Tag: wisdom

reflecting

Me and Mister O’Reilly

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Mr. O’Reilly was my Junior High Science teacher. I don’t remember much about him, except that he was old – most of my teachers were old by my standards… after all, I was in Junior High, and that he had gray hair and always wore a suit. Teachers dressed formally in those days. Other than the memory I’m about to share, all I remember about Mr. O’Reilly is that, on a warm, warm autumn day, when the windows of Peckham Junior High School were open to let in the clean, fresh air of the city, he sat at his desk, and – commenting on a fly that had flown into the window – told us a strange bit of information: if the fly were to land on a piece of food we were eating, whatever the fly had lit on before – the edge of a bedpan in a nearby nursing home, for example, and if said fly then landed on our hand, and if we did not wash our hands before we ate a meal – the germs that germy fly carried would transfer from the edge of the bedpan onto our food. And then into us/me.

Ugh. Enough of that memory – except to say: I’ve never forgotten that particular lesson. Wash your hands, people…

By the time I entered Junior High School, my school day began early and ended late in the afternoon. In Junior High I brought my lunch each day in a brown paper bag I carried along with my books. In each bag was a sandwich made with homemade bread, a piece of fruit, and maybe a sweet treat that Mom had baked. And by the time I entered Junior High, walked under the viaduct at 35th and Fond du Lac Avenue, I was in classes with young people who were, really, from the “other side of the tracks.” My classmates were no longer all the children of working class factory workers. My classmates often came from homes where Dad had a job that required a suit, and where Mom was not simply a housewife, but a woman who worked in an office, or who had been a nurse before she stayed at home, a home that the family owned.

And I was sensitive to all these things. I noticed.

One day, Mr. O’Reilly called my name as I passed him and another teacher, on my way to my assigned chair at a table in the cafeteria. I stopped in front of the tall teacher as he stood next to another teacher, a younger woman. They had been talking, and I somehow knew that they had been comparing the students they taught. Mr. O’Reilly – apparently to make a point – asked me where I lived. I understood completely in that moment that he expected me, a student of his in an accelerated program, to give him an answer other than the answer I gave: “I live on 28th and Locust.” Mr. O’Reilly looked at me with a surprised look on his face.

In Junior High, I was already sensitive to the homes and the kind of work my schoolmates’ parents had. I understood that I was not one of them. Later in college, I would take a class in the humanities about social class. In Junior High, I felt the tug of my difference, I saw the quality of the clothes my classmates wore – different from my often home-made clothes, and I expect I felt ashamed. I did not feel shame wash over me, wash over my body and mind as well as my emotions, in that moment in the school cafeteria, as I answered Mr. O’Reilly’s question. But I was keenly aware of what that moment was about.

In college, I would take a class about social class. These days, I’m rereading a text from that class: The Hidden Injuries of Class, Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennet, 1972.

After my encounter with Mr. O’Reilly, I sat at the table with my friends and ate my lunch, ate my sandwich made of homemade bread. And I have never forgotten the sting of being from the other side of the tracks, for all the life of privilege I have lived.

A view of Mt. Fuji from Hakone, Japan, 2026. That’s Jeff in the bright orange jacket, seeing “the shy one” as she chose to show herself to us before we left to travel to Kanazawa. My own photo.

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“When I am among the trees”, Mary Oliver

Mary Elyn Bahlert

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world,

but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, October 10, 2025, “Among the trees in my yard”
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A moment…

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Mom and I stood together in the checkout line of the local supermarket where she shopped in her neighborhood in Milwaukee. I was home on a visit from the Bay Area of California. We always loved those days together, two “Milwaukee girls” who explored the city, finding new and revisiting old sites.

She didn’t say it to me; she said it to herself. In the line ahead of us, an elderly Asian woman and a little boy, who appeared to be her grandson, stood in front of the checker. We heard the checker ask for some amount of change, and the elderly woman, her hand full of coins, turned to the little boy, extending her hand toward him. He peered into her the palm of her hand and chose a coin or two. She handed the coins to the checker.

“And now he feels ashamed,” I heard Mom say to herself. She had seen the moment, just as I had, and I knew then that it had brought forth a memory of some distant moment in her life. She would have been standing at the checkout with her mother, Feodosia, who had never learned to read, and she would have been the child she saw now, looking into her mother’s hand and choosing the right coin. And she had felt ashamed.

I understood then that my mother had a heart for those who are the “other” in our country. I had always known it, having grown up in a house where we did not speak slurs about those who were/are “other.” I grew up learning to respect those who had gone before and to respect those who were different than us, those whose lives had been difficult in ways I could not imagine, those who had left their land and their people so that I could be standing in that aisle that day, a witness.

And I loved her even more for that moment.

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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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The One

Mary Elyn Bahlert 
She chose me before I knew Her,
or maybe - forgetting - I chose Her.
Silent, She's kept her peace:
Though I have risen and fallen,
though I have walked through the dark holding hands with demons,
forgetting who I am.
She observes, Her eyes deeper than mine:
She sees it all - sees clearly, with a wise heart.

She took my hand  
before I reached out.
She spoke:  sometimes with words, sometimes in silence:
She spoke.

One day - alone and afraid -
I said:  “Yes."
Then, we walked hand in hand.
We did not part ways again -
although sometimes I forgot Her for long stretches.

She is placid, clear, deep, full.
When I am angry, shaking a hot fist at the world,
She is placid, clear, deep, full.
She holds me then with great gentleness.
My breath returns, gentle, too.
                 - Mary Elyn Bahlert, 8/2020

Sometimes with words, sometimes silence, she speaks… photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, Vilnius, Latvia,

7/2024