Tag: reflections

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A night visitor

Mary Elyn Bahlert

My Grandma, Frances Markowski – Feodosia Machsuda Srebna – had been born in Ukraine and came to the United States in 1914, before the Soviet Revolution that took that land and swallowed it into itself. A picture of her as a young woman with her young son, Ivan/John, and her husband, Vlas/Alex sits on the cabinet under the window in my dining room.

As a little girl, I looked over the railing of the porch on the second floor of the flat on Ring Street to see my grandma walking slowly, head down and covered by a scarf – she was a true “babushka” – her long dark winter coat covering her legs, up the alley to sit with my mother in the kitchen, to have a talk in the language that was native to both. In later years, Mom would often forget much of her Ukrainian first language, only speaking a word or two, sometimes with humor, with her sister, Anne, or one of her brothers.

Grandma died when I was in high school, and her funeral was the last that my parents went to without me and my sister, Suzie. A few months later, my mother’s younger sister died, as if to follow her mother. Years later, her son, my cousin Mark, would tell me that he thought his mother – who was already battling cancer – gave up after her mother died.

After Grandma’s death, my mother went to the cemetery a few times a year to clean up the graves of her father and mother, a sort of homage. When I went with her, she’d send me off with a bucket to the water spout on the road that ran past the graves and I’d come back, the bucket filled with the water, so that she could tend to the dead. A few years ago, Jeff and I returned to the cemetery in Milwaukee, and when we drove into the gates, I provided directions that took us right to the graves. I have not forgotten.

***

I wasn’t thinking of Grandma at all when I entered seminary in 1982 in Berkeley. One early morning, before sunrise, as I lay sleeping in my small room in the dormitory apartment that I shared with two other women, I was awakened by a presence in the room. I knew it was Grandma. I knew. She came into me that early morning. Frightened by this unbidden presence, I called out to Jesus.

Was I haunted? Why did she come to me? I asked the questions, longing to know, in a conversation with a friend. “Who else would she go to?” Her answer.

Jeff speaks of that time as a “haunting,” but I’m not sure. I do know that she lived with me, in me, for a number of years. And over the course of that time I wrote the series of poems I call “The Feodosia Poems.” They are her poems, not mine. She was an illiterate woman from the Old Country, and I am a woman of the New World, privileged, educated.

My mother told me she did not remember her dreams. But she remembered a dream one morning when I was visiting in her apartment. Just before she awoke, she dreamed she was standing looking at the back of a truck. The back of the truck rolled up, and there, looking at my mother, was a Matryoshka doll, a nesting doll. The doll’s face was her mother, my grandmother. She winked at my mother! And Mom woke up. She recounted the dream to me when we talked over coffee that morning.

A black and white photo from the 1950’s is the only photo I have of Grandma with a light in her eye. She sits between me and big brother Ronn, already a teenager, trying to look “cool.” Maybe we brought some joy to her.

How I wish I knew her better, my Grandma, my babusya. And maybe, I do.

Me, Grandma, Ronn, circa 1955

beauty, memories, reflecting

the cat

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I married a man and a cat. Schatzi had been in Jeff’s life for several years when he and I were married in 1984. Part Maine Coone, she was a beautiful creature with long gray fur. After we were married, she took to sleeping at our feet, making room for me. Schatzi will always be my favorite cat (sorry, LiLi).

Schatzi was my first cat, and she became my introduction to cats. She was a good role model. I’ve discovered since that not all cats have the same people-loving, generous disposition that Schatzi had. If I pushed her too far, she warned me gently, stretching one leg, claws showing, in my direction. I always paid attention! I studied her closely. One day I announced to Jeff: “this cat doesn’t have any eye-lids!” Welcome to cat-hood!

When I took long naps on the green couch in our living room, Schatzi would lie next to me, her back stretched out along my body, an extra layer of warmth. When we had visitors, Schatzi made sure to find her way to the center of the action. While she was a house cat, she was allowed outside if she chose, and being female, she didn’t ever go far from home.

In December of 2000, I recall a Sunday during the liturgical season of Advent when I recounted three things in my sermon that had happened to me during the prior week: I’d received a phone call that my friend and colleague Bruce had died of a heart attack, a doctor’s appointment with my mother had revealed that she had terminal cancer, and the cat had spent the week sick, lying close to the heat register in the dining room of our flat off Grand Avenue in Oakland. As she passed me after church, Phyllis turned to me and said: “I can’t get that cat out of my mind.”

A few months later, Mom passed, in February of 2001, at her beloved home at Mathilda Brown Women’s Residence in Oakland.

Schatzi stayed awhile longer that year. She seemed to know that I was grieving, that I needed her cozy and comforting presence. In the autumn of 2001, Schatzi spent her last night with us on the floor of the kitchen, not able to move, not able to eat. Jeff lay on the floor next to her, all night long.

LiLi, our current feline housemate. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert.
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O, the Places You’ll Go!*

Mary Elyn Bahlert

These days, O’Hare Field in Chicago is just another airport. Since many flights have changed over the course of the years we’ve all been living with Covid-19, Jeff and I fly into O’Hare and drive to Wisconsin on our trips “home.”

Flying into and out of O’Hare Field is a sort of home-coming – and a home-leaving – to me.

O’Hare Field stands in my mind as a character of its own. O’Hare Field holds a particular place in my memories. I was in my late teens before I flew in an airplane, and I was in my early 20’s before I met O’Hare Field. As I walked through the terminals – everything so much bigger than in Milwaukee, 80 miles to the north – and I observed the people in that crowded, crowded airport – I was transported into another life, a life filled with a kind of diversity that I had not seen in my coming up life.

I loved it! I loved all the different people, people traveling from other parts of the world, distant places that I was not sure I would ever see. Turks, their heads held proud, covered, and women, long skirts around them as they herded their children from one gate to another. Strangers with their eyes focused ahead of them, focused on where they were going, eyes and hearts reflecting where they had been. I didn’t imagine my life at that point, a life that would include trips to foreign places, distant places that I was not sure I would ever see! And I have seen some – many – of them.

And so my world was opening, before I knew it was, before I was aware. The life that someone had dreamed for me – maybe I dreamed it myself – was beginning to lay itself out before me. I’ve lived most of my life in the Bay Area, a long way from Milwaukee, a long way from O’Hare Field. I often say that the weather is more interesting back in Wisconsin, but the people are more interesting here, the diversity of people who land here in the Bay Area from around the world.

*thanks to Dr. Spock

community, reflecting, remembering

On the Journey

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I was searching, it felt as if I was always searching, had been searching for a long time. Searching implies an object – what was I searching for? I had the idea that I could go into the ministry – but I had no church experience of a community of faith. I had only a history that included a family distrust of “Church,” and three years of study in a fundamentalist denomination. After confirmation, I had abruptly left what I knew as “Church.” I thought the social movements of the 70’s were more about Jesus and what he taught than what I had known of Church. In particular, I had noticed and admired the work of Father James Groppi in Milwaukee, a Civil Rights leader in my hometown and adjoining ‘hood.

After college, I embarked on a career with the Social Security Administration, and after three months of intense training as a Claims Representative in Minneapolis, I was assigned to the District Office in Green Bay, Wisconsin. At the time, I was happy to have been assigned to Green Bay, which was a couple of hours north of Milwaukee. I didn’t know at the time how lonely I would be, how lost as I began my professional life as an adult.

And part of me was still searching. I was always searching. For what? For love? For meaning? For connection? For depth? For community? All of these were to be answered, although I didn’t know it when I was searching. And part of me is searching, even now, which has given my life and faith a depth and richness I would not have had otherwise. I’ve always been open to new understandings, to new learnings. I’m grateful for that.

After a couple of years, as the Social Security Administration took on the administration of SSI – Supplemental Security Income – the staff in the SSA office at Green Bay grew. From my first days, when I was the first woman CR, staff numbers grew. My first colleagues – who ruled the roost as only white men in power can do – were challenged to accept women who were at least as good at what they did than the men had been.

I was still searching. One of my colleagues was a woman named Joan, who was a bit overwhelmed by the work as a Claims Representative, but whose life I noticed. She was a white woman from Wisconsin, married to a disabled African American man from the South. Joan always wanted to go deeper, and I sensed a depth in how she wanted to relate to others. She didn’t engage in the politics of the office, often spending her breaks reading a Holy Book – the Holy Book of those people who are called Ba’hai, the teachings of their prophet. In a way, Joan was difficult to relate to, but I liked her depth, the way she looked at others as she spoke to them. Joan and Nat invited me to dinner at their house, and there, after the meal, we talked.

Joan and Nat were the first people I knew who took the faith they professed seriously. They allowed my questions. They didn’t expect rigid answers, the answers of a “right faith.” They wanted to talk, to learn where I was going with my questions. They took me seriously, as well as the faith they professed. When I asked about becoming a Bahai’, they didn’t surround me with evangelical fervor – they encouraged me to explore my journey, to see how my journey unfolded.

And my journey unfolded in another direction – in a way. I’ve written about returning to Milwaukee, still working for the Social Security Administration, and following my heart and questions to the people called Methodists, to my friend and guide Harvey Stower, and into the ministry.

I’m grateful for the journey, and for the questions, which still arise, will continue to arise. I’m grateful for all those whose path has lit my way. I’m grateful for the ongoing quest of faith, of trust in life as life offers itself. And I’m always grateful for the beacons of light who have lit my way – for Jesus, for Joan, for Nat, for Harvey – for all the others. 

The Blue Mosque, Istanbul - View by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 5/2023
community, nostalgia, remembering, Uncategorized

Meeting Joanne

Mary Elyn Bahlert

2023 marks fifty years since Joanne sat down across from me at my desk in the Social Security office in Green Bay, Wisconsin, smiled warmly at me, and said: “Do you golf?”

I answered: “I haven’t, but I could try.” I have never tried, in 50 years. But Joanne is still a good friend, to me, and to my husband, Jeff.

We were both Claims Representatives at the Social Security office in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I’d arrived at the office in June of 1973, after three months of training in the Minneapolis office. In March, I’d driven my red VW bug to Minneapolis while I received training, and now I was permanently assigned to Green Bay. When I came to the office, I was the first woman to work as a Claims Representative in that District, helping folks who were about to retire to complete their claim for benefits. Joanne would follow, a couple of months later. She’d been promoted from her job as a Service Representative. As a Service Representative, she’d helped folks with issues they had after they had begun to receive benefits: Retirement, Disability, Child’s Benefits. In the time I worked at Social Security, in the Green Bay office, at the office on the South Side of Milwaukee, and later, as a Field Representative out of the Waukesha office, I never ran into a person who performed the job better than Joanne. She read each of the papers that came across our desk each week, filing them in the proper place in her copy of the Social Security Manuel, the working details of implementing the Social Security Law. She was smart and competent, the hardest worker I knew.

We traveled together, driving to the Northeast, to Florida, to Washington, D.C., to Montreal and Quebec on our vacation times. We met one another’s friends. We lamented our lack of dates. We shared recipes. We took rides together on warm summer nights, ending up on the Eastern Shore of Green Bay, watching the sun set over the Bay. When I was able, I moved back to Milwaukee, and Joanne followed, not long after. She bought a little house and she spent her weekends and evenings working hard on that house. Joanne can do anything, in my estimation.

The contractor that helped her with one of her house projects told her that there was a nice, young, divorced man who lived in a house around the corner. He wanted them to meet. Sure enough, Rich and Joanne began to date, and after a couple of years, they married, in the spring of 1983. They moved into his little house in the neighborhood, and later, a larger house. In 2014, they moved into a home they’d built on a small lake in the county to the west of Milwaukee County. Joanne had accomplished her life long dream to live on the water.

I was in seminary when Joanne and Rich were married, and she stood up with me in my wedding to Jeff in Milwaukee in March of 1984. In later years, after I’d moved to California, she and my mother became good friends, baking and cooking together, enjoying one another. When my mother’s memory became bad and she needed help, Joanne visited her and answered her frantic phone calls, until we knew she had to move to be closer to me in California.

A few years ago – 2016 – I answered the phone in the kitchen on Labor Day, in the evening, when Jeff and I were about to go to bed. I heard Joanne’s voice then, and I heard something in it I hadn’t heard before. “Joanne?” I asked. And then again: “Joanne?” She told me that she and Rich had spent the day in Emergency at a local hospital. Rich had been diagnosed with Glioblastoma, an aggressive cancer that originates in the brain. By October 15 of that year, Rich was gone. Jeff and I made sure we cleared our calendars and made the trip to be at his Memorial. There, Joanne was surrounded by so many friends that she and Rich had made over the years, both Rich and Joanne folks who were important to the community in which they lived.

Joanne came to visit us in Oakland this past winter. She’d arrived from Wisconsin, hoping for some nice, sunny weather. Winter can be long and gray in the Midwest, and sadly, winter here was long and gray, also, one rain storm following another for days. But the conversation that started so long ago in Green Bay continued, and since Joanne was visiting, we explored some interesting places in the Bay Area.

Next week, Jeff and I will be flying to O’Hare Field in Chicago, where we’ll rent a car and drive to spend the first night of our trip with Joanne in her house on the water. We won’t run out of things to talk about, the three of us, and together, we’ll make sure we remember Rich, how he made us laugh, how he made Joanne laugh.