Tag: reflections

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

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

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

Uncategorized

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!  

memories, nostalgia, remembering, Uncategorized

Thanksgiving

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I love the holiday season, which begins with Thanksgiving Day. When I was pastor in downtown Oakland, the congregation marked the day of thanks by offering a wonderful, complete Thanksgiving Dinner to anyone in the community who wanted to join. Homeless folks, people who did not speak English, people without family or even friends, joined the day’s gathering to sit at a table and to be served by other grateful folks. For many years, that tradition became part of my personal Thanksgiving, as I looked out at the gathered people and said to myself, again and again: “these are my people!”

And Jeff and I mark the holiday every year now by arriving at Norman and Cheryl’s cottage on a hill in San Francisco, climbing the narrow stairs to the top of a hill, our arms filled with pies – our contribution! – and to sit at the long, narrow table filled with an assortment of Bahlert-related people every year. As the day progresses and the dusk and darkness come, families with little ones begin to gather their belongings and leave, with much ado. The tiny kitchen which produced the feast we’d all enjoyed is full of helpers bumping into each other, cleaning up, continuing the dinner-time conversation. And then – just like that! – we all descend the steps and walk to our cars on the quiet streets and drive home, mentioning to one another moments from the day, who had grown, who talked to who, how much older everyone is (except for us, of course!), and probably feeling a bit of sadness that another holiday has passed.

In the Midwest, the shorter days and long evening of dark and cold have begun by this time of year. There’s a sense of “cocooning” that we don’t know in the same way here in California. And missing now, also, is the childhood sense of a quiet and light filled season, beginning with Thanksgiving, that won’t end until after Epiphany, in January.

My mother honored the season of holidays each year by hosting Thanksgiving Dinner at our upper flat, and by creating for my sister Suzie and me a holiday tradition. In the 50’s and 60’s (of the last century), the holiday season did not officially begin until Thanksgiving. On the day after Thanksgiving, my mother and Suzie and I took the 23 bus from the North Side to downtown Milwaukee, now mysteriously decorated with lights and ribbons along Wisconsin Avenue, still a booming shopping district at the time.

We’d step off the bus at 3rd and Wisconsin to walk through the Boston Store, which anchored the downtown at that time. My mother held tightly to each one of us as we walked through the crowded store, the lights and music having followed us from the street into the store.

Then, we’d walk, first to the Wisconsin Electric Company, and then to the Gas Company, to take in the cookie displays at each one. My mother made sure that at each place, she was provided with 3 copies of the new cookie book published by each company each year. She loved to try new recipes, and she loved to re-create those that had been her favorites – or dad’s favorite, or mine, or Suzie’s. Unknown to me, she wrote notes as she baked: “a favorite,” “takes a bit less powdered sugar than called for,” “makes a big batch!”

I didn’t discover the notes until years later, when I had my own apartment in Green Bay, and when Mom presented me with the collection of cookbooks she’d saved, just for me.

I’m not a great baker, although the family in San Francisco allows me to bring pies as my contribution to Thanksgiving. My mother loved to bake: “that’s the fun of it,” she’d say. And I expect she envisioned some sort of future for me and for my sister, based on her own life. Neither of us grew to have quite that future, I expect; it was her dream for us, regardless. The year after I retired, I baked a few batches of cookies, looking for a new way to fashion my life after an adulthood of work, often in a “man’s world.” That’s the year I reached high onto the kitchen shelf reserved for our cookbooks, and retrieved the cookbooks Mom had saved so carefully for me. And that’s when I saw her notes, in her particular hand-writing, written with me in mind, written with the relationship between the two of us holding us together.