Mary van Balen

PHOTOS: Mary van Balen
While helping me clean my old house, a friend asked if I would miss it when I moved. There are plenty of things I will not miss: non-stop noisy traffic, a one-person kitchen that managed to hold four or five people when the children and I were baking or we hosted a party, and a narrow hallway with four doors that all opened into each other. Of course, all homes have drawbacks.

As I stopped cleaning for a moment and considered her question, a number of thoughts came to mind.  Read More 

PHOTO: "MEMORY SYNAPSES" - SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE "How Our Brains Make Memories"
A few days ago I had the unusual experience of watching my vocal chords in action. Chronic hoarseness and some difficulty breathing sent me to an ENT specialist. I had gone to one decades before when singing in coffee houses, churches, and at sing-a-longs pushed my voice past its limits, but this time technology had a new tool to offer: a rigid stroboscopic endoscope, or in layman’s terms, a long silver tube with a camera that takes a video with soundtrack of one’s vocal chords while the patient follows the speech and language pathologist’s directions for holding pitches and taking deep breaths through the mouth.

The procedure was painless, and the results were amazingly clear. Read More 

PHOTO: Mary van Balen
Where do you find a room full of enthusiastic authors, poets, and storytellers celebrating life together? At the Ohio Literacy Resource Center’s Writer’s Conference. For twelve years, the OLRC has sponsored a writing contest for adults enrolled in Adult Basic and Literacy Education (ABLE) classes throughout Ohio. From hundreds of submissions, the conference committee chooses poetry, memoir, fiction, and non-fiction stories and puts them together in a softbound book.

The published authors are invited to attend the daylong conference that from its early days has featured Lyn Ford, a nationally recognized storyteller who draws on her Native American and Black American heritage to mesmerize attendees with tales of wisdom laced with humor.  Read More 

I always liked walking into an elementary school building an hour or so before classes began, when quiet covered every classroom and office, inviting unhurried reflection as well as preparation for the day. Occasionally I saw a janitor pushing a wide mop down the old wooden hallways and making them shine. Now that I work at a large department store, I find similar calm when I arrive before its doors open for business. I also see the people who work behind the scenes to make most American department stores shine.

On Mother’s Day, I walked in the employee entrance and made my way downstairs to clock in at the register. I passed a number of workers, women mostly, wearing full aprons, pushing mops and buckets down wide aisles that reflected the dim lights of the early morning store. Read More 

Once again, I spent part of my day substitute teaching; this time it was language arts. The students were quiet as they took a long vocabulary test and then opened “With Every Drop of Blood,” a Civil War novel by James and Christopher Collier, reading until the period ended. I took advantage of the time and read the novel myself. It tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a Southern boy, Johnny, and one of his captors, a Black Union soldier named Cush Turner. As the boys become friends, they realize the erroneousness of many stories and stereotypes about Blacks and Southerners they had learned growing up.

At one point, after Cush ‘s fierce desire to learn to read and his reverence for Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address surprised Johnny, he began to rethink his assumption that Black slaves were inherently inferior to their white masters, and realized that he had never considered anything from the point of view of the slave. Read More 

PHOTO: Bead Creative
The call came early in the morning: A seventh grade history teacher was sick; would I like to sub?" Yes. As I prepared for the day, I smiled at the timing. For months I had hoped for calls to substitute, but none came. Then, after my first full day of working as a large department store associate, when I was looking forward to a hot bath and putting organization back into my office, I received the call.

Life has always been like that evidenced by expressions like "Feast or famine," and "When it rains, it pours." The mess of my office would have to wait.

After assisting students as they researched the Catholic Church in Medieval times (a particularly embarrassing stretch in its long history), I spent the evening with my father.  Read More