Tag: writing

beauty, poetry, reflecting

First reading

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I’ve been a reader for many, many – many – years now, of course. And over the course of those years, I have also been a writer. I learned to write by reading the writing of others, I think. Words, and the sentences that hold words together, come easily to me. That particular gift allowed me to be a preacher, also. I loved reading and studying the scriptures, and over the years, I’d developed my own rhythm, a rhythm that formed the outline of my week for many years.

And I have written poetry since the days I watched my teachers carefully, studying their manners and idiosyncrasies carefully. I was a careful child, and I took that care to my studies. I faithfully memorized the poems of the great American poets in Miss Ross’ English class at Peckham Junior High School. Miss Ross gave me a great gift with her old-fashioned manner of teaching. I remember so little about her; she was an old-fashioned teacher who wore a navy blue, old-fashioned dress that was covered in little white dots, a dress that covered her knees, modestly. Was her name really Betsy Ross? I don’t know, although that’s the name I’ve carried with me all these years. I was sure she had her hair done at a beauty parlor every week. That’s how it looked to me, with my trained eye!

Every week, I studied a poet’s life and poems, and over the course of the semester I put together a book of my own, a three ringed folder with poems carefully written in my own hand, and pictures to visually bring the poems to life. I cut the pictures out of the pages of my mother’s women’s magazines. I wish I had those folders now. Those pages of poems were a treasure in my life.

The poems, the lives of the poets, the world that books and reading opened to me have been a priceless gift to my life.

But the poems that I have written and collected – not carefully, but faithfully – have formed the book that my beloved husband, Jeff, encouraged me to have printed. I am a published poet now! That’s an identity I find I will have to grow into. Like the day Jeff’s first published book appeared at our house, he and I sat down and looked over the small printed volume of my own poetry, Moments (Balboa Press, 2026).

And I have survived my first reading! Carefully planned and executed, I read aloud to a group of other humans selected poems from my collection. The room – the Edwards Room at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, the church where I had retired from as Pastor in 2014 after a 16 year stint (not bad for a Methodist!). There was a gathered group of people, mostly folks I know, a few I did not know. A woman I’d helped with a family matter a few years after my retirement joined the group. The pastor, Sunae, had made sure a flyer had been included in each Sunday’s bulletin.

And so, I am a published poet, and I am a poet who has survived a public reading. I am grateful. A gathering of friends, of beloved folks from many years in my life, colleagues, former parishioners, and even a man I did not know arrived to sit for an hour of poetry reading! So many of my poems, many written on scraps of paper and filed away in a manila file – these many years – were now properly printed and presented for public view. The pastor and a few faithful helpers set out a nice table of simple food for after the reading. A friend brought her dog and generously agreed to handle the selling of the books, of my book, which I signed for the waiting admirers.

And so I expect that a small part of me will have to take on a new – another – identity: published poet. I’m proud that a photo of mine graces the cover. I was delighted to see who showed up to hear me read, some folks I had forgotten would be interested at all.

Now, that day is in the past. I’ve had my collection of poems published – I’m a published poet now – and I’ve had a reading. I’m out there.

memories, Uncategorized

Driving Through Chester

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Rainier was going with Lia, a young woman who lived in the same apartment that they rented together with several other young women in San Francisco. At just the right time, Rainier and Lia started dating each other – and that was it. They were a couple. It was 2012.

Rainier lived with us in Oakland for the first few years of his studies at San Francisco State University, before he’d moved out to live in the City during his last year of school. He’d come to live with us almost from the day he’d graduated from High School on Oahu, calling to ask us whether the offer of a home with us we’d made some years before was for real. It was for real, and we were glad to have him. He lived in a small porch-like area with windows on two sides in a second story duplex before we moved into the beautiful Craftsman Style home we’ve owned and lived in since. In our home, Rainier’s space was down several steps from the kitchen, a small room with a low ceiling and access through sliding doors to the garden. During the move to our new house, he’d offered a strong helping hand. He’d joined us as we gathered a few friends to our new home for a house blessing.

While he was in college, Rainier had taken up bicycling, first using a second hand bike he’d found in the basement of the duplex on Sunnyslope Avenue, graduating to another bike and into a group of cyclists in San Francisco, competing for Mike’s Bikes by traveling to races. Now he’s got a stash of bicycles and parts in his workshop in the yard of his home in Seattle.

When the time to go out on his own came, Rainier moved to San Francisco, where he shared part of an old house with several young women.

We knew from the start that Lia was Rainier’s true partner, and we have enjoyed their company together ever since. Jeff officiated at their wedding. During COVID, we’d made the trip from our place in Oakland to their home in Seattle several times to spend time with them and their baby girl Celeste, born on the first day of COVID sheltering in place – March 17, 2020. Rainier and Lia and Celeste became the children of our own we did not have.

*

After they became a couple, we invited Rainier and Lia to join us at our friends’ Paul and Lana’s place in the Warner Valley, 5 hours north of the Bay Area, for a few days. The four of us had fun together: we watched the budding romance. When our visit was over, we packed up Jeff’s Forester and headed back to the Bay Area. We stopped in Chester, at the southern end of the Valley, dropped off a few days’ worth of garbage in a big garbage can in a driveway, and started West out of Chester toward Highway 5. We left the town limits of Chester. Jeff noticed first. He didn’t say anything to us, but he watched a police vehicle driving along behind us. Jeff is not one to speed, but he watched the speedometer anyway.

Just as we left the town limits, the red lights of the squad car went on and we pulled over. The four of us sat silent in the car as the officer came to the window and asked to see Jeff’s license. I’m sure the officer could read the faces of anyone he pulled over, because that day, he took his time to explain that we’d been seen dumping garbage in town. “I’ll give you a choice,” he said. “You can go back and get that bag of garbage, or I can take you jail.”

“We’ll go back to pick the garbage up,” Jeff said.

We were silent as Jeff turned the car around and watched as he didn’t go a bit over the speed limit as we returned to Chester. We found the garbage container where we’d deposited our garbage less than an hour before. Jeff stopped the car. Rainier got out to get the bag of garbage. We were silent, but I’ll bet we were watched by the neighbors who’d – apparently – watched us before.

And we were mostly silent on the long ride back to San Francisco.

When we drove into San Francisco, I’d taken the wheel, and we were almost at Rainier and Lia’s place. At the same moment, we all burst into laughter, unable to contain it any longer. We all burst into the laughter that followed our entanglement with the Law in Chester.

And you can bet we’ve told that story to one another many times since that fateful day…

A view of Warner Valley now, Mt. Shasta in the distance. After fires several years ago, damaged trees stand amid trees that had escaped the fire. Paul and Lana’s first cabin was destroyed in the fire; the homes on either side of the cabin that burned still stand. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 6/9/26.

memories, nostalgia, The Holy, Uncategorized

A dream

Mary Elyn Bahlert

My dad loved life. He loved my mother, he loved us, and he loved his life. After having been diagnosed with colon cancer in the year after he retired from his work as a steelworker at age 65, he was always grateful for the life he was able to live during the 10 years after. He came to realize that he could live much as he had before the arrival of the cancer, and so he returned as much as possible to the life he’d had before the cancer diagnosis and the colonoscopy. He rode his bike all around his neighborhood in Milwaukee, and he and Mom drove clear across the country from Wisconsin to visit my mother’s brothers in California. Mom and Dad enjoyed every moment of that trip, my father at the wheel, my mother pointing out sites and reading from the AAA trip-tick that guided their trip. Both my parents – my father had an eighth grade education in a country one-room school house, my mother had received her GED when I was in college – were interested in life. As I remember them, I count the quality of having an interest in life as important, not only to them, but to me, as well. I’m grateful.

My dad loved life. He spent many weeks in a hospital bed at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Milwaukee, knowing he would not leave that room – ever. More than anything, he missed being able to ride his bike, especially now that spring was coming to the Midwest; it was April. He was 75; he would never make it to his 76th birthday. Now that I’m 76, I think of that fact – often.

Before I left his hospital room for the last time, before I traveled back to Pleasanton, California, where Jeff and I lived, I said to Dad: “Let me know you are all right.” I was clear: after he passed, I wanted a sign from him. As I said those words to Dad, he didn’t speak. He nodded. He understood.

The dream came some time later, months after Dad died in April of 1986. It was a simple dream, a clear dream. I saw my Dad, dressed in a suit, standing with a group of people, looking away from me. He had a humble look on his face as he stood with the others, his hands held together in a simple gesture, below his waist.

When I awoke, I knew immediately that Dad had kept his promise. He had come to me. And he had let me know that he was all right.

Uncle Johnny must be angry at Dad – he’s about to push him into the pool… They had fun together.
photo, circa 1983, San Jose, CA.