No. Of course I was not Amish.
Do I look Amish?
I never thought I looked Amish, but maybe I have been sorely mistaken all these years...
Anyway, I think it's time that I tell you one of my favorite stories about life in the midst of them.
But first, a little background. I have three older brothers and when the youngest of them went to college I thought my dad might go into permanent hibernation, seeing as now for the first time in 24+ years he was a in a house that was by population now dominated by women and not men. We can only imagine it must have been quite the adjustment.
To his elation, this predicament lasted only about two weeks.
Now, less than half a mile down the road from my parents' home is an Amish farmstead. All through my childhood years it had been residence to a quintessential Amish family, straw hats and horse & buggy and all the trappings, whose first names may or may not have been Benji and Fanny, and they may or may not have had a son named Benedict. How perfect.
The last handful of years, however, their house had sat empty, because they had moved to Missouri.
I should also mention that the community I grew up in the midst of was not a modern Amish community. They were not "new order" Amish, but "old order." They didn't wear light colors, they had very distinct looking hats and capps (what the women wear) and buggies. No running water in their homes. No electricity. These were not your tourist Amish. They were not either, however, the Amish you see plaguing TLC or Dateline. In my personal opinion, Amish like that are definitely not the norm, New Order OR Old Order. It's like most things, Wolfies, don't believe everything you see.
But in spite of their being an exceptionally conservative and private sect, my parents had somehow gotten to be in good standing with their community. My mom would drive them places when I was a kid, all of us packed into her van like sardines and me and my brothers turning green over their lack of soap and deodorant use. Sometimes on blustery cold winter mornings if we were out and saw the little children walking to school in the frigid temps we would give them rides. We would let them use our telephone for nothing, even though after the passing of a few calls here and there we were gifted with a pie. We were VIP customers to their Christmas candy stands every winter, knowing which shops to pass over because their candies tasted like kerosene and which ones were safe to take to our fancy city Christmas parties.
So maybe things like that is what gave us our good name with these people. I really do think, though, it was because we treated them like people and not like aliens, which is how a lot of people in our area treated them. We accepted them for what they were and built as much of a relationship with them as they would allow.
Ok, that's the history.
So sure enough, fast forward to two weeks after my brother moves out when, right before our eyes, a semi pulls into the neighboring yard one Saturday and out comes a small troupe of Amish we had never met before. Not from the area, they moved to our community because two of their daughters had married men from our community and moved here. So the rest of the family moved, too.
But this family was small and that was unusual to say the least when the average Amish going rate was somewhere north of ten, and somewhere south of 17. What was also unusual was that there was no father. Apparently the dad had left the family to become....one of us.... an "Englisher" as they say. And so as it stood there was a single mother, a daughter (about 24 yrs old), and.....(drum roll please)....a son!!! There was another man in the neighborhood! At about twenty years old, he would definitely fit the bill for the vacant male spot in my dad's life and in virtually no time he became what we started to call "the fourth son."
We will call him Jonas.
And Jonas was different. Not like most Amish boys that we knew. He was not a a head-nodder; one who followed their rules without questioning them. So maybe he was a kindred spirit to us and that's why we all hit it off so well. Oh he didn't do anything bad, don't go thinking that. For instance. He showed up at my house one day not long after they moved in and asked if we had a DVD player. "HOW IN THE WORLD DOES HE KNOW WHAT A DVD PLAYER IS???" my mom and I asked each other after we showed him to our movie room. But the truth was that we did and we didn't think it was a sin for him to use it. After all, it wasn't like he was watching some R-rated nastiness, he was watching an instructional video that came with the deer stand he just bought.
And then there was the time that he came over and asked if he could ever ride one of our bikes....under the cover of darkness, that is. He would return it right to where he had found it, he promised. And so we let him. Sure enough, he returned it, just as he had said. So we kept letting him. Or then there was the time(s) when he and a couple buddies came over and drank orange soda and ate the frozen pizza we made for them while they watched the 1997 comedy For Richer or Poorer, which hilariously depicts what might happen if two Manhattan-ite millionaires evade their taxes and flee to an Amish community to hide. And then there was the time when he and his sister and her fiancé came over and we all played a roaring good card game of Dutch Blitz.
Naturally then, we kept letting Jonas and his friends come over to our house to do these kinds of things because
A. We didn't think they were bad things.
B. We figured they would end up probably staying Amish and not turning into some runaway horror story if they had the ability to "rebel" in our house (i.e. orange pop, bike rides, deer hunting instructional videos, John Wayne movies, non-gambling card games, and the occasional Tim Allen comedy). And
C. My dad said, "Listen, our society would be a lot better if the worst thing our rebels did was ride bikes after dark..."
So we got to know a whole bevy of Amish boys and it made for many an entertaining evening.
But I think my very favorite story......
Will have to be continued.....
No comments:
Post a Comment