I’m grateful for his kindness, through all of life’s journey.

Jeff, Lake Tahoe, 8/2020

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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.