Ira Wagler's Blog, page 4

Return to Vincennes: Blood and Kin…

You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood,

…back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for,…

back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed

everlasting but which are changing all the time–back home to the

escapes of Time and Memory.

—Thomas Wolfe

_________________

It was around a year ago, I think, when the suggestion first was made. Maybe even a little before that. It came from my cousin, Kathy Yoder Barbush. She’s from Mom’s side of the family. Those people my father cut off from us, because he didn’t want us to be tainted by the contact. The Yoder blood, that half of us we were taught to ignore and renounce. And when you hear a voice coming from that part of your past, well, I’ve learned. You stop and you listen.

Kathy messaged me, back whenever it was. She asked, because she worked there, at Vincennes University. Has been there pretty much since I was a student, way back. The University was having an Open House in the spring of 2018. Would I consider coming and speaking at the Humanities Department? I mean, being I was an author and all, with a bestseller under my belt. She thought VU would be happy to host me. She was pretty sure, in fact.

Well, what do you say to such a thing? Would I consider going and speaking at the first University I ever walked into as a student? It was a lifetime ago, when that happened. It’s always an honor, to be asked to return. Of course I would, I told her. I would be more than honored. Just give me some lead time, if and when it happens. And we left it at that. I kind of forgot about it, to be honest. Things like that mostly never develop anyway, I thought to myself.

But this “thing like that” did develop and firm right up, right along, since early this year. And that’s why I walked into Enterprise in New Holland a few Saturdays back, to pick up a rental. I had negotiated with Kathy. Well, I had told her what I wanted, and she had negotiated with the Humanities Department there at VU, apparently. Travel expenses, including a rental car and a room at the University Guest House. And a few bucks, for a “speaker’s fee.” We got it together, the Agreement. And I stopped to pick up my car on the day before Easter. I planned to spend that Holy Day this year on the road to the Midwest.

I’m irritated at Enterprise, I’ll say right up front. Beyond irritated, actually. They made me mad recently with their pious PC proclamations. Stop telling me what to think. Just shut up about politics and rent me a car when I need one. I don’t know why more big companies don’t have the sense to do a simple thing like that. Stay out of politics. I vowed that I would not rent from Enterprise again unless there was no better option. So when the time came, I checked around a bit. The local Enterprise is just a few blocks away. So very convenient. I can leave my Jeep right on their lot while I’m gone. And I rationalized to myself. Vincennes University is paying for the car, anyway. So it’s no money out of my pocket. The convenience outweighed my irritation, this time. So I went ahead, this time. I guess we’ll see what next time brings.

So there I was that morning, at Enterprise to pick up my car. I asked the nice young man if there was a Charger on the lot. As usual. And as usual, at least lately, he shook his head. No. They had a Toyota Camry ready for me. A 2018 model, almost new. He figured I’d like it. And then the young Enterprise man asked me what the rental car people always ask when you’re picking up your wheels. Do I want any insurance for the car, for this trip? It was only $25.00 per day, for a total of $100.00. They always slide it in so smoothly, and they always make it sound so easy. Just cough up the extra money. It’s really not that painful, for the peace of mind you’ll feel. That’s what they’re saying, when they’re upselling you.

And I shook my head, like I always do. Nah. My Allstate coverage kicks in. But then I thought, all of a sudden. What if I had an accident? Yeah, Allstate would kick in, after my deductible. And I just had that claim, back before Christmas, when Big Blue spun like a top on the ice. My first insurance claim, ever. And now I stood there, thinking. I had never, never before taken the extra insurance with any rental car. But VU was paying for my car. That included insurance. So I changed my mind, right there. Yeah, I said. I’m getting reimbursed for my rental expenses, by the University where I’m going to speak. Yes. Let’s put on the extra insurance. The young man smiled. A sale. An extra. He had done it. He showed me where to initial that I was purchasing the insurance. I took my paperwork, parked Amish Black at the back of the lot, and got into my new Toyota Camry. It took a minute to figure out all the glitzy controls. The car all but drove itself, from the looks of it.

And by 6:30 the next morning, I was on the road. All my bags were packed and loaded. I had packed a little heavy. It was the first time in a while that I was going out to speak at a place like this. The first time since I quit drinking back in August. The first time since I started to groom up a bit and take a little pride in how I look. And at home, I played it out in my head. This shirt with that tie and these pants. And there was this other possibility, too. Round and round I went, with my thinking. And I ended up just filling my garment bag with a number of different colored shirts, and a jacket and a vest. And a couple of pairs of shoes. I’d figure it out when the day came, I figured. And I headed west on the turnpike with my bags and a box with a few dozen copies of my book. You always take a few of those along, wherever you go. That’s what I’ve learned. The Camry hummed along, almost like a Charger, I thought. It sure had the power. It’s bigger and completely redesigned, the new Camry. And it was giving the Charger a run for the money, in my head.

And I thought about things, as I pushed along the road that day. I thought about those days of long ago, when I was a student at Vincennes University. Mulled over those days, as the miles flowed along. But I thought of other things, too. I thought of Kathy, my cousin who worked at VU. And how she had gotten me in to speak. I thought of her and her family.

Mom had a number of brothers and sisters. Most of them were known to us. Most of them were Plain Mennonite, Block Church people who drove cars and farmed with tractors. But Mom also had two siblings that we never knew much about. We rarely if ever heard their names spoken. Mom’s younger sister, Sarah, and her youngest brother, Joe. Those two were so far from the world I grew up in that they might as well have been on another planet.

Sarah married a Catholic man with the last name of McGuire. She was not only English, she was Catholic. And that right there was enough to make Dad make sure we never had anything to do with her, as long as he had any control over who we saw or didn’t. And Mom’s youngest brother Joe, well, his was a tragic story. The man was a hard drinker, addicted to alcohol. I know a lot more about how that is than I’d like to. He married a girl named Lydia Ann, who was from the Amish community in Berne, Indiana. I know absolutely nothing about their lives when they were Amish and young married. I don’t know when Joe started drinking, or if he always drank. Anyway, he and Lydia left the Amish with their children. Several daughters, and at least one son. And not long after they left the Amish, they separated, Joe and Lydia did. Then they divorced. The classic fodder for Amish sermons. See how it goes, when you leave? This kind of thing happens when you go out into “the world.” I know a little bit about how it is when you’re fodder for Amish sermons for reasons like that.

It’s impossible for me to tell how little I knew of Aunt Sarah or Joe and Lydia’s family, growing up. I can’t remember hearing the names of any of them, except in passing, maybe from my older siblings. Mom had a brother named Joe, who was completely English. And divorced, yet. They were pariahs, Sarah and Joe and Lydia, an embarrassment to the Wagler family name. They were Yoders, from Mom’s side. They were judged and reviled in my father’s world. And utterly scorned. It would take a long and broken road for me to travel to where this part of my family was.

The Camry swooshed along, like a rocket ship. The young Enterprise guy was right. I was impressed with the car from the first. When you had to back up, there was a camera on the dash that flashed to life with an amazingly clear live feed of what was behind you. And when you put the thing in cruise control, it wouldn’t get too close to the vehicle ahead. It slowed down on its own to the speed of the car in front, about a thousand feet back. Which was a little unhandy, because you had to get close to pass. By the end of the trip, I had figured out the car’s foibles. I would rent a Camry again. Of course, I’ll always happily drive a Charger, too. If it came to a choice between the two, well, the Charger looks just a little classier.

I didn’t figure there would be a lot of traffic on the roads on Easter Sunday. And there wasn’t. From the turnpike, I got on I-70 West. On and on, through Ohio into Indiana. It’s a long old stretch, out through there. By late afternoon, I was approaching Indianapolis. And here came a text from Kathy. She had the key to get me into my guest room. She would meet me at VU. But she was at her Mom’s house, there in Vincennes. And they had cooked up a big meal. There would be a plate for me when I got there. They wanted to feed me. OK, I texted back. I’ll let you know when I get close. And I thought about it. I was tired, from traveling all day. I didn’t know these people, Kathy’s Mom and sister. I wasn’t sure about walking into the house of a stranger to get fed. Still. They wouldn’t have invited me if they didn’t want me there. That’s what I told myself as the Camry pulsed through Indianapolis, then on west for an hour or more. Then south on State Road 41. Vencennes was coming right up.

It was a long time ago, when I first walked the streets of Vincennes as a student. Next year, it will be thirty years. There have been so many miles since that time. So many roads, some of them hard, broken roads. But still. I always feel a little sliver of anticipation and excitement slice through me when I approach that town. It was a big deal to me, when I first walked onto the campus at VU. A big deal. And time has distanced me from those days. The lights have dimmed a little. But that sliver of excitement always stirs inside when I return.

I texted Kathy. I’m getting close. She texted back. I’ll be waiting outside on the porch. And minutes later, I pulled up to the little house where her mother lives, just off Hart Street. The skies had darkened. A few random drops of rain were spitting down. I parked on the edge of the yard and got out. Kathy walked out. We greeted each other and hugged. I followed her into the house. And there I was greeted by total strangers. Kathy’s husband, Andrew Barbush. Her mother, Lydia. Her older sister, Laura. And her teenage son, Avann. They sat there in the dining room. I shook hands with all of them. They seemed excited and eager to see me. I took a seat at the table, and we talked.

I had not eaten all day. I’m still eating only my One Meal a Day (OMAD). And I wasn’t sure how it would go. I had not traveled much at all since starting OMAD last November. And it worked out great, I gotta say. All that day, I had sipped on water and black coffee. At precisely 5:00 PM, I swallowed my daily Superfood vitamin pill. That’s always the first thing I take, to “break my fast.” And now these people, these strangers, my cousins from my mother’s side, now they sat with me around that table. They had eaten earlier. But they asked. Would I like a plate of food? They had ham, and all the fixings. You bet I’d love that, I said. Laura dashed off to the kitchen. The rest of us sat there, just talking and catching up. Well, maybe getting acquainted is a better term. We sat there, getting acquainted. These people are sure easy to talk to, I thought to myself.

And soon Laura brought the food from the kitchen, a large plate loaded with sliced ham, potatoes, corn, greens. I was hungry, from not having eaten all day. I grabbed a fork and shoveled in bites as we talked. And I asked about their history, these people from my mother’s family. Joe Yoder’s ex-wife and children and a grandson. We talked like old friends who had known each other for a long time. It turned out I had met Joe once, at a cookout, probably back in 1986. Right after I had fled Bloomfield after breaking up with Sarah. I remember that evening faintly. I remember Joe, too, but I can’t recall his face. I remember hearing when he died, decades ago, at age fifty-eight. He “drank himself to death,” is what they said. I remember thinking. He’s a stranger to me. But he was my uncle. Here, in this room, here was his family. They were English, as I was. They had seen hard roads, as I had. Completely separated from each other, we had somehow found each other on this day. It’s funny, how that works sometimes.

I settled in and devoured my food. It was delicious. We talked hard and fast as I ate. I asked Lydia if she had a copy of my book. She had seen it, but she didn’t have one. So I walked out to the Camry and fetched a copy. I signed it to her. She smiled and smiled and thanked me. Kathy then rode with me over to VU to show me around and to get me settled in the guest house. We cruised around campus first. The place has expanded vastly, at least in buildings, since my time there. The old Humanities Building looked the same, though. And the parking lot where I used to park, it was about the same, too. We drove down to the river, where VU had cleaned up the banks and created a small park. Heavy rains had raised the river, and it was spitting rain that night, too.

And then I drove over to the VU Guest House, where the University offers rooms to VIP guests. Like me, I thought, and chuckled. Kathy was eager to check out the house, as she had not seen the inside of it. It’s a beautiful place, very tastefully furnished with a full kitchen, dining room, living room, and about four or five independent guest rooms upstairs. I was given the key to the Red Skelton room. I guess he was a native of Vincennes, so that’s why my room was furnished with many photos of a clown. Kathy helped me carry in my bags, and then I took her back to her mother’s house. And before too late that night, I settled into my comfortable bed in the Red Skelton room.

Monday. Moving along, here. The day came at me. There was an old friend I wanted to look up in town. I called him, and he gave me his address. We had connected on Facebook before I came, so he knew I was around. I left my cozy guest house and headed out to find a cup of black coffee, and gas up. Might as well get that done. Parts of Vincennes are a little run down, I thought as I pulled into a raggedy station. I forget the brand, some sort of Midwestern logo. I filled my tank and punched the button for my receipt. The decrepit little printer made squeaking noises, but failed to spit out any paper. Ah, come on, I groaned. You piece of junk. I was pretty irritated.

But I needed coffee anyway. So I walked in and poured a cup, strong and black. The attendant, a large busty blond woman, greeted me with a raspy smile. One cup of coffee, I said. And I need a receipt for Pump 4. She nodded, and printed the receipt and handed it to me. Thanks, I said. I owe you for the coffee. She smiled at me again, a big bright smile. “Ah, honey,” she said. She was a smoker or had been at one time. “Tell you what. Since you had to come in for your receipt, the coffee’s on us.” My irritation flashed out the window, whoosh, just like that. I smiled back at her. Thank you, I said. I appreciate that. And I did. It was a classy and cool thing to do. I thought happy thoughts as I drove away. It’s amazing how a simple little act like that can affect your frame of mind.

Twenty-nine years ago, I was an excited and eager student at Vincennes University. Before getting there, I had asked the University people. I need a room to board in, during the week. I’ll go back to my home in Daviess for the weekends. I don’t need an apartment or anything fancy. Just a room. And they had very kindly connected me with a guy who lived across town. He had a third floor attic room for rent, for a little bit of next to nothing. One fifty a month, or some such thing. I went and looked and rented the little attic room on the spot. And over the two-year window when attending VU, I boarded in my little room. I got to be good friends with the landlord. His name was Lyndon Phillippe. He was divorced and lived alone in the house with his adult son. There was room for one or two more. I had not seen the man since graduating from VU in 1991. And this morning, the morning of my free coffee, I was going to his home to visit.

We had connected on Facebook, back a number of years ago, Lyndon and me. He knew about my book. We had communicated a few times via instant message. He had wanted to come hear me speak this time, but he let me know up front that he probably wouldn’t be able to make it. Well, I said. If you can’t make it to hear me, I’ll come to you. And that morning, I went. I parked along the street outside the house he now lives in, about a block away from the one where I had rented that attic room. I walked up and knocked. The door opened. I would have recognized him, I think. He’s not that tall, and a little heavy set. His face looked about the same, just older. He greeted me and spoke my name and smiled. I smiled back and spoke his. We gripped hands, as we had not done since I told him good-bye in 1991.

He’s retired now, and he walks with a cane. I followed him inside. His house was cluttered, like it had always been. Stuff stacked about. Just like my house. I was instantly comfortable and at home. (At least those two shedding cats were gone. I asked about them, and he told me the details of the demise of each. I murmured sympathetically.) He sat in his favorite old worn armchair and I sat on the couch. And we caught up from almost thirty years, me and my old friend. He told me about his family, his son and daughter and their families. He showed me pictures of the grandkids on his computer. And we talked about knives and guns and pickup trucks and smoking pipes and such, the stuff men talk of when they hang out.

I stayed a while, over an hour. As we wound down, Lyndon handed me three treasures as gifts. Two Erik Nording freehand briar pipes, and a handmade hunting knife he had picked up decades ago at a swap meet. The pipes were works of art, the knife beautifully crafted. I tried to protest, a little weakly, but he waved me off. He wanted me to have these things. I thanked him and took the gifts. I will always treasure them, I told him. I signed his copy of my book, then. And I told him I’d send him a copy of my new book when it came out. He saw me to the door, and we shook hands again. And then I left.

So far, so good, here in Vincennes. Tuesday would be the big day. I had two speeches to make at the auditorium. But this was Monday. And Kathy had asked me. She worked at the Writing Center, there in the Humanities Building. A place where students came, to work on their writing. And she wondered. Would I consider coming by on Monday sometime, and give a talk about writing? Of course, I said. I’d like that. I strolled into the Center early, around 2:30. Kathy was sitting at her station. A few students sat about. I met Tyson, Kathy’s coworker, who was the tech guy. He would introduce me at my main speeches on Tuesday. But for now, we were here, a dozen people or so. Including a couple of VU professors. English teachers. Right at three, Kathy stood behind the little podium on the table, and introduced me. There was polite clapping as I stood to take the floor.

Writing. How does one speak of what it is to write? I told the students a little bit of how it went, back in 2007, when I started writing seriously. How I started posting on my blog after my marriage blew up. How I had never pushed myself out there, how the book came on its own, from me sitting at my corner desk and writing. And I told them. You write how you talk. At least I do. That’s why you see fragments in my book. Incomplete sentences that an English teacher would mark all up in red. Still. You speak from your heart. Don’t pay all that much attention to the rules. Just like you don’t when you talk. That’s what works for me, what has worked for me. I took questions, then, and expounded on what I think writing is. I wasn’t sure there was enough interest to keep me going for an hour. But the time whooshed right by, and four o’clock came. Time to wind down. If anyone has a book, I’ll gladly sign it. And they brought their copies. One down, I thought to myself. Two to go. Tomorrow. Two speeches.

We went out to eat, then. Kathy and her husband Andrew, and a few friends. At a nice little pub on the other side of town. I parked and walked up to the front door, and there was an old familiar face. One of my old professors at VU, Dr. Bernard Verkamp. The man spent his career teaching philosophy at Vincennes. I took a class he taught in all four of my semesters at VU. We had become good friends before I graduated. I knew he had retired, and was spending his time researching and writing. He looked about the same, just a bit older. As we all are, I suppose. I walked up and greeted him, smiling. We shook hands. It was a pleasant surprise to see my old friend. He’s still looking spry. “Call me Bernard,” he insisted. I laughed. It just don’t seem right, I said. To me, you are and will always be Dr. Verkamp. My professor and friend.

We were seated around a large table. Kathy told me to order what I wanted. VU was paying for my meal. So I ordered an appetizer, a steak and a couple of side dishes. No wine or whiskey, though. Just water to drink, with lemon. Dr. Verkamp sat across the table from me, and we instantly launched into a discussion of lots of things. The man weaves his philosophical thinking into every conversation. He asked how I have been doing, and what I’m thinking these days. Umm, I said. I am an anarchist in the classical meaning of the word. Not a black-clad thug, breaking windows and rioting. That’s what the media wants you to think anarchists are. In truth, we are the most peaceful of all peoples. We simply don’t believe in having anyone rule over us. No ruler. No king. (We do not dispute about the qualifications of a master; we will have no master. Cato’s Letters, No. 23) We stand by the non-aggression principle, or NAP. All aggressive force is always wrong, no matter where it comes from, the individual or the state. All defensive force is always justified, no matter who or what it’s against. I will leave you alone, always, to live in peace. But if you come at me to hurt me or mine, I will hit back at you so hard your head will spin. And you might die.

And I told him. It’s bred into who I am, from my Amish heritage. You never, never, never trust the state. Never. My people were hunted down like animals and killed by the state, the government. It is a vile, false idol. I will never bow my knee to it. I tend to get a little worked up, talking about it. The state is a monster. Dr. Verkamp nodded and looked interested. He wasn’t all that dubious, even. He asked what my religion is these days. I’m in the Reformed camp, I told him. A Calvinist, right across the board. It’s the freest thing I’ve found. He didn’t seem shocked by that, either. I don’t think the man would have been shocked at anything I might have said. He was always calm, that way. Like a good philosopher should be.

The food came, then, and we all feasted. I was hungry for my one meal. The steak was excellently done. And I even took dessert, a large slice of moist carrot cake and coffee. As we parted, Dr. Verkamp mentioned that he planned to come hear my talk the next day. Oh, boy, I thought. Now I’ll be judged by my old teacher. It was good, though. I was honored that he would take the time.

And it was back to my room at the Guest House, then. The Red Skelton room. A cold rain drizzled down. The weather had been unsettled all the way across the country. And I settled in to sleep again. Tomorrow was Tuesday. The big day, the day I had come for. And soon enough, it dawned. A clear morning. The sun shone nice and warm. I looked at my shirts and ties and pants. And settled for a nice white shirt, red power tie, and black dress pants. A patterned brownish jacket and black shoes. Pretty spiffy, I thought. I then stopped at McDonald’s for a good cup of black coffee. And by ten or so, I was in the Humanities Building on the VU campus. The Shircliff Building. That’s the name of the place where I took most of my classes as a student. I strolled into the auditorium, carrying my box of books. My friend Tyson was bustling about onstage, getting ready. There was a large wired podium off in the corner, but it looked like it was anchored to the floor. I asked Tyson. Where’s my podium? He shrugged. He didn’t know for sure. Eventually, we figured it out. We brought up a white folding table and set a small wooden podium on top of it. It was the right height, and comfortable to stand behind. Tyson allowed he could scare up a nice blue cloth to cover the table. And off he went to find it.

Kathy bustled in and out of the room, too. She had located a couple of mannequins and dressed one as an Amish woman, complete with bonnet, the other as an Amish man, complete with barn door pants and galluses. And a straw hat. The “man” wore a straw hat. I was impressed. Good backdrop, right there, I thought. The minutes ticked by as the time for my talk crept closer and closer. And soon, people began drifting in and seating themselves. The auditorium would be far from full. But there would be at least a few dozen students and other listeners. Kathy had found a short clip online that had been filmed about me back in 2012. The 700 Club people had stopped by for over a day. They had planned to run a short documentary on me and my book. Well. They got started with the film, but they quit about six minutes in. What is done is very beautiful and professional. But the clip just stops, cold. And Kathy had texted me the night before. Would it be OK if they ran that short clip as an introduction, before I spoke? Of course, I said. That would be great. I knew the clip was good stuff, but I also figured I would have to be onstage for at least six fewer minutes if they ran it. So it was a good deal all around, I thought.

Dr. Verkamp strolled in and took a seat toward the back, on the right side of the room, facing the stage. I waved at him. Other people, too, filed in and got seated. And promptly at eleven, Tyson walked onto the stage. After a brief but very complimentary introduction, he started the short six minute film. And there was my face, much larger than life, on the large wall screen behind the stage. After the film, Tyson walked on and said, “And now, here is Ira Wagler.” The people clapped as I walked to join Tyson. We shook hands, and I walked up behind the podium on the table, now covered with a nice blue cloth. I had laid out all my stuff, my notes, my glasses, and a book. And I had stacked a pile of books on each side of the table, facing out. It looked good. I held the mic and looked out over the room. Amazingly, I didn’t feel all that nervous. I began to speak.

Thank you all for being here. It is a huge honor for me to be invited to speak by Vincennes University. And right then, the mic went blank. Just shut off. Tyson walked back up and we fiddled with it a bit. It worked again, until I had spoken about two words. Then it blanked out again. I looked out over the room. It wasn’t that big, really. I come from the Amish, where the preachers have to shout across vast rooms filled with people, to speak their sermons. So I set the mic back on its stand. And I stood there behind my podium, behind my table, and just spoke to the people with the voice I had.

I have a fairly basic spiel, when I get up to speak in public about my book. I give a very condensed version of the story in my book, especially the parts about Rumspringa and leaving home. The talks are usually just a little different in details here and there, because there are so many bunny trails one can meander down. One day, it’s this trail. The next day, that one over there. And there are always new trails to find, too. I have a very rough outline to guide and nudge me along. Otherwise, it’s free talk, almost. And that’s what I did that day in that first speech at Vincennes. I looked back and remembered a good deal about my experience at the school, and wove that in, too. I’ve talked before dozens and dozens of groups. And it always goes better when I’m relaxed. Well, I was relaxed that day.

I went a bit overlong, though, because I thought the speech was supposed to last 90 minutes, all told. So I was geared for that. Tyson managed to politely signal and shut me down at just a little over an hour. Fifty minutes was more what they’re looking for. It was all good, though. I was very willing to shut down. And I signed a few books that people brought by, and sold a few of my own, too, there right after. I mingled for as long as anyone wanted to. Then I headed back to my room to rest a little. The skies were dark and dangerous when I parked and walked into my room. And soon, I heard the hard thumping on the roof of the house. What in the world? I pulled back a curtain and looked out the window. Great white clumps of ice were raining down, hard. They bounced off the pavement and they bounced off cars. Including my Camry, sitting out there all unprotected.

A quick little bunny trail, here, about another gas station. I had seen the sign, when I came in along sixth street earlier that day. At Huck’s. A big banner out front. Livers and Gizzards: $3.98. It made my mouth water, just the thought. And that afternoon I broke my fast a half hour early. At 4:30. I had to speak at six. So I thought, eat a little early and get that food settled in before. I drove out to Huck’s and sauntered in, all dressed up for my speech. A black vest with black pants and a white Steampunk shirt with blue dots and a dark blue tie with stripes. Which is better than a striped shirt with a striped tie going opposite. Well, according to some people, it is. Not me, necessarily. I get a lot of flack from certain friends about wearing stripes with stripes. Striped shirt, solid tie. That’s what they keep hollering at me. I just smile at them. I like opposite stripes. Just not that day. I can wear about whatever and get away with it. People expect a writer to be a little weird, dress a little different. So that perception helps.

And that was a bunny trail in a bunny trail, right there. I sauntered into Huck’s, all dressed up, and asked for an order of Livers and Gizzards. The young attendant didn’t think that strange at all. He piled my little container high, as far up as he could stack. I paid the guy, took my precious cargo and walked over and sat at the side bar to eat. Sprinkle a little mustard on those fried chicken innards, and eat them with a plastic fork. That’s what I did. That little meal right there I wouldn’t trade for the finest steak and caviar, if those two things are even served on the same table. You can’t find fried food like this in Lancaster County. They’re too stuck up and blue-blooded. I enjoyed every bite of my feast, right down to the last crumb.

And soon enough, I was back at the campus, getting ready for my second speech that day. I now know a little bit how a preacher feels, if he has to preach at two services on the same day. I mean, I was talking about the same things both times. Just a little different trail, maybe. Kathy had told me, early on. My Aunt Sarah was planning on coming to hear me speak. She wasn’t sure which one. We had to see what the weather brought. The weather was bad through much of Tuesday. But by evening, it had cleared. And they arrived together, the people from Mom’s family. Aunt Sarah. And Joe’s ex-wife, Lydia and her daughter, Laura, and a couple of grandchildren.

“We need to take a picture with all of us in it,” Kathy said. I agreed. Yes. We definitely need to get that done. I met them as they walked up to us. Aunt Sarah hugged me. She’s 93 years old, the only one left in Mom’s immediate family. She’s been a widow now for many years. I hugged Lydia, too, and Laura. I greeted all of them. Kathy and Aunt Sarah, I had seen and spoken to both of them many times before. All the others in the group were complete strangers to me when I arrived in Vincennes. We lined up and seated ourselves on a couple of rows of seats and smiled for the camera.

My Mother’s blood. Front, from L: Laura Yoder, Sarah McGuire, Lydia Yoder.

Rear, from L: Ira, Kathy Yoder Barbush, Leah Bullock, Avann Mickens.

And then people trickled in. Some of them I knew, and some of them I got to know later. The crowd was small, probably the same size that had attended earlier that day. I looked out and recognized some of the Wagler family from Daviess, the people who had taken me in back in those frantic days when I was running hard. Dean and his wife, Wanda. And Rhoda and her husband, Marlin. I smiled in wonder. Old friends, from way back. They came. I connected with them later. They had seen the little blurb in the newspaper that afternoon. And they had dropped everything and come to see me.

Tyson did his little introduction and played the short film again. And then he called my name. I walked onstage for the second time in a few short hours. We shook hands, and he gave me the mic. Supposedly it had been fixed. Sadly, it had not. It didn’t even pretend to work at all. So I set it aside again. And I just talked to the people again. This time, I was highly conscious of the clock. After about forty minutes or so, I opened for questions. There are usually plenty of those. As there were that night, too. A few minutes in, someone in the back asked about the relationship my parents had. About how Dad had kept Mom from her family. There is a brief mention of that fact, early in the book.

I forget the exact wording of the question. And my response was not planned at all. But it hit me right then and there. They were here. Mom’s blood. Mom’s family. The two siblings whose names were never mentioned. They were here, or their blood was. And I stopped for a little bit and thought of how to say the words. I gathered them in order, in my head. Just speak your heart. That’s all you have to do. It’s all you can do, at this point. And I stammered a bit and fumbled with the words. But they came.

Yes, I said. It’s mentioned early in the book, how Dad took Mom and moved her away from her family. It’s true, that he cut her off from them. And tonight, they are here, some of that family. Mom’s people. They are sitting right out here in front. Those two short rows. I pointed. I went on. These people are my family. They are my blood. It was not right, what my father did to keep us apart. It was wrong. And tonight, I claim them as family. Our relationship will never be what it would have been, and it will never be what it should have been, had we not been kept apart. But it can still be strong and beautiful. Family is family, and blood is blood.

And I didn’t really think that much about it, right there when it happened. It only hit me later, kind of sideways, upside the head. How symbolic and significant that moment was. It will affect the narrative in the book I’m working on right now, I’m thinking. And, yeah. My voice shook a little. And yes, I fumbled for the words. But they were spoken, and they were spoken in public. I rejected the actions my father took so many years ago. He did what he thought was right. But he was flawed, as we all are. It wasn’t right, to cut Mom’s people off like that. It was wrong. My family will always be my family. I don’t care how many broken roads any of them walked, getting to where they are. Family is family, and blood is blood. It will always be. I mourn for those who are trapped in the grip of harsh and zealous judgment, those who have never opened their hearts to this simple and powerful truth.

After a few more questions, I wrapped up the talk. Read a favorite quote from Thomas Wolfe. And I thanked the people who had come. Everyone clapped. And then Kathy walked onstage. She handed me a little bowl of tickets. Everyone had been given a ticket with a number, coming in. Now we would draw to give away four signed copies of my book. I shook the basket, mixed up the token tickets. Pulled one and read the number. A winner. Then another. And another winner. I read the third number. Aunt Sarah gasped, loud enough for the room to hear. “Well, that’s mine!” Aunt Sarah won a book, I said, cheering. Let’s all give her a hand. And we did. Later, I signed all the copies brought to me, and I also posed with Aunt Sarah. I would have gladly given her a book anyway, but I was happy for her, that she won one. And I was so, so honored that she came.

Aunt Sarah, holding the book she won.

Wednesday morning dawned. I was up early. By six, I had loaded my bags and hit the road. I texted Kathy on the way out. Thank you so much for everything. I had a super great time. I left the keys on the kitchen island, and the door to the house is unlocked. She texted back. Thanks for being here. I pushed hard that day, on the road. At precisely five that afternoon, I pulled into my drive in New Holland. Eleven hours. That’s how long it takes to drive from Vincennes to my home.

The next morning, I returned the Camry on my way to work. I was sipping my black coffee and thinking pleasant thoughts. The car had been real nice to drive. I won’t ever grumble if they give me a Camry instead of a Charger. I parked and walked in. Another customer was checking out a vehicle. So I waited for my turn.

The young Enterprise guy took my keys and went out to inspect the Camry for potential damage. He wasn’t gone long. He walked back in, looking a little excited. And he asked. “Did you drive through any hail?” I thought for a moment, then nodded. As a matter of fact, there was a hail storm, yes, I said. On Tuesday afternoon. Why? And he took me out and showed me. If you held your head just right and looked, you could see. My car had about thirty pronounced little dents on the hood, the roof, and the trunk. That all right there was going to take some fixing. But there was nothing to worry about, the nice young man assured me. My special insurance would take care of it. There wasn’t even any paperwork to fill out. No claims to sign. I just took my receipt and walked out and boarded Amish Black and drove off.

And right that moment, I was pretty astounded. I still am. Either the Lord is looking out for me, or I’m just walking free. I think that’s it. I’m walking free. The thing is, I work for Him. He doesn’t work for me. Whatever comes along is just fine. I’m not looking for any special little things to happen, but I’m thankful to the Giver of all gifts when they do. And this little trip to Vincennes was a gift, all right. From the moment I walked out the door of my house until the moment I walked back in. And right up through the moment I returned my rental car. It was all a gift, freely given. And a gift freely received, with a grateful heart.

And I gotta say. It’s a beautiful thing, to walk free like that. Even on broken roads.

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Vagabond Traveler: Amish Black

The sight of these closed golden houses with their warmth of life

awoke in him a bitter, poignant, strangely mixed emotion of exile

and return, of loneliness and security, of being forever shut out…

of being so close to it that he could touch it with his hand…

—Thomas Wolfe

_________________

It was a lazy Saturday, a few weeks ago. And I didn’t have much of anything particular on my mind. Well, other than normal, I mean. I’d stop by the home of some of my good Amish friends for coffee that afternoon. The late February skies were spitting random specks of snow and drops of rain when I pulled into their drive around two, all spiffy in my new black Jeep. I showed myself in through the first door and walked up the stairs and knocked.

The housewife opened the inner door and smiled in welcome. “Come on in.” I smiled back and thanked her, then took a seat at the kitchen table at my usual spot. And the housewife walked to a doorway and called into the back room, where her husband was working in his office. I heard the words clearly, even though she wasn’t talking to me. “Ira is here,” she said. “Come for coffee. Then we will go shopping with Amish Black.”

Amish Black. Oh, my, I thought. Where did she come up with that? Was that my new nickname, now? You never know, around these Amish places, what they’re calling you behind your back. It was fine, though. Nobody meant anything bad, I was sure. But still. I asked her. What in the world is Amish Black?

“Your Jeep,” she said. (She might as well have said, “Duh.” But she didn’t. She just explained the obvious to a simpleton.) “Your Jeep. It’s Amish Black.”

I laughed. Oh, my. I said. I’m not quite sure how I feel about you naming my Jeep like that. I guess if it sticks, it sticks. She smiled. She didn’t say it, but thought it, I’m sure. “What do you mean, if it sticks? Of course, it will stick.”

We sat at the table and drank our coffee and caught up with our visiting. And then I took them on their Saturday afternoon shopping run, in Amish Black. First, our usual stop at Miller’s Health Foods, on the other side of Monterey. And then on to Lantz’s Discount Groceries just outside Leola. As is the custom, I got to sneak a few items into the cart, that my friends paid for. The perks of hauling Amish around, I guess. And it was a little tight, having a person in the back seat with boxes and bags of groceries. There’s not a lot of room in a two-door Jeep, not the kind of room Big Blue had. But we made it work.

And I have thought about it a lot since that day. The name the housewife gave my Jeep. Amish Black. It sure has a ring to it. And that ring might echo all the way to the title of the book I’m working on sporadically these days. It’s catchy, and people will remember. Amish Black. File those two words away in your head. You’ll see them again down the road, I’m thinking.

A few days later, then, the next week at work. An Amish builder walked in one morning to order a few items. He’s young married. I’ve known him, or at least known who he was, since he was a kid, going to work with his Dad. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I spoke his name. He spoke mine. And we chatted for a few minutes, before I realized something was different. I looked closer. He was all cleaned up, with stubbled face, and wearing an English denim jacket. Which is no big deal, for the Lancaster Amish. Around here, the young guys dress about half English, anyway. I glanced outside. There was no driver sitting in his Suburban, waiting, like Amish drivers do. He had driven himself.

He’s a quiet guy, and a little shy. So I slipped it in, after we had written up what he came for. So how long have you been driving? He grinned. “A few months,” he said. And I asked him how it went. I remembered his father well, he was a good friend of mine. He passed away unexpectedly several years ago, the father did.

And I remembered a little thing that happened, soon after my book came out. The father, who will remain unnamed, stopped in one day for some materials. I was gone that day. He placed his order, then asked about buying one of Ira’s books. My coworkers told the man. “Ira is gone today, but we can sell you a copy.” The father considered the offer for a moment. Then he shook his head. “I’ll wait, and get it from Ira,” he said. I was touched, later, when they told me. The next time the father stopped in, he bought a signed copy of my book. I never forgot.

And now, here stood his youngest son, or close to the youngest. He was the first in his family to leave the Amish. It had to be hard on his widowed mother, I figured. Not that I mentioned any such thing. I just asked how it’s going with the family. He smiled again, a little shyly, and my heart went out to him. “They’re taking it pretty hard,” he said. “I haven’t seen any of them in a while. But they’ll get over it, I think.”

I nodded. Yeah, I said. I hear that. I know how it is, a little bit, to walk that road.

Another weekend came, then. The Saturday before, I had stopped at the thrift shop over in Leola. I rarely do that, but that day I had a few minutes for a quick walk-through. I found a pair of brand new khakis, just my size. (Well, my new size, since my One Meal a Day diet.) Tommy Hilfigers, still with tags. 38 x 32s. They’d never been worn. I shelled out the $4, and dropped them off at the dry cleaners. I got them back the next Saturday and tried them on. The waist fit fine, but they were one fold too long at the bottom. I grumbled to myself. Come on, the tag lied. It was what it was, though. I thought about my options. And I settled on a plan.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled my Jeep into the drive of the home of some Amish friends, where I often stop for coffee on a Saturday morning. No, this is not the place where my Jeep was unceremoniously dubbed Amish Black. This here was another couple I’ve known for years and years. I count them among the best of all my friends, anywhere. That’s how well I know them, how long I’ve been coming around. I parked and knocked on the front door. It was almost lunch time, but they knew I wasn’t hedging around for food, what with my One Meal a Day and all. (And yes, I still feel fantastic, every day. And no, not a drop of alcohol since late August. Knocking on wood, here.) After greeting everyone and visiting a bit, I laid my khakis on the table. And I told the goodwife. Esther, I said. These pants are too long. I have a flicca job for you (Flicca means mending in PA Dutch.). She took the pants from me and I showed her. One fold up, inside or out. That’s all I need done.

She scoffed. “Inside is where you want it folded, not outside,” she said. “Do you want to look like Farmer Brown, with your pant legs rolled up?” No, I said weakly. But an outside cuff can be stylish, too. She scoffed some more. OK, I said. Inside it is, then. I’ll just leave them here and pick them up next week sometime.

“What’s wrong with right now?’ She asked. And the woman unlimbered her sewing machine and got to work with nimble hands. The sewing machine hummed and clacked. She snipped away at the thread, and it was done in ten minutes or so. I sat and visited with them all, there at the table. And then I hemmed a bit and said I must be going. I thanked the goodwife, took my Hilfigers, and left. And I thought to myself, as I was driving along in my Jeep. I bet there’s not a lot of single guys out there who got such good connections as I have, to get stuff like this done while you wait. I mean, it really is quite remarkable.

The days rolled on, then. And looking back, I can’t quite remember that such a thing ever happened before, there at work. A husband and wife stopped in to price some snow guards for the roof of their pole building. The building package had come from Graber a few years ago, through a local contractor. They really liked it, they both claimed. But all that snow this winter coming off the roof tore the gutters right off the building. So they wanted snow guards. I priced what they asked for, the stainless steel snow guards we stock. They got to telling me, then. They needed someone to install the snow guards, and there was some more repair work other buildings to do, too, from the snow damage. I was writing up their invoice, when the door opened and another man walked in.

He came right up to the counter and interrupted us. Inserted himself, is more like it. He wasn’t shy at all. He was just driving by, he told me, and he wanted to stop and thank me for referring my Amish contractor friend, Levi, a few months ago. He had called different people who claimed to do remodeling work, and no one would pay him any attention, or give him a quote. Until he called my buddy, Levi. He came out, he gave a quote, and then he came and did the work. Levi did what he said he would, and he did it right. The first couple looked on and listened with extreme interest. Then they got to asking the second man. Who was this Levi, and what had he done for the guy? They were looking for someone, too, to come and do repairs on the snow damage on their pole building.

The second man jumped at the open door. He got all dramatic and descriptive, all of a sudden. He waved his hands this way and that. And he told the man and wife. He had almost despaired of finding a contractor. Then he stopped in and talked to Ira, here. (A wave at me.) And Ira connected him to Levi. The man then pulled out his smart phone with a flourish. He had before and after pictures. He whipped them up on the screen. The husband and wife “ooh’d” and “aah’d.” The first pic showed a dilapidated old building, on the verge of collapse. The second pic showed a beautiful building, all new and dressed up and gleaming with painted metal roofing and siding from Graber. I didn’t even have to say much, other than exclaim at the contrast the pictures showed. The second man did all my selling for me. The husband and wife practically salivated. They wanted Levi’s phone number. They were going to call him right away. I wrote the information on the back of my business card and gave it to them. Mention my name, when you call Levi, I told them. He’ll take care of you. It could have been a scene in a movie.

They all walked out then, and I saw the second guy standing there, talking and waving his arms with great vigor, practically accosting the other couple. He was still selling for me and Levi, right out there in the parking lot. You can only shake your head in disbelief when such a thing as that comes at you. I mean, the timing has to be perfect. I just smile and look to God with a grateful heart for all the little blessings flowing around me in the course of an ordinary day.

Another weekend came, and I went on an adventure. There was a gun show at the Harrisburg Farm Show Complex. It had been a few years since I attended a gun show. Pre-Sandy Hook, I think. And that was in 2012. I called my buddy Amos, the horse dentist, the day before. Hey, it’s been a while since we hung out. Do you want to go the gun show with me tomorrow? Of course he did. The place opened at 9:00, we got there around 9:30. There was a long line outside, about four people wide and several thousand feet long, snaking halfway back around the building. It took us half an hour to get in. Many stern signs warned. NO PICTURES. STRICTLY ENFORCED. I couldn’t blame the show organizers for that. All kinds of whack job leftists would be taking all kinds of unflattering photos and posting them with false narratives as fake news.

Amos and I went our separate ways and agreed to meet up front around noon. I strolled about, taking my time. I am very much at home at a gun show. The place was packed out with a very diverse crowd. There were a surprising number of women (that’s my kind of woman, right there, someone who is totally comfortable around guns), and I saw several young couples holding toddlers or pushing a baby carriage. Getting’em started young, there. I loved it. Warmed my heart, it did.

And I looked at all those people. Young and old, and every age between. Graybeards, moonshiners, rum runners, and just plain old country redneck working class, a lot of them were. Plenty of professional people mixed in there, too. And I thought about it. These were the people who voted Trump into office. Salt of the earth, they were, the kind of people who would feed you if you were hungry. They’d shoot you, too, if you tried any stupid stuff with them. And these were the people the left is determined to disarm, with their silly little high school walkouts. It’s so ludicrous and so wrong, that young people are being manipulated into marching and demanding to give up their rights. Only a brainwashed people would do or support such a thing. Shades of “1984.” It simply boggles the mind. Whatever the brainwashed students think they’re “marching” for, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. The left will keep trying, though. Disarming the common folks will always be a wet dream to people who love and worship the vile false god that is the state.

I bought a few odds and ends, stuff I didn’t really need. But you gotta get something at a gun show. I did pick up my first ever Zero Tolerance assisted-open knife at a better price than I’ve ever seen on the internet. So that was my splurge for the day. I overheard snippets of conversation, here and there. One old vendor stood behind his tables loaded with long guns and other shooting stuff for sale. The man had a magnificent gray beard flowing all the way down to his chest. I overheard him chatting with a prospective customer. “Yeah,” he said. “My wife is a vegan.” The customer looked startled, and I hung close, straining to hear what Graybeard would say next. He chuckled. “Yep,” he said. “She’s a vegan, she is. People are surprised when I tell them. We make it work.” I drifted on, then, as the old man muttered illogically. “I sure do love my dog.”

Hey. That’s the kind of scene you see and hear at a gun show. Amos and I met up, then, and headed out for home. It was great, just to catch up with my old friend. Amos has some really fascinating theories about Amish blood and Amish history. He makes a lot of sense, too, I gotta say.

And the next day was a Sunday. The Amish had church at a farm about a mile from Chestnut Chapel that morning. I saw all the buggies parked in rows on my way to church. And I saw their service was over as I was heading home from mine. A young Amish girl had just left and was walking home along the side of the road toward me, in my lane. She was a teenager, maybe twenty, and she was alone. Her face glowed with life and health and joy. She smiled and waved at me as I approached and passed. I waved back, pleased and a little startled. I’m not used to seeing pretty young Amish girls waving at me for no particular reason. But then the realization clobbered me over the head like a sledgehammer.

She wasn’t waving at my handsome bearded face or my Territory Ahead shirt and matching tie or my Burberry trench coat. She was waving at Amish Black.

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Old Order Mennonites and Me…

We are the sum of all the moments in our lives – all that

is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.

—Thomas Wolfe

_____________________

It was a nippy spring morning, almost twenty years ago. Still early enough in the year to be cold. Mid to late March, if I remember right. And I had a “home” appointment that morning, over close to Ephrata. The client had called. He needed a Will, and he wanted someone to stop by. We made arrangements. And I set out from the office where I worked as an attorney, in suit and tie every day. Not that I would have needed to be all dressed up. Where I was going, they wouldn’t be that impressed. That’s because my client was an Old Order Mennonite.

I trundled down Rt. 322 in the little white Dodge Spirit I was driving at the time. And then off on a side road. There was no GPS back then, so I slowed as I got close. Looked for the mailbox number. And there it was. The farm. A little more raggedy and unkempt than neighboring Amish farms. The Old Order Mennonites don’t rush out with a rake to attack every leaf as it flutters down from a tree, like the Lancaster Amish do. So their farms look a little more rough. More like the places I grew up in. Well used. Make do until it wears out. The barn roof might well have two or three different colors of metal. The OOMs are more about functionality, and less about neatness. Which is totally OK. I understand the concept, and I understand the mindset.

I pulled in the drive and parked. Got out. Straightened my suit coat and tie. Then I walked up the cracked and uneven walkway to the house. It looked battered and old, like the barn. A few lean cats lurked about. And a dog, too, whined inquisitively. Not that great a watchdog, are you? I muttered. I walked up the steps and stumped across the wooden porch floor. Knocked on the weathered wood door. From inside, the sound of faint stirrings. And then the door opened. An old man stood, peering out at me. Well, he wasn’t old, necessarily. Older, I’d say, in his sixties, probably. Beardless, in plain shirt and barn door pants with galluses. He was lean, and you could tell he was fit. He looked at me with a half-smile on his wizened, stubbled face.

I greeted him. I’m Ira Wagler. I have an appointment about a Will. “Oh, yes,” he said. And he opened the door wider and motioned me in. “Come on in, and we’ll sit at the kitchen table.” I thanked him and stepped through the door into another world.

The room was drab, colorless. It was nippy outside, and it was downright chilly inside. Near as I could tell, there was no heat at all anywhere. By the wall in the kitchen stood an old dry sink. And it was ancient, probably worth a small fortune. Still used every day, just like it had been since the time it was made. The housewife smiled from across the room, where she was working at something, sewing or ironing. She got up and walked over to join us. Over in the corner, an old woman sat motionless, as if frozen, huddled in a shawl. She was actually old, and she looked cold. No. She was cold. The grandmother of the house. I didn’t see any grandfather. Probably passed on. The OOMs take care of their own, like the Amish do. It was like stepping into a Whistler painting, that moment. Stark contrasts and stark shadows, but only in the earthy tones of black and shades of brown and pale green.

We sat there at the kitchen table, me and the man and his wife. The old crone in the corner sat, huddled, silent, unmoving. I sneaked a glance her way now and then, as we talked there at the table. The whole scene kind of gave me shivers. It was a threadbare existence, the lives these people lived. Threadbare, like this old house. And I am not criticizing. I’m simply opining, from what I saw that day. What you are is how you live.

We chatted. Made small talk. I think I spoke in PA Dutch, at least some. I do that a lot more freely around the OOMs than I do around the Amish. The Amish glance at you, all startled, if you speak to them in their language. And then they start mumbling uncomfortable questions about whether you ever were a member of their church. If you were, are you now excommunicated? If you are, we can’t deal with you. That’s how it goes, with the Amish. The OOMs could not care less, if you were ever a member of any church but their own. And it’s pretty plain to any insider that I wasn’t. So I let down my guard and speak PA Dutch to them a lot more.

I went through the usual list of things I need to know to write a Will. Full names, including middle initials. Full names of the Executors, Guardians, and Trustees, if there are any. After I took down all my notes, we visited a little. I asked a bit about their history. Their lives, their stories, who they were. And somehow, the old man got to telling me about the day he bought this farm, way back when they were young married.

It happened a long time ago. The farm was sold at auction. And it was located right in the community where the young marrieds lived, or wanted to. The old man leaned in, across the table, as he talked. He was sitting right there, across from me. But in his mind, he was seeing a big thing that happened a lifetime ago. The bidding went hard and fast that day. And before he knew it, the price was up and above what he had planned to pay. But he counseled with his wife. And his Dad. They kept bidding. Higher and higher. And then the sale was knocked off. The old man had done it. Back in that day, when he was young, he paid a record price for a farm in that immediate area. He spoke the price. I forget what it was. Compared to the farm’s value today, it was barely a pittance.

And it was what happened after the sale, it was what happened then that the old man remembered. The wound stabbed down deep, and he felt the pain as vividly on the day he told me as he had felt it forty years before, when it happened. He and his wife were standing around, after their high bid on the farm. Kind of shy and unsure of themselves. And a neighboring OOM man came up to them. I think the man’s name was mentioned, but it wasn’t important to me. What was important was what the neighbor man said.

That day, that morning, the old man leaned across the kitchen table, as close to in my face as he could get. His wife sat, smiling self-consciously. She had heard this tale a thousand times before, over the years, I have no doubt. And the old man asked dramatically. “Do you know what that neighbor man told me, that day? Do you know what he said?” No, I said, shaking my head, but not acting too eager. No, I don’t know. What did the neighbor man tell you?

The old man paused, once again. He was back there, and he was reliving a pain he had dragged along with him through all the ensuing years. And the words came rolling from him, he almost spit them out. “He said, he told me. The neighbor man said, You’ll NEVER get this farm paid for.”

And the old man leaned back, sitting there at the kitchen table, looking for me to make the proper noises. Obviously, he had paid the farm off. He would have worked himself to death if he had to, just to prove that neighbor man wrong. He didn’t have to. Not physically, anyway. Emotionally, I think something had died in the old man a long time ago, because he had allowed the cruel words someone said to take root in him in a way that deeply affected him all through his life. You gotta feel a little sorry, to see someone suffering so senselessly like that.

Still. What he had told me, well, I just gaped at him. Good Lord. Why would any person go up to a young couple who just bought a farm at auction, and spew such brutal words? It didn’t surprise me all that much, though. That’s the kind of thing an Old Order Mennonite might say. They can be blunt and cutting. That’s what I thought to myself.

Old Order Mennonites. They’re a strange breed of people. And yeah, I know. That’s a mouthful, coming from a guy who came from the Amish. I mean, how much more strange are you going to get than that? But the OOMs are different, there is no question. What that means to you depends entirely on your experience and perspective. I see them as people who are a little peculiar in their ways. As they see me, I suppose, and as they have every right to do.

It’s different blood. Way back, before the radical firebrand, Jacob Ammon, got all slap-happy with his banning and shunning of any group he had the slightest conflict with, way back then, it was all one big happy family. Then Ammon broke away. And the people who followed him became a distinct people, all on their own. The Amish. The Mennonites who didn’t leave, they slouched back and licked their wounds. Ammon cut a wide swath with his condemnations. You don’t agree with me? I’ll show you. You’re excommunicated, you and all your blood. And shunned, as worse than a whoremonger. I banish you to judgment and hell. That’s how Ammon worked. He was not a nice man.

And today, you got lots of levels of Mennonites out there. Lancaster County has them all. From high-strung, whack-job, leftist, state-worshiping gun grabbers, all the way over to Plain horse and buggy Old Orders. And every shade between. All claim the heritage and legacy of good old Menno Simons, who would be extraordinarily startled, I think, could he return for a day and see for himself who his “followers” are.

I don’t know the detailed history of the Old Order Mennonites. I suppose one could google much of it. I can only speak from my perspective, and the things I have seen and lived and felt. The OOMs have surnames that are nonexistent or extremely rare among the Amish. Names like Martin, Weaver, Sauder, Shank, Reiff, Nolt, Shirk, Newswanger, Oberholtzer, and a host of others. Their culture is distinct, as are their physical builds and the bone structures of their faces. You leave either group, the OOMs or the Amish, and I can usually tell that you did, no matter how long ago you left or how English you try to look. I can tell which group you came from by how you act and how you talk. Almost always, I can. It’s just an insider’s perception.

It’s fascinating to me, that another group held onto a Plain lifestyle, all on its own. The defining moment in the OOMs, as with the Amish, happened when the group rejected the automobile. That was one of the few things in the two groups that were similar. Otherwise, both developed on their own. And they sure developed different.

They were there in my Aylmer world from my earliest memories, the OOMs. I think they have numerous settlements in Ontario and a few other locations in Canada. Elmira is the place I remember. They connected with Dad, at least a few of them did. And they visited back and forth some, my parents and their OOM friends. I remember the men as wiry and lean and dark clad, with hard thin faces shadowed from the stubble of decades of shaving. They wore short-brimmed black hats and spoke in singsong voices. Their women tended to be plump, and they wore patterned, flowery dresses and white head coverings and funny little pointed black bonnets. Dad and Mom went to the OOM church services, even, when they visited there. I remember them talking about how it went. It was all very different than Amish services. Starting with a church house. OOMs congregate in church houses.

A little bit of an aside, because now my memory roams ever wider back there in my childhood in Aylmer. There was a fairly strange Mennonite man named Menno Sauder who used to come around in his little black car. He looked and talked exactly like the OOMs, except he drove a car. I don’t know if Menno had joined a “Black Bumper” car church, or if he had just struck out as a renegade on his own. He was an intellectual eccentric. A writer of sorts. He cranked out little religious tracts and exceedingly dry tomes of dogma and doctrine. I can still see his little black car parked under the trees by the sand box beside our looped gravel drive just west of the house. I don’t think he ever stayed for the night. But he came around often enough that I remember his name and his face.

When Menno Sauder died, Dad and Mom went to his funeral. I think this was before we moved out of Aylmer, although I can’t say for sure. It doesn’t matter, I guess. I know my parents went, and I know Menno got a full-fledged OOM funeral. Maybe he had recanted and rejoined before passing. I think that’s what happened. Anyway, Mom told us what the preacher had said at Menno’s funeral. In his sermon, the preacher proclaimed that Menno always was so faithful and tireless in his efforts. He fished and fished. Nobody fished harder than Menno. But sadly, he always fished from the wrong side of the boat. That’s what the preacher said. The wrong side of the boat. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I never forgot that phrase. And Mom never really let on, whether she agreed with the preacher man or not. She was just telling us what he had said.

My family moved to Bloomfield, Iowa, in 1976. And we left the world of the Old Order Mennonites behind. There were none in the Midwest. Well, that’s not quite accurate. There was a fledgling Black Bumper settlement just south of us, in Rutledge, Missouri. Black Bumpers are pretty much OOMs with cars. Kind of like the Beachys are Amish with cars, I guess. Back then, there were no OOM settlements anywhere close to Bloomfield. There have been several large groups settling in Kentucky, I’m not sure of exactly where in that state. And in central Missouri, too, I know there’s at least one settlement. The lure of cheaper land led many OOMs on an exodus from Lancaster County to places like Virginia and Kentucky and Missouri and Penn Yan, New York.

We moved to Bloomfield in 1976. I broke away for the final time sometime in 1988. A twelve-year stretch, there, where I saw enough personal turmoil to last several lifetimes. And during those desperate years of hard and frantic running, the OOMs were just about as far removed from my mind and consciousness as they could have been. And they stayed that way until I wandered into the historic, blue-blooded lands of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

It’s seems a little astonishing, looking back. After more than a decade of angst and turmoil and hard running and fractured dreams, I finally broke free from my people. And within two years, I meandered right back into one of the oldest and largest Amish communities in the world. Lancaster County. I liked it. Here, I thought, here at last is a place where I can rest. I will never live the life of my people, but at least I can live among them. It was a comforting and natural thing.

I connected with the youth group at Pequea Amish Mennonite Church. Beachys. The youth were polite and accepting of me, a traumatized guy who had drifted in from the Midwest. I will always remember those first few summers as some really good days. I enjoyed the youth, and I enjoyed their activities. I participated in organized softball games for the first time ever, in my life. The Pequea church was always cutting edge Beachy. Always on the forefront of hard-won progress. They still are, from what I hear told. Not that I hang there, anymore, anywhere close to that world. Haven’t for decades. I recently heard that the Pequea Beachy Amish church allowed its women to discard their covering strings. Just snip them off and throw them away. Oh, my. Slipping fast, they are, there at Pequea. Like Waylon sings. Slippin’ and a’sliden, playing dominoes.

Anyway. I soon became aware, after I came to Lancaster. There is a large community of Old Order Mennonites here. They settled back when the Amish did, or real close to that time. So the footprints of these people and their ways are woven into the very fabric of the land. The Pequea youth had a term for the OOMs. Maudy. Which is Martin, in PA Dutch. It was a derogatory term, kind of. When you called someone a Maudy, you were talking trash a little bit. And you were calling that person a few different things, none necessarily pleasant.

Some years ago, I heard where the term came from. Maudy. The Amish are scattered pretty much all through the county. The OOMs live up north. North of Rt. 23 is their country. The further north you go, the thicker they get. The Amish and the OOMs live side by side a lot, where they overlap. And mostly, they get along. They share their school houses, send their children to the same schools. They mingle there, but that’s one of the few places where they do. They never, never intermarry, not unless they leave the Plain culture. Even then, it’s very rare for someone from Amish and OOM blood to connect in marriage. It happens, but just not often. The two cultures are too different, I figure. And there is an undercurrent of one-upmanship out there, too. Not with the older people, so much. You get battered by life, and you let such things go, mostly, I think. But with the youth, there is. And this is the story I was told.

At the local farm sales and mud sales in spring, the Amish youth and the OOM youth played Cornerball, a form of Dodgeball. It was a tradition for generations. I think the game recently got banned in some venues, because it got too violent. And in the heat of these competitions, decades ago, the OOM youth took to calling their Amish counterparts a derogatory name. O-mish. Which in PA Dutch roughly translates into the word, manure. Misht is manure. The OOM boys chuckled and chanted, as they hurled the stinging Dodgeball. “O-mish, O-mish” (Oh, manure, oh, manure). The Amish boys looked grim. They wouldn’t stand for that, not for long. And soon they came up with a chant of their own.

I don’t know who first said it. But it’s the term that stuck. At least part of it. The Amish chanted back the name, Martin, in PA Dutch. Maudy. But they added a word. Maudy-poopers. The O-mish word got lost over the years, as did the “pooper” part of the Maudy taunt. But Maudy stuck. And in all honesty, I can’t confirm that any part of this tale is actually true. It sounds like something that probably happened. So there it is. That’s why OOMs are called Maudys, if you ask me.

The OOMs are distinct when it comes to Plain cultures. And an undercurrent washes through, a hint of meanness, and a cantankerous character. You can dig into their history a little bit, and see. They have had splits and splinter groups and all manner of harsh disagreements. There have been fights about contract disputes, boundary lines, and whether there will be preaching from a pulpit at the church house. I’ve heard the echoes of the stories.

There are at least three levels of Old Order Mennonites. Joe Wengers are the most common. (and there’s another very important OOM surname. Wenger.) Then there’s the Pikers, who are very plain. The Thirty-Fivers are the latest large group to split. I think so, anyway. Thirty-five families broke away into a separate OOM group. I don’t know when, probably a generation ago or more. They are all intermarried and related now, and they are not allowed to go outside their group to find a partner to marry. First cousins marry first cousins. They don’t even get a marriage license (which I fully support, as an anarchist), they just get married in a church ceremony. Such a thing is simply unsustainable. The Thirty-Fivers are going extinct, I was told recently by a Joe Wenger Mennonite. The Pikers and the Thirty-Fivers are the plainest of the plain, among OOMs, I’ve also been told. Still, I’m not pouring any concrete around any of these details. I haven’t been around these people close enough to know all the intricacies.

Years ago, I was chatting with an old Amish woman, north and west of here, in OOM country. She was a widow, and she had seen many things in her lifetime. And we got to talking somehow, about the differences in the two cultures. I asked her a lot of questions, about the experiences she had lived all her life, around OOMs. She valued her relationships with them, spoke in the highest terms of her OOM friends. It was clear that the telling affected her, the feelings ran in her deep. But still. I nudged her. I know they are really good people. But there’s an undercurrent there. It’s hard and rough. There’s a mean streak. I can’t quite grasp a good word to describe it. Do you know what I’m saying?

She nodded reluctantly. Yes. She knew what I meant. And she told me, almost hesitantly. “It’s not all of them. But I know what you mean. And the best way I can put it. They just can’t let it go.”

And I thought of the old man sitting at the kitchen table, telling me in vivid detail the deep and cutting slight he had endured forty years before right after he bought his farm at public auction. Yes. The Amish widow woman said it best. They just can’t let it go. Some of them. Like the old man had chosen not to.

It’s a complex reality, the OOM world. Yeah, the negatives are what they are. But along with those come the good things, too. There are many. The OOMs value faith and family. Their women bear many children, and most of those children stay in the culture. They work hard, the OOMs, and they are among the most productive farmers in the world. They use tractors to til the earth, tractors with steel wheels. (Every summer, I buy the world’s sweetest cantaloupes from a Thirty-Fiver just north of New Holland on Hoover Road. They’re on a self-serve stand for a buck apiece. There’s a sturdy little wooden locked box to put your dollar in.) And they ride bicycles everywhere, with a little cardboard box strapped on the rack behind the seat. And often on a summer night, the OOM youth will swarm the roads in great rolling convoys of bikes. Right down Rt. 23 they go, their little red blinker lights flashing in wild and random patterns. It’s really quite a sight.

The group is tightly controlled by its leaders. Computers are forbidden, as are smart phones. I’ve said it before, about the Amish. The smart phones are going to affect that culture in ways that the Bishops simply cannot imagine today. And it’s going to happen soon, within a generation, I’d say. The Old Order Mennonites got that horse penned in, kept it from leaving the barn. Long term, I think they have a better handle on their survival as a distinct and separate group. Not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just the way it is.

They are a frugal people. Well, I guess tight would be a more accurate word. More harsh, though. Their farms aren’t quite as cleaned up as the Amish farms. They’re a little more ragged. But their houses look nice and worn and comfortable, too. In a tightly controlled world like the one they live in, being frugal is not only expected, it is the norm.

Years ago, my brother Steve was cruising around a few miles up north, around Voganville, one sunny Saturday afternoon. It’s Maudy country, up there. There were yard sales going on, and Steve stopped to browse a bit at one OOM place. They had a cooler there with ham and cheese sandwiches for $3.00 each. Steve overheard the house father asking his daughters. “How many sandwiches did we sell?” It was getting close to time to shut things down. Apparently they had not sold many. The cooler was still almost full. The house father looked glum. Then he took a marker and discounted the sandwiches from $3.00 each, all the way down to $2.50. Steve told me that little story, and we laughed and laughed. I mean, sure. People are going to rush in and load up on ham and cheese sandwiches for $2.50, where before they weren’t interested at $3.00.

Still. It all comes down to personal experiences, I guess. I deal with OOMs, some, at my work. Sell them building materials, and we have used OOM crews to install Graber pole barns. They are hard-working, like the Amish. And like the Amish, by far, far the vast percentage of them are as honest as the longest day in summer.

A funny thing happened one morning recently at the office. Well, I thought it was funny, at least a little. A local builder stopped in to pick up an order he had called in. He got to talking to one of the other guys in the office. While he was doing that, I chatted with his worker, an alert-looking young man. Turned out he was a horse and buggy Joe Wenger OOM. And he told me, in the conversation. He just got married last year. This was astonishing to me. Looking at the guy, you could hardly tell he was Old Order anything. You can’t really tell, looking at a lot of the younger OOM guys, when they’re wearing a jacket that hides their galluses. I would have guessed that he came from Plain blood, but not that he was a married, current OOM.

I asked him a lot of questions about the ways and traditions of his people and his church. There are two preachers in a service. Plus a deacon, who reads Scripture. Much like the Amish, that setup. They sing faster, though, in both English and German. He claimed the New York settlement of Joe Wenger OOMs will soon be the largest in the world. People are moving up there, because you can buy a farm for way less than the millions it will cost in Lancaster County. I found much of it fascinating, what he said. I kept asking questions. Our talk was a very genial.

Eventually, he figured out that I was raised Amish. He asked about it, and I told him. Yep, I wrote the book on that. I pointed to a poster of my book. He had heard of it, he claimed. And he felt like he had to admonish me a little bit. Good-naturedly, of course. “If you leave the horse and buggy, you’re never satisfied,” he said, stoutly.

I chuckled. I’m pretty satisfied, I told him. And I pointed outside. See that black Jeep out there? I drive that. If I had to go back to a horse and buggy, I would be extremely unhappy. I can’t even imagine such a thing. There’s not enough money to pay me to go back to that world.

“Yeah,” he shot back. “But you won’t be happy long, with that Jeep. What’s next? A Lamborghini? You know it’s never enough. You won’t be satisfied.”

That’s the kind of thing I heard many times in Amish sermons, growing up. Apparently Amish preachers aren’t the only ones who talk that way. (Decades ago, a well-known Beachy preacher thundered that young men who get caught speeding will be drafted to drive tanks in the next war. I mean, how ludicrous was that?) I laughed and laughed. Driving a Lamborghini has never been even remotely on my bucket list, I said. It’s just about the last thing I can imagine ever wanting to do. But even if I did, so what? Sounds like you’ve been listening to your preachers, there, a little too much.

I don’t know if he really heard what I was saying there, the nice young OOM man. Somehow, I don’t think my words registered, quite. And that’s OK. It was completely fascinating to me, just to have that conversation. To hear words I had heard so long ago, to hear that same message spoken by a young man from another culture. It was fascinating and a little startling, too. Still. Whatever our conversation would or could have been, it was going to be OK.

And there’s one more scene that happened, right that very week, along similar lines. It all got me to thinking, and then to writing this blog. Late one afternoon that week, a local builder walked in to pick up a few things. He’s OOM, I’ve known him for a few years. Good guy. Today, he was dressed in his Sunday best, with a plain, straight-cut suit and spiffy little black hat like the OOMs wear. I greeted him cheerfully and we chatted a bit about business. And then I asked what that was all about, seeing he was dressed for church like that. He looked somber.

And he told me. His twelve-year-old nephew had passed away the day before, and he was over at the boy’s home, making funeral arrangements. Wow, I said. I’m sorry to hear that. Such a loss has to be tough on his parents and his family. And on you and your family, too. We kept talking, and I heard how the boy was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia just this Christmas, less than two months ago. He never got out of the hospital after the doctors figured out what was wrong.

The Amish always have their stories about eerie and uncanny things. Not dark stuff, necessarily, at least not mostly. But strange and surreal events that unfold, guided by an unseen and supernatural hand. Every Plain culture has its stories of such happenings at such times as this. And the Old Order Mennonites tell their stories of comfort, too.

My friend’s young nephew was still conscious and talking, up until a few days before he died. One of the last things the boy told his mother. He wanted to come home, the next time it snowed. She made no promises, but smiled through her tears. She held her son’s hand and pondered his final wish in her heart.

My friend stood there and spoke the details of the story. His eyes got a little wet and mine did, too, when he told me. “Yesterday, it snowed. And yesterday, he went home.”

*************************************************************

And here, I cough politely. How about that Super Bowl? Umm. Who called it? I was a little off on the final score, sure. But I got the winner right.

I got together with some good friends on the big night. Only a few of us were die-hards. My brother Steve and I sat, glued to the game all the way through. We got tense a few times, we did. What a game it was. We shouted and high-fived everyone in sight after Brady’s Hail Mary was knocked down and time expired.

I’m happy for the Eagles. They never were intimidated, not in the least. When they had to score, or when they had to make a fourth down, they did it. That TD to Foles just before halftime was a thing of rare beauty. It was simply breathtaking, the sheer audacity of it. The game was fun and refreshing to watch.

I’m not taking anything away from Brady and the Patriots. Tom Brady played in eight Super Bowls in seventeen years. He won five. That is an accomplishment that will never be matched, I don’t think.

So congrats to Doug Peterson and his team. They are for real. And there’s a real good chance we’ll see more of the Eagles at the big game in the next decade or so.

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Dark Knight Rising…

“You were a knight,” said Merlin. “Somewhere in the world

there is defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat,

and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives

in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.”

—John Steinbeck

______________________________

It was a lifetime ago, seems like. And it wasn’t the most logical thing I had ever done. Certainly not the most necessary. But it was something I had walked around and poked at and looked at from different angles for some time. It happened more than ten years ago, and it was the first time I had ever done such a thing. Back in 2007, toward the end of an extraordinarily messy and stressful year, I bought me a new truck.

It was a Dodge. And it was a big deal back then. A 2007 Dodge 1500. With a Hemi. Brand new. Fully loaded. With a sun roof. And a sliding rear window that opened with the push of a button. The color: A bold electric blue. Thus the name of my constant traveling companion and road partner since that day: Big Blue.

And it seems so strange in a lot of ways, looking back. Where in the world has the time gone? I remember telling a good friend, back when Big Blue was gleaming and young and new. I’ll drive it for five years or so. Trade it off, then. It’ll have some miles, but it’ll have some value. I chuckle at those words now. It was a naïve thing to say. But I had never owned a brand-new truck before. Or a brand-new vehicle of any kind, really. Well, unless you count my new black buggy, back in Bloomfield. I mean, a motorized vehicle. I had never owned a new motor vehicle before. My head was spinning a little. And I didn’t quite know what to expect.

I remember the night I drove it off the lot, after work. It was a Monday. I remember this from a couple of things that were going on around me about right then. I stopped at my brother Steve’s house on the way home. Proudly pulled up. Come out and look at my new truck. Look how the mirrors fold out if you have a wide load. Ain’t that the coolest thing? And everyone seemed excited and impressed.

And those first five years? Well, those shot right by as if propelled from a grenade launcher, is what happened. Whoosh. The days were gone, just like that. Then the weeks, then the months. And, yeah, a lot happened in those years.

Big Blue was simply a part of my persona, in my life and in the blog. We went on a lot of adventures together, me and that truck did. I never used it rough at all. Never abused it. Never so much as talked rough to it. I always changed the oil right on time. And the five-year mark, that would have been in 2012. The year after my book came out. I remember thinking about what I had told my friend, back when my truck was new. And I looked at my blue steed. It was just getting comfortable. Under a hundred thousand miles. Heck, it was still like new. And I figured back then. I’ll drive it until it gives out. I’ll run my truck into the ground.

And that truck was connected to me and my life like a thread. You think about it. Wherever I was at any given time of day or night, Big Blue was somewhere close by. Rental car trips excluded, of course. But still. The truck was my physical connection to wherever it was I wanted to go. For more than ten years. It’s a little startling to look back over all that time from a perspective such as that.

My truck was my truck. An extension of me, of what I did, and who I was. I was quietly content. It never crossed my mind, either, that my next vehicle might not be a truck. I mean, I was a pickup guy. And that’s as far as my brain went, when it came to what I was driving on the road.

Until last spring. And like a lot of things that come along and establish themselves in your mind and consciousness, I wasn’t looking for anything when it got here. I was heading down to Florida to see Dad for a week. The Enterprise people tried to shake a little toy Hyundai on me, when I came in that morning to pick up my rental. That’s what they had, and that’s all they had, the guy claimed. A Hyundai Elantra. And I was just as adamant. No. That will not work. I will not drive a Hyundai all the way to Florida. They don’t have any headroom. What else you got around here? There has to be something that will work. There has to be.

The nice Enterprise guy was pretty young. And he saw I was fired up, that I meant what I was saying. I will not drive a Hyundai. I will not do it. He was thinking to himself. Be that way. Still, he smiled politely. And he poked around on his computer. “I have a black Jeep Wrangler, here,” he told me. “For a small upcharge.” I interrupted instantly. I’ll take it, I said.

Had this been a scene in a movie, there would have been muted thunder in the background as the nice young man pulled up out front in the black Wrangler. Or at least an orchestra would have been playing. Cool looking little vehicle there, I thought to myself. I walked out and got into the Jeep. And drove home to load my bags. It drove like a little tank. I could get used to this, I said to myself.

It turned out to be way cooler than anything I had imagined. I mean, I didn’t know. So it’s easy, not to have imagined it. A black Jeep is a black Jeep. It stands alone. A dark knight. Instantly recognizable. It’s mean, lean, and wickedly cool. And I soon learned just from driving south and back, in those few days. It’s a Jeep thing. You wave at other Jeeps.

I had a wonderful trip, down to Pinecraft, to see Dad. We had a blast, he and I. Just hung out and relaxed. You can eat what you want, when you want. And you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, I told him right up front. Just nip it in the bud, I figured, any kind of contention. When a man gets to be the age my father is, he’s got the right to do pretty much what he wants. Enjoy life, I told him. There are no rules while I’m here with you. You don’t have to take your pills if you don’t want to, even. And if something happens, it happens. You can’t live forever. (He took his pills right on time every day, because he didn’t have to. He just decided to, on his own.)

My little black Jeep was a big hit wherever I went, down there with Dad that week. Everybody made a fuss. It was a blast to drive, locally and on the road. We just fit each other, the Jeep and me. And for the first time ever, my thoughts and desires strayed from my big blue truck. I didn’t stay true to my Dodge Ram 1500, 2007 model. I sure didn’t. My heart wandered. The thought kept running through my mind. I could live with a Jeep like this.

And by the time I got back home, the plan was anchored in my head. Somewhere in my future, there would be a black Jeep Wrangler. A two-door. This was firmly established. No hurry, though. All good things take time, I reckoned. So it would come when it came, the black Jeep. And I went back to living life as I had before. Last year was a little different. There were serious stressors, all around. I drank lots of scotch whiskey and fretted about whether my second book would sell on the open market. Until I didn’t anymore, and it did.

Fast forward, then. To now. The New Year came at me. And I thought about things. Well, backing up, a little. Late last year, me and Big Blue had our unfortunate little accident. We spun around on the ice, like a mad cow. My truck has a small dent in it, now. And I got to thinking, early on, this year. It’s time to get a few feelers out, to look for a Jeep. And not just any Jeep. A black Jeep Wrangler, two-door. I remembered, then. I have a good contact in the car business. Check with him. Let him keep an eye out for you.

I’m not sure when I first got to know Linford Berry. It was probably when my book came out, back in 2011. We were Facebook friends, so he may have been a blog reader before that, at least for a while. He lives down in Virginia, in good solid Mennonite country. Harrisonburg. And when I first met him, Linford was a pastor at a big old Mennonite church down in the area. I always had a little bit of a problem with that part of the equation. I’m not particularly fond of Mennonites. They make me skittish. It’s so close to the place I came from, and whether real or imagined, I always feel silent, pulsing judgment from that brand of people.

Don’t get me wrong. Next thing, I’ll talk myself into a hole, here. I never had any kind of judgment problem with Linford. Never felt anything but complete acceptance from him. But still. I have minor issues with the church he was associated with. The Conservative Mennonites. And they are not bad people, as in evil. Certainly, I have a lot more in common with them than I have with mainstream Mennonites from Harrisonburg. Leftist crackpots, a lot of mainstream Mennos are. Mad with rage. A year ago, many of their women donned pussy hats and raised their fists and marched and cursed Trump. The people who did that will never live down their vile and shameful actions. Menno Simons must be spinning in his grave.

All right. That was a bunny trail. I met Linford a few times after my book came out. Once, when he was in the area for a conference, he looked me up and we had lunch. I never was quite sure what he told the people at the conference. “I’m having lunch with that backsliding reprobate, Ira Wagler, to see if I can talk some sense into him.” Maybe he said that. If he did, he never let on. He was always completely accepting and open and very cordial to me. We had a fine time at lunch that day.

Linford dabbled in cars. That’s how he made a living, I reckon. Preacher pay ain’t all that great. And a few years ago, he quit his preacher job and went full time into his business, Mountain Valley Motors in Harrisonburg and Dayton. And he auctioneers, now, too. It was a little wild, to see him branch out into a whole new world and a whole new place. I cheered for him, though. I understand why people do that.

So, anyway. I messaged Linford, about the second day of the New Year. Hey. I’m wondering if you can help me. And I told him what I wanted. A black Jeep Wrangler. Recent model. Low miles. Two-door. Hard top. He had a few questions. I told him about what I wanted to spend. And I told him. There’s no hurry at all. Just keep an eye out. If you see something I might want, let me know. And he said he would. OK, then. I had done what I could do. Now. Wait.

And I gotta say. It didn’t take long at all. A little over a week, I think. Tell a car dealer you’re looking for a certain model, and he’ll lock on that scent like a bird dog. And the message came from Linford one day. A message, and some pictures. He had found something at an online auction. He thought I might be interested.

It was a Jeep Wrangler, of course. Black as coal. Two-door. Late model, 2015. Low miles, at 24,000. And it was loaded. There was a little bit of extra chrome on the mirrors and door handles and the grille. And fully automatic windows and locks. I had asked for those almost as an afterthought. Jeeps are stripped down, normally. Plain Jane. Manual locks. Crank the windows up and down by hand. I wanted something slightly more civilized. And now Linford was telling me. He had found it. And he spoke a price that was well within my range.

The online auction was going on right that moment. Right then. So a decision had to be made. Right then. I called Linford. And we talked about it. The price was good, well below market. Before hanging up, I told him. Go ahead. Get it. He said he would. And that’s how we left it.

It’s been ten years since I fretted about buying any vehicle like that. I needed to get a couple of things done. Call Allstate, and get the Jeep on my policy. And stop by PNC Bank just down the road. They know me there. I wanted a short-term loan, to get my Jeep bought. After I sold Big Blue, I’d shovel all that money right over. It’s been years, since I looked into getting a loan of any kind. The ladies at PNC smiled when I walked in. They’ve known me for years, all through the journey of the first book. And I told them. I need to see someone about a loan for a Jeep. My friend Stephanie ushered me into her office. Less than half an hour later, I walked out of there with a check for the full amount of the purchase, for a little over three percent interest. I was pretty amazed at how simple the process was. And I figure to have all that money paid back well before it’s due.

And then it was the logistics of getting my black Jeep home. Linford thought he could get it transported to his yard in a couple of weeks. He wanted to clean it up, make it smell like new, and change the oil. The days passed, and the Jeep still had not been delivered. It’s winter, I told my friend. Whenever you get it, let me know. And last Friday, he got the Jeep home to his yard. It would be ready any time after Tuesday of this week, I was told. Well. I needed to get four hours south, to pick up my wheels. I looked at my options. Then I called Enterprise. Can I rent a vehicle, for one way only? Down to Harrisonburg? The nice young man allowed that I could. I reserved a car, for Wednesday. I’d head down in the afternoon, then drive home that evening. And so my plans were set.

They didn’t stay set all that long. Sometimes, connections kick in, when you’re not looking for them. I told the people at work. I’m heading down to pick up my Jeep. My boss, Reuben, asked how and I told him. I’m driving a rental car down, one way. He looked at me. “Why don’t you let me fly you down in my plane?” He asked. “I’ll do it for whatever the rental car would have cost. Just consider it a perk, for working here.” That would be great, I said.

On Wednesday, shortly after noon, we drove Big Blue over to the Chester County Airport. A short time later, Reuben’s jet-prop plane was high in the air, heading south. After a little more than an hour of flying, we landed at Shenandoah Valley Airport. A little place with a single runway. We waited there, in the General Aviation Terminal. Minutes later, a black Jeep whipped in and parked. There’s my wheels, I told Reuben. We walked out. And there it was, all cleaned up and gleaming. My new black steed. I greeted Linford and introduced him to Reuben. We stood and chatted for a few minutes. Then Reuben walked back out to his plane for the flight home. Linford gave me the keys to the Jeep, and we drove the fifteen minutes to his office to fill out all the paperwork. And I signed over that loan check.

Linford has a real nice business going, there. He’s the only car dealer I know that I would trust enough to do what I did. We chatted and caught up a bit, as I signed here and signed there. He asked how the next book is coming along. And I told him. It’s a different road than the first book was. I’m just getting started, walking.

With Linford, as I’m ready to head on out.

He handed me a file with my paperwork, and we walked outside to the Jeep. The Dark Knight. That’s the name I chose. It seemed fitting. Linford attached temporary tags and told me what to do when the title gets to me in the mail. And then we shook hands. I thanked him. Got into my black steed. Made final adjustments to the seat, and double-checked the mirrors. Shifted into gear and eased out the drive. And I crossed myself as we pulled onto the road. Lord, you are the giver of all gifts. Thank you for this blessing. Grant me safe travels on the road home.

I remember a little bit how it was, when I drove Big Blue off the lot, back in 2007. I was slogging through some tough times. The cold hard facts of life were raining down in torrents all around. Ten years ago, I was a little naïve about the human condition, about the utter depravity of every human heart. I was a little clueless about a lot of things. But somehow, there was always a tiny seed of faith that showed up from somewhere. And I can see so clearly in retrospect. It was always a gift, that tiny seed of faith. A gift, freely given.

And that day, the future stretched before me. Whatever it held, I was ready. I was cautiously optimistic in my new blue truck. Let come what may. Lord, I said. I’ve seen a lot of hard roads lately. And that’s OK. But I’m just asking. Let there be good things.

And now, it is today. Ten years on. I’ve traded Big Blue for the Dark Knight. And I stand by my steed, ready to ride. I can’t see into the future. But I’m eager and excited. There’s a new day dawning. There’s a new road rising. I look to the heavens with a grateful heart. And I believe, in faith.

There will be good things. There will be, because God is the giver of all of life. And all His gifts are good.

*******************************************************************

It’s been a while. More than a decade. That distant roaring you hear is the sound of Eagles fans celebrating a very rare appearance at the Super Bowl a week from this Sunday. I’m a transplant here in Lancaster County. I don’t care for any teams from Pennsylvania. But of the state’s two NFL teams, I’ll take the Eagles every time. The Steelers are total anathema to me. I despise that team with a passion.

Many years ago, president Kennedy spoke in halting German. “Ich bin ein Berliner.” In that same spirit, I now say, “Ich bin ein Eagles fan.” For one day, I will cheer for the Eagles to fly. On February 4, 2018.

And regardless of how tired everyone is of the vile Patriots (I am beyond weary of them), one fact remains. Love or hate Belichik and Brady, they are the greatest coach/QB combination the NFL has ever seen. Brady is without question the most talented quarterback in history. The numbers speak for themselves. The man is a phenomenon. Just as well as not, he could already have seven Super Bowl rings instead of five. Little Eli Manning got in the way twice. Brady surpasses all who played the position before him, including Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw. We are witnesses to greatness on the football field such as has never been seen before.

Still. There is a time and a season to all things under the heavens. Nothing gold can stay. Brady is the aging warrior. He’s been there many times before. He may win the battle, but this time, I think not. The Eagles have been underdogs so far, and they have been completely unintimidated. They will win their first Super Bowl, and it won’t be all that close. Eagles 34-20.

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Vagabond Traveler: The Promised Land…

Living in the Promiseland,

Our dreams are made of steel.

The prayer of every man

Is to know how freedom feels.

There is a winding road

Across the shifting sand.

And room for everyone,

Living in the Promiseland.

—Willie Nelson, lyrics

___________________________

It seemed like an ordinary morning, a few weeks ago. Well, almost. It had snowed some, the night before. Just barely covered the ground. I grumbled to myself as I cleaned my truck, and got it all warmed up. Winter sure seems to be creeping in. I drove on down to Sheetz to grab my coffee, like I always do. And then I settled into my nice warm truck, to head to work. Such are my scattered memories, near as I can gather them, looking back.

I drove out and turned left. There was some light snow on the road. But I never gave it a thought. I accelerated out, then slowed up, to cross the railroad tracks. Bump, bump. I stepped on the gas again. And exactly right then, my world spun around and out of control. I’m talking literally, when you’re looking out the window.

My truck suddenly lunged out of the right lane. I can’t quite remember, it all happened so fast. I think my back wheels pushed around to the right. Ice. There was a layer of black ice under the thin blanket of snow. As the truck shot into the left lane, I instinctively stomped the brakes (big mistake) and yanked the steering wheel to the right. The wheels grabbed, and I was shooting toward the right ditch. So I reversed the wheel turning. To the left. The back was coming around. I was helpless. I haven’t felt that helpless in a long, long time.

There are a few things that happen, when you spin out on ice. Well, a few things that I remember. First, you grasp in a split second how utterly helpless you are. I remember that feeling of surprise and fear, when I realized my truck was out of control. And I remember one other thing about that moment. I remember looking ahead and around, to see if there was any other traffic, anywhere close. Thankfully, there was not. Not a car in sight, at least not anywhere close. So that much was established in my brain. If you hit something when you’re spinning, it won’t be another vehicle.

I don’t know. I was going twenty-five, maybe thirty. Not that fast, really. Except on ice, it’s fast. Oh, yes. It is. And the next two to three seconds were just about the wildest ride I’ve ever had on the road in any vehicle, anywhere. I had never, never had any kind of road accident before. Never, not even for a scratch. That history of clean driving was about to go the way of the dinosaur, for me. It was a wonder I ever held on as long as I did. But now it was over.

Big Blue kept sliding from one side of the road to the other. And then my truck just spun all the way around, clockwise. The tail end swooshed into someone’s yard, missed a telephone pole by less than six inches, and crunched into the little Railroad Crossing sign that was planted less than two feet from the telephone pole. The little sign flattened to the ground like a broken weed. The driver’s side tail light popped out and shot across the yard like it was propelled from a gun. And my truck finally shuddered to a stop, back in my own lane. Sadly, it was facing the wrong way.

Way back at the light on Rt. 23, several cars had crossed and were creeping my way. I blinked my headlights, then slowly crept off the road, into the drive of some commercial business. I parked and got out. I mean, I wasn’t hurt, or anything. But I was a good deal shook up. Whatever had happened wasn’t a fraction as bad as what could have happened. Had a car been approaching in the other lane, well, I could be with Jesus now. And had the rear of my truck crunched into that telephone pole, Big Blue would have been totaled. Those two equations shot through my head before too many seconds had passed.

There was a good solid dent bashed into the driver’s side, behind the rear wheel, just in front of the tail light. Looking at that dent, and what I did hit showed me how close I had come to smashing into the telephone pole. It was less than six inches. I calculated it all out later. Right that moment, I was worried about one thing. Did my truck still run, or was it damaged underneath, where I couldn’t see?

It wasn’t damaged underneath. I could still drive it. So I got back in and headed on toward my place of work. Very carefully and very shakily. And that little story is why I chatted with my Allstate agent later that morning. It’s also why I stopped at Enterprise and picked up a nice gray Jeep Wrangler (four-door) late that afternoon, and parked my truck at a local body shop in New Holland. I was turning in my first auto insurance claim, ever, for anything. And Allstate has been a real class act so far, I gotta say.

And my little spin-out that morning, well, I’ve looked back over it in just about every way there is to look at it. It was a tale of inches. Six inches one way, and I would have missed everything, would have driven off, blithe and scot-free. Like I always had, up until that morning. Six inches the other way, and Big Blue would have been totaled by the telephone pole. As it was, the little Railroad Crossing sign inflicted some damage and a lot of inconvenience. So it could have gone a lot better. And it could have gone a lot, lot worse. I guess I’ll settle for what actually happened and accept it. As if there is a choice. But still. There are different ways to calm your heart.

I’ve thought a lot about that morning, those road conditions, and what happened to me that had never happened before. Mulled over it a lot. And I gotta say. That morning was a microcosm of what my whole year has been like in a lot of ways. I was spinning out of control for more days than not, I think. I was walking calm, about half the time. At least I told myself that. But for most of the year, there was so much going on out of my control that I forgot to control the parts of life that I could. I’ve been there before, more times than I care to admit. And when I forget to control the parts of life that I can, it usually boils down to one word. Whiskey. Somehow, somewhere back there, I had chosen to embrace the one nemesis that can never be fully and finally slain.

It’s always a choice. Everything you do is. And there is only one person in all creation who is responsible for your choices. You. Always. Talk to me about addiction all you want, and how tough that life is. It still boils down to how you choose to deal with the aftermath of your previous choices. And no, that’s not trite or harsh. It’s just reality. I know what it is to be addicted. I know how hard it is. Trust me. I know, way better than I want to.

So, anyway. That’s where I was, for about the first eight months of this year. There was a lot of tension flowing around, for different reasons. My book was being shopped on the open market. And word from the field was sparse. There were other things going on, too. Other pressure points. There were. And I went for the “easy” way to deal with the stress of it all. I reached for the bottle. And I drank hard every day. It was a choice. It seemed like a choice I wanted to make. The easiest choice, on a table full of hard ones.

I had a heart checkup in June. About every six months or so, good old Dr. B summons me in. Does the basic stuff. Heart rate and blood pressure. And the big ten-thousand-dollar question. How’s your heart beating? Is the A-Fib back? I was nervous about that checkup, back in June, as the day crept up. So about two weeks before, I stopped drinking. Cold. As far as I knew, my heartbeat was pretty steady. But still. It couldn’t hurt to clean up a bit. Get the alcohol out of my system.

The day arrived, and I went in. And so help me, this is true. That very morning, I could feel my heart beating wrong. Erratic. I knew it before Dr. B told me in a sad voice. “You are in A-Fib.” We talked about it, and I told him I was nervous. He upped my dose of the one med I take, and told me to come back in six months. And this, too, is true. The next day, I checked my heart rhythm every hour for half a day. Solid and steady as a rock. Good grief. I called Dr. B’s office, and left a message. My heartbeat is back to regular.

But still. I knew the alcohol was affecting my heart in a bad way. I don’t want to make a bigger deal out of it than it was. But I knew.

A little bunny trail, here. Sometimes you hear people say, when mentioning someone who passed on. “He drank himself to death.” And it is understood exactly what is meant by that statement. It’s something like this. Oh. That kind of man. Yeah, he sure didn’t have much self-control. He wasted his life away. He sure loved the bottle. He drank all that hard liquor. What a sinner. We can only hope he repented at the last second, and maybe just squeaked through the door into heaven. Probably not, but we won’t know for sure until we get there. If he made it, he’s probably stuck in a little room way down in the basement somewhere. We’ll have to go looking for him.

That’s what people think to themselves and mutter to each other. Not me. I don’t go there. I understand completely when I hear that someone drank himself to death. I understand the pain and loss and bitter sorrow that such a person could not face. I know the monsters that lurk in the recesses of the mind and in the dark corners of the heart. I know, because I deal with my own demons of what was and what might have been. I hear those voices calling in the night. I understand, because I poked my head through that door and looked around a bit. And I gotta say. It’s not a terribly scary place. I wasn’t frightened there, in that room where death is. I understand why people go there. And I understand why people choose to stay there.

It was pretty normal, what I thought to myself and what I spoke back then, when I was drinking hard. Let the book deal come through, I told God. Let me get it written, and then I’m done. I don’t care, after that. Just let me last that long. That all I got to live for. That’s how far I had stuck my head through that door. To get to where it seemed rational, such thinking. I knew it was a lie. But it was a lie I chose to believe. It was like my truck was spinning on the black ice, out of control. I felt helpless and hopeless.

People around me could tell there was something going on inside me, and that it wasn’t going all that great. Nobody said much. Not until two close friends told me, separately and privately. “You are not well. Your eyes look bad. The whiskey’s getting to you.” The weird thing was, those two friends didn’t even know each other. They still don’t. That jolts you, to hear two voices saying the same thing from two completely different places like that. And you hesitate, in mid stride. I have to at least hear what was spoken to me. Is it true? Be honest with yourself. And right there it is, one of life’s hard and fast rules. Be honest with yourself. I fought hard, not to be.

Somehow, a few slivers of light penetrated my brain. Just enough so I drew back from that destructive door I was hell-bent on walking through. Stop. Make sure this is where you want to go, before you step through. I mulled the thing over in my head for weeks. And I saw it. There. That other door is the one you want, not this one. And I wasn’t real sure how to get from the wrong door to the right one. Or that I actually had what it took to open the right door, once I got there.

I didn’t set out on a big, majestic quest, or anything. I just turned from the wrong door and stumbled along aimlessly, without a lot of hope in my heart. And then, one day, the right door inched open. And from somewhere, there came a mustard seed of faith. It was almost lackadaisical, how I chose to step through that door. I just decided one night. I’m going to quit drinking until I get a better handle on things. That’s it. There were no promises. No vows. Not to God. Not to myself. Not to anyone else. Just a simple, almost offhand decision.

And in the distance, the dragon of fear stood to block my passing, belching all the fire and smoke and noise and rage that only such a dragon can. I clutched my sword and tried to look brave. It was hard, not to turn and flee.

I remember the evening clearly, when it happened. Or didn’t happen. It was a Tuesday night, the last one in August. And I told the guys at Bible Study. There’s something going on. I’m not sure what. But I’m going to have to get a grip on things. The whiskey. It’s getting to me. And we talked about it openly, me and those guys. I would trust any one of them with my life. They would support me, they said, without judgment and without expectations. They meant it, too. If things got too hard, I could call on any of them at any time of any day or any night. I walked out of there, still not quite knowing. That night, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t have a drink when I got home. You can always make it through one night, I figured. I guess the future will take care of itself.

And it has. I have not had a drop of alcohol since that late August evening after the Bible Study. It’s always for today, that I’m quitting. Maybe tomorrow, too, but for sure only today. There are no promises. There are no expectations. There is only a man, walking along, with a heart of gratitude to God for all of life. That’s it. That’s all.

I don’t know where it will end, or how, or if it even will. I do know this. I’m the type of guy who can be cruising right along. And then, without a whiff of warning, I can go and buy a bottle of single malt scotch and knock it back in two nights. I can easily do that. And so far, I always have, at some point. But until such a time approaches, until temptation calls relentlessly from the old door, I’ll keep walking.

A long time ago, the Lord’s people were wandering aimlessly in the wilderness. They had fled Egypt decades before. And there were many misadventures. This had happened and that had happened. The people were compelled to wander the earth for forty years, until all of the old generation had died. And even their leader, Moses, was barred from entering the Land of Canaan. But before he died, Moses was led up to a high place on a mountain. “Look over there, across the valley,” he was told. “That right there is the Promised Land. The land where I will lead my people.” Moses got to see. But he never got to enter.

The first few days were the fires of hell. Being dry, I mean. And the first few weeks, as well, in waves. The thought was constant, gnawing in my head. A drink. I need a drink. After work, it was all I could do to wrestle Big Blue straight home, instead of heading over to Vinola’s. Somehow, I hung in there. I talked about it before, here on the blog. Almost immediately, the weight started washing from me. More than a pound a day. And that’s what kept me on the right path early on, I think. The weight. I was ashamed and beyond weary of being a big, fat slob. I was done being embarrassed at how I looked in polite company. Never again. That’s what I told myself. That’s what I thought. I never want to be this slovenly again. And day followed day, as night followed night.

Forty-five days. That’s what Sam the Counselor told me years ago, when I was thinking about putting the bottle down for a season. Forty-five days is how long it takes for your body to break free from the physical effects of drinking. After that, you’re clean. After that, you’re free, if you can stay that way. So that’s what I focused on, there at the start. Lord. Let me have forty-five days of freedom. Let me get to that place. And then, let come what may.

After those first few days and weeks, the fires of hell diminished a great deal. I watched what I ate, and didn’t eat a lot of that. And somewhere in those early days, I talked to my buddy, Mike the Barber. By then, I was grooming up a little, starting to take pride in how I dress and how I look. And I told Mike. I put the bottle down. I’m quitting, for now. I don’t know for how long. But it’s here and now. I got some serious writing coming up, I think. The vodka is done. And Mike cheered.

He’s a few years older than me, and he came from a similar place, years ago. He drank hard, every day. And he went to rehab, whatever that is. I’ve never “gone to rehab.” Not saying I shouldn’t have. I just never did. Anyway, Mike got himself cleaned up. He was told he would have to attend AA meetings for the rest of his life. He wasn’t having any of that. He figured it out for himself. I’m not knocking anyone who goes to AA. I’m just saying Mike didn’t. And that day, when I told him what I was doing, or wasn’t, he spoke life to me in a way that few people ever have.

He looked at me. And then he said. “When you wake up with a clear head, each morning is a new high.” I absorbed those words. It’s a code I have claimed and lived by since that moment. Each morning is a new high. It is. It really is.

And moving along, then, in this little tale of trucks spinning on ice and the Promised Land. The days moved on, then the weeks. And after six weeks or so, the pounds slid off a lot harder. I looked at the situation. And I thought to myself. If you’re gonna get down to the weight you want, you’re going to have to starve yourself. I don’t see any other way. And then we all know what happens when you quit starving yourself. All that big fat slob weight will come roaring back, the same as if you had never lost it. That’s what happens.

And so I was open to another road. Standing at a door leading to I knew not where. And just about then, my good friend, Ava Shank, came strolling along and nudged me online. “Here,” she said. “I’ve been walking this path over here, and it works pretty well. You should try it. I think it’s exactly what you need.” The path she pointed to? Intermittent fasting.

It was almost as lackadaisical as my decision to quit drinking was. I checked out the links she sent me. Researched things a bit. Eventually, I even ordered the book. Fasting is very much the “in” thing these days. It’s trendy. But does it work? That was my only concern. And then, back in early November, I decided to do it. I went to eating one meal a day. It was no big deal. I’ve never been a big eater. The alcohol was what made me bloated and heavy. So it was very simple for me to cut back to one meal a day. And the thing about that is, there are no limits. For that one meal, you can eat whatever you’re hungry for, and as much of that as you want. Which is exactly what I’ve been doing for the last seven weeks or so. Eating as much as I want of whatever I’m hungry for, once a day. I always finish off with a big old bowl of ice cream, topped with butterscotch. Now that’s the kind of “diet” I can wholeheartedly endorse.

I love it. All the weight I had lost before has stayed off. Plus a little bit more. Not that I weigh myself much. But I’ve dropped a total of thirty-five pounds. Heading for forty. I’ve been shrinking where I need to shrink. My face is thinner than it’s been in decades. I keep notching up my belts, making new holes with a leather punch I bought for that reason. I’m wearing jeans that had been stacked in the corner, never to fit me again. But they are fitting. My winter coats are getting baggy. I figure to make this a long-term lifestyle. Although, like the alcohol, the less I think about it or plan, the better it will go, I figure, too. I feel great. Actually, I feel fantastic. Better than I’ve felt in twenty years. And Mike the Barber’s little observation holds true. I feel it, breathe it, when I wake up every day.

Each morning is a new high.

And I saw it coming at me, as December came knocking on the door. It was soon time for my six-month checkup for my heart. Time to go see Dr. B again. It was on my mind some. And that morning last week, when I got up, I told myself. Stop being nervous. You are feeling great. You should be good to go.

Early afternoon. I drove to the Heart Group in Lancaster and signed in. A nurse led me to a little room and checked my vitals. Blood pressure was totally optimal. My resting heart rate was sixty-one beats a minute. Sixty-one. That’s the lowest heart rate I can ever remember. The most relaxed I’ve ever been.

And then Dr. B came bounding into the room. We shook hands. I told him. I’m feeling better than I have in a long, long time. Decades. I told him about the lifestyle changes I had made in the last few months. No alcohol. The intermittent fasting, I told him about that, too. I have one meal a day. He looked at me, astounded. And he checked out my heartbeat. Deep breath, front, front. And deep breath, back, back. Perfect. We kept on chatting. I told him about the offer for my second book. I’m getting ready to wade in, to tackle some serious writing. He got all excited about that.

And he told me, “You look fantastic. You look alive. Your heart is strong and steady. Whatever you are doing, keep right on doing it.” He went on. “In my practice, almost all the people I see are sliding downward, at one speed or another. Some are slipping down slow. And some are sliding fast. It is beautiful and rare to see you actually grasping life, and making great choices. You have good things happening, here. I love it. Keep it up.”

I figure to do that, I said. Life is a beautiful thing. Each morning is a new high. It really is. But I’ll tell you right up front. I make no promises about anything. It is what it is, today. That’s all. Nothing more, and nothing less. Today is all I got. It’s all I ever had. He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I understand. But you will never let the alcohol control you again. That’s what I’m sensing.” Yes, I said. Yes. That. The whiskey will never control me again.

We wrapped it up, then. He reduced my one remaining med to practically zero. Then he told me to come back for a checkup in a year if I want to. There will be no more summons. The ball is completely in my court. I thanked him. I’ll drop off a copy of my second book when it gets published, I told him. We high-fived on that note. And then I floated on out of there. It was a beautiful, sunny day. I don’t dance, but I felt like doing a little waltz, out there in the parking lot.

I’m not sure what the Promised Land looks like. The land where milk and honey flows. The land where you know how freedom really feels. The land Moses saw, but could not enter.

I don’t know what that land looks like. But I figure it’s probably something close to the world I’m living in right now.

Happy New Year to all my readers.

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Ninety-Six Years: My Father’s Road…

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

— Tennyson, Ulysses

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I hadn’t really figured on writing about it, much. But as the date crept up, I looked at it. And thought about it. A rare milestone will arrive this Sunday, December 10th. It’s a place few people ever see. Ninety-six years ago on that day, my father was born.

Whatever the man’s strengths were, and whatever his flaws, it is a remarkable thing for him to reach the age of ninety-six. It doesn’t matter. Not at this stage. The work of his life, his faults and failures, the track of his deeds and how they healed or wounded those around him. He is standing where very few people have ever stood. And it is worthy of note when a man reaches the door of such a day as that. And however his sons and daughters may feel about a lot of things, it detracts not a whit from the fact that he now stands where he stands.

I proclaim it. We proclaim it. This is our father’s day. We celebrate, with him right here among us. This is our father’s road, our father’s world. And we are his sons and daughters.

December 10, 1921. It was a long time ago, any way you look at it. It was early winter. The cold winds swept in from the northwest and swirled through the raggedy little clapboard farm house, there in the Daviess country side. Farm houses back then were not insulated. It was just bare walls against the elements. I don’t know if there was snow on the ground, back on December 10, 1921. There easily might have been. I’ve asked Dad a few times, over the years. What was the day like, when you were born? He’s always been vague about any specific details. Which means he never asked about it, much, and doesn’t know. Either that, or the adults in his childhood world never took the time to tell him because it wasn’t important. Still. One can wonder, from here. And one does.

The world was a vastly different place, ninety-six years ago. Unimaginably different. The murderous Great War had just ended a few years before. And the Spanish flu was just winding down, too, about the time Dad made his appearance. It was a hard place he was born into. It’s probably about as much a miracle as it isn’t, that he even survived at all. But he did. He was a sturdy son, of sturdy stock.

He was born into a family that had its own dark mark of shame to bear, though. The Waglers of Daviess. I’m not sure if my father heard much about it when he was young. I know he never spoke about any of it to us. There had to be whisperings and knowing looks, and gossip, there in his childhood. There just had to be. There was a black stain on the family name. It had happened barely a generation before. Dad’s grandfather, his father’s father, Christian, was a deeply disturbed man. The pure Wagler blood coursed through him. I know a little bit about that blood. He recoiled, mentally and emotionally, from the harsh realities of life around him. Until he simply could not take it anymore. He shot himself in the head at age thirty-six, in 1891. A suicide is always a shameful thing, in the Plain cultures. There is dark sin, buried somewhere, some curse from way back. That’s what people think to themselves, and mutter to each other. It was exponentially more shameful back then, than it is now. It took a generation or two, to live down the stain of such a deep shame as that.

Dad came along quite a few years after that stain was unleashed. And his father, Joseph K., had managed to work his way up in status to an upstanding member of the community, there in Daviess. And he was a deacon in the church, yet. So the Wagler blood was struggling back to respectability, back in 1921.

Christian’s widow, Mary, remarried and moved out of Daviess with her new husband. How she ever attracted another man remains a mystery. He had to come from a hard place, too, I always figured. He was from Mt. Ayr, Indiana, and they moved to Nappanee after they got married. And Dad told me a little story, just last April when I was visiting him in Florida.

He went on a trip with his father, Joseph K. and his mother, Mrs. Joseph K. — Sarah, I think her name was. They traveled on the train. Dad was five years old. So this would have been around 1926. The Roaring Twenties. Wherever they went, they stopped in Nappanee on the way home, to visit Joseph K’s mom, Christian’s widow. They lived right there, in the outskirts of town, Dad told me. He and his parents arrived one day, and stayed overnight. The next morning, Dad decided to take a little walk, there in Nappanee.

He strolled about in the fresh morning dew, a little Amish boy of five. Blithely skipped along. Dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and little barn door pants and galluses, I’m sure. And then he wanted to return to his grandmother’s house. He wasn’t sure which one it was, there in the row. The houses all looked the same to him. That’s what he told me. And so he just walked right on in, into the house he thought was the right one. It wasn’t. It was the wrong house. The woman of the place squawked in surprise to see a grubby little boy in her home. Dad was all embarrassed. He quickly ran out and over one house, to the right place. I had never heard this story before. I wondered what the world looked like to a five-year-old child that morning long ago, in Nappanee, Indiana.

The house is gone, now, on the farm where my father was born, and lived as a child. I mean, the house that was there, then. A new house was built sometime in the 1960s, I think it was. And the old barn still stands. And the well out front along the fence, buried and unused in the weeds. Those are there. And the public school where Dad attended as a young child. Parson’s Corner. It’s still there, right close to the farm. Not sure what it’s being used for these days. But it still stands.

And that period of my father’s life is about as blank to me as any. His young childhood. There were stories, I’m sure, that he told when I was growing up. I just don’t remember much of them. Maybe I wasn’t listening all that close. Still, in later years, I asked about that world. And Dad told me a little bit about it.

He saw the Great Depression before he was ten years old. I find that fact just astonishing, today. That my parents both saw and lived through a window of history such as that. They saw the dust of the dirt roads in summer, and they saw the ragged tramps walking those roads to nowhere. They saw the peddlers traveling door to door in rickety vans, selling what they had to offer. The market came to the poor country folks, back in those days. A sparse market, compared to the one we take for granted, but a market nonetheless. Dad spoke of the dry goods man, selling bolts of cloth for dresses and denim for Amish barn door pants. Three yards of this, five yards of that. The man kept a running tally in his head, and when it came time to settle up, he had the total price all ready. He never made a mistake in figuring, Dad claimed. He was a real math whiz.

It’s all a little foggy, those years in his life. And when he was a young man, those years are foggy, too. It’s kind of funny. Dad wrote a lot, in his lifetime. But he never spoke much about his childhood and young adult years. Back in 2011, one of his sons got a memoir published. Growing Up Amish. The son told his story. And soon after that, Dad announced to his family. He had some notes, he’d been keeping. He was fixing to come out with his own memoirs, now, too. I chuckled when I heard it. That’s great news. I’d love to read Dad’s memories, from when he was young. If that’s what it took to get him going, his son getting a memoir published, then that’s just fine. Dad envisioned a five-volume set of small books. In the last five years or so, he has actually come out with four of those five volumes. (If you want to order any of the volumes, call Gospel Book Store in Berlin, Ohio. They stock and sell and ship all of David Wagler’s memoirs.) The first two volumes are a gold mine to me. Most of the stories in them, I had never heard before. I’m glad he got them told. And even more glad I got to hear.

Moving on, then, into his teenage years. That’s when he met Mom. At least that’s what he remembers. Her father, John Yoder, had some livestock for sale. Some heifers. Dad was sent over to check the heifers out. I don’t remember if he rode a horse or drove a buggy that day. He arrived at the farm. The sun was shining. Whistling a merry little tune, he walked up to the house and knocked on the door, to see if any of the menfolk were around. The door opened. And there stood the most beautiful young woman Dad had ever seen. Ida Mae, it turned out, her name was. Mom. She smiled at him, shyly and sweetly. Dad was tall and handsome enough, I suppose. He reflected his mother’s blood and bone. Waglers are generally short. He was tall, with dark, curly hair. That morning, standing in in the midday sun in front of that lovely young woman, Dad stammered and stuttered a little, but got the words out. He had come to check out the heifers that were for sale.

Mom smiled at him again. He felt light-headed. She was so beautiful. And she told him. The menfolk were all gone, this morning. She was home with her Mom and sisters. The heifers were out behind the barn, if he wanted to check them out. Dad thanked her. He turned and walked out to the barn. The lovely young woman disappeared into the house. He checked out the heifers and reported back to his father, who later bought them.

That would have been in the late 1930s, probably. And Dad somehow found reasons to keep lurking around Mom’s home place. They connected, and started dating. And things moved right along. They were married in February, 1942. They were very young when they started their journey through life together. And there was no way they could have known where the tides of life would sweep them as the years and then the decades rolled on like a flood.

And now, Dad is on the doorstep of ninety-six. He’s been alone for a few years. Mom passed away in early 2014, up in Aylmer, and was buried there. As most of my regular readers know. And Dad has spoken it. He never expected to last this long. His father, Joseph K., passed away from a heat stroke back in 1940. He was fifty-nine years old. Dad was nineteen. He didn’t figure to reach the old age he’s in. The Waglers just weren’t known for their longevity, that way. Maybe Dad got it from his Mom’s side, from her Lengacher blood. I don’t know. But here he is.

From here, today, I stand and look at who my father is and who he was in his lifetime. And I feel a tremendous sense of respect and pride. And, yes, I know. He was a deeply flawed man. That has come out countless times in my writings in the past. He was a hard, driven man. He was full of passion and desire and rage. The road he chose to walk was his own. And no, he didn’t treat Mom the best, on that road. Well. He treated her pretty bad, a lot. She endured a lot of senseless suffering. Until she was approaching the end of her own road. Then he cared for her with gentle tenderness, desperately, eagerly, like a child trying to make up for past wrongs. He was such a man. I look at all that unflinchingly and acknowledge his failures. But he was so much more than the sum of his flaws.

He was a man. A giant of a man, whose footsteps will remain imprinted in the earth long after his passing. He was all the maddening things a man can be. Stubborn. Focused. Bullheaded. Flawed. Unyielding. Cold, and kind. Distant, yet he cared deeply for his family. And where it counted, he wanted what was best for his children, his sons and daughters. He walked the path, he walked the road that he believed was the right one. He wanted his children to walk that road, too. And he sacrificed his own desires to do what he felt was best for his family. Most notably, he moved from Aylmer to Bloomfield, way back in my youth. He did that, so his remaining sons would stay with the Amish church. It didn’t work, of course. But he was willing to uproot all that he cherished, and take the risk. And he did it.

He was adventurous. Born of good solid Daviess blood, I don’t know where my father got his wanderlust. There was never any chance that Daviess would hold him. And once he forsook the land of his fathers, it was ever easier to leave the land he had fled to. I know his time in service camps as a conscientious objector during WWII vastly broadened his world. So it was a comparatively simple thing to move to Piketon, Ohio, then to Aylmer, then to Bloomfield. It’s OK. He wasn’t a nomad, but he didn’t hesitate to travel to a new place, a new world. There is always a place out there where things might go better.

He was a pioneer. My father will go down in history as one of the most visionary Amish intellectuals of all time. And yeah, I know. Some would claim that the term “Amish intellectual” is an oxymoron. I’ll stand with those who say it’s not. Dad was a writer, which is a little bit rare in the Amish culture. And writing was the true passion and purpose of his life. In defense of the Amish way of life, he cranked out voluminous amounts of words, from all the way back in his youth. He wrote because he had to, I suppose. I understand that. Compared to him, I got a real late start. And I’ll never match his volume. Never. It wasn’t until he followed his passion and his dream to launch Family Life, it wasn’t until then that his name became legend among his people. I look at that one single accomplishment as the major defining event in his long and productive life.

Such a thing had never been done before, at least not with any measurable success. Sure, there were wild-eyed Amish guys here and there over the years, guys who cranked out a little rag of some kind. They were never successful, at least not outside the boundaries of their immediate communities. The Budget would be an exception, but that was a newsletter that depended on its readers to provide the print. Family Life was a monthly magazine. With an editor and columnists and stories and serious historical research, and such. And Dad threw all he had, all his energy and drive and talent, into making the venture work. It succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. I have always admired him tremendously for pursuing his vision. That took guts, it took courage, and it took a bucket load of faith.

He walked alone a lot. I can’t say this for sure, but I’ve often thought it. Dad was a lonely man. He didn’t connect easily or deeply with a lot of people. Oh, sure, he did on a surface level. He was a superb salesman. He could jive and laugh and bow and scrape for a sale right with the best and brightest. But at a heart level, I think it was very hard for him to connect with people. He had very few truly close friends, at least not that I remember. I could be off a bit on this particular observation, but I don’t think I am. He was alone a lot, because you have to be, in your head, to really write. I know this because that’s how it goes for me. Writing is a lonely world.

And now he’s old. Now he’s turning ninety-six. Winding down a little abruptly, here. I didn’t know how this would all come out. In the end, I guess, my father was a man as he walked through life. Dad. A figure so vast in my world that it seems futile to try to express it. Or to commemorate the milestone he is about to observe. But still. You do what you can. You speak as you are able to. One of these years, it will be the last time his birthday is celebrated. Maybe it’s this year. Maybe it’s not. You just keep walking.

“And you, my father, there on the sad height,” Dylan Thomas wrote. “Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.” Those words have always spoken to me. Dad, I know you are on the sad height of a lonely world. A world where others take you by the hand and lead you to a place where you may or may not want to go. A world of loss and pain, where all but one or two of your peers are gone. I know you remember life from long ago, and look back fondly on the days of your youth. I know you miss Mom. I know the road has been long, and rough in places. And I know you are weary and simply want to rest.

Tomorrow is promised no one. It will bring what it may. Today is today. We are here, and this is now. At this moment, we choose to celebrate life, and all that life is.

A blessed Christmas to all my readers.

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The Sharp-Dressed Man…

Clean shirt, new shoes,

And I don’t know where I am goin’ to.

Silk suit, black tie,

I don’t need a reason why.

— ZZ Top, lyrics

_______________________________

I have no idea how it all happened, looking back. I mean, it sure wasn’t planned. But those journeys are the best, the ones that just come at you when you aren’t looking for anything except your ordinary day. And you don’t even realize the moment for what it is. This little foray was exactly that, back a few months ago.

A little bit of background, first. I will say. I’ve always been a rough and tumble guy from a real plain place in the country. A place where a man should be tough. His face should be seamed and weathered. Tanned by the sun. His hair should be windswept and uncontrolled. His hands should be calloused. And blackened by dirt and grease, from working the earth and working the machines that till the earth. His bread should be earned by the sweat of his brow. He should be gentle. His heart should be grateful and humble. These are some of the things a man should be.

Where I come from, it was the most lackadaisical world imaginable, when it came to men’s grooming. The men of my childhood, at least the married men, were dark and bearded and grim. Aylmer was kind of on the edge of things, when it came to letting your mustache grow. In most Amish communities, they’re pretty strict about that. Keep that hair trimmed down tight, on your upper lip. In Aylmer, not so much. It was one of the pet issues of the Stoll men, the mustache was. And looking back, it makes perfect sense, what they were saying. Facial hair is facial hair. There is no rational reason to say a beard is biblical, but a mustache isn’t. But Amish rules aren’t necessarily based on reason. The horse and buggy is the most visible symbol of that fact. (That, and maybe those awful barn-door pants the menfolk wear. Those are irrational, too.) Still, they roiled and stirred around a good deal, the Stolls did. Wear a blue shirt to church, instead of white. And it didn’t hurt to have a heavy midnight shadow where your mustache would grow. That’s the way things went a lot, back in Old Aylmer.

Mom wasn’t having any of that. I’ve mentioned it before. Her men and boys wore white shirts to church. Always. Never blue. And as for shaving your upper lip, well, there’s this little story from one fine Sunday morning, before my time. Dad had hitched up his horse and was trundling his family off to church. He wore a white shirt under his suitcoat, I’m sure. He clucked and slapped the reins. The horse clopped along contentedly. It was a peaceful morning. Until Mom glanced over and happened to notice. Dad had not clipped his mustache lately. It was clearly visible. It was, in fact, a mustache. This did not sit well with Mom.

“Dad!” She spoke sharply. And a little loud, over the rattle of the buggy. “Dad. You forgot to shave.”

My father generally remained calm under such an outburst as that. And that morning, he tried to laugh it off. Har, har. Oh, well. They had left home, now. It was too late, to turn back. It was soon time for church to start.

But there would be no peace. Not as long as Dad had that stubbled upper lip. Mom kept right on admonishing. And Dad kept right on driving. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if church was to the east of our home, or to the west. I seem to recall hearing it told that Mom kept nagging Dad until he pulled into Nicky Stoltzfus’ place, a half mile to the east. Wherever it was, that family had not left for church, yet. And Dad went to the door and knocked. The door opened. Dad asked if he could borrow the hair clippers to clean up his face a bit. And that’s how Dad got to church with a freshly-shorn face that morning. And that’s why some other family passed down the story to the children, of the Sunday morning when David Wagler stopped with his family, so he could clip his mustache hair with the hand clippers. Such a tale as that was told. A tale that actually happened.

There wasn’t a whole lot of grooming going on among the men in my Amish childhood world. Not a whole lot of grooming of any kind, I don’t guess. I do remember a few things that signified a rite of passage, though. My older brothers had these things, I saw early on. A single-edged safety razor. A pressurized can of shaving cream. And a plastic bottle of green Skin Bracer. I’ve seen that hard green glint in just about every shade of light there is. Skin Bracer is good stuff. And it doesn’t smell half bad.

And that single-edged razor. We used it for other things, too. Scraping paint. And it made the perfect blade to castrate little piglets. Dad always had a few sows around. A few farrowing pens in a dilapidated barn. And when the sows had little ones, we’d step in when they were a week old or so. We’d grab a male piglet, and one of us would hold it upside down, by the back legs. The other person would reach in, slice open the testicles, and slash, slash. It was done. Dunk a little peroxide on the open cuts, and back to Mama the piglet went. I’m sure it hurt, the procedure, but I can’t remember that we ever lost one because of infection. They healed up pretty fast. And that’s how I used a single-edged razor blade long before I ever shaved.

And I remember first using the safety razor to shave. Well, maybe it wouldn’t count as a real shave. I was probably fourteen, when some fuzzy hairs showed up on my chin and my upper lip. Barely noticeable to anyone, except to me. When could I use that razor, to actually shave? And I remember scraping the fuzzy hairs off, without any shaving cream. I just rubbed a bit of hot water on my chin, and scratched away. That was in Aylmer. After we moved to Bloomfield, I gradually entered the world of real shaving. And I honestly can’t remember what my first razor was. If it was a real safety razor, or one of those blue disposables. I dutifully scratched the hair from my face every Sunday morning before church, and splashed on some of that cold green Skin Bracer. And that right there is all I ever really knew about men’s grooming. Other than wearing deodorant, I mean.

One other thing I remember. Mom often spoke it, when the boys were cleaning up to go away for the evening, or to church. She always told us to make sure we wash that cow barn or pig barn smell off, before we put on any kind of after shave or perfume. The barn doesn’t mix with the smell from any perfume. Clean up. Wash up. Use soap. Then put on your Skin Bracer. That was her refrain. Barely a generation removed from a place where such words would have been rarely if ever spoken or heard, she boldly spoke to us what she instinctively knew. That’s how civilization develops, I guess. Maybe that’s how the Amish church develops, too.

And now. Coming up to today. Well, a few months ago. I had just quit drinking. Again. Certainly it wasn’t the first time. I’ve learned to never get too riled up when I quit. Never make any promises to myself or anyone else. I’m quitting for now. Today. Only today. Forever is too scary, too long. So just for now, I’m walking a different road than I have been. We’ll see where the road goes and how long I’ll stay on it.

I had just quit, for maybe two weeks. The liquid weight practically melted off me those first ten days or so. It was just astounding. More than a pound a day. And I was strolling around in the Giant grocery store, picking up a few things I needed. Some Glide dental floss, and this and that. After grabbing my items, I noticed, there, off to the side. Men’s shaving products. All kinds of disposable razors with every bell and whistle you can imagine. The replacement blades for those things cost a fortune. It’s a racket, is what it is. There were shelves and shelves of shaving cream, in pressurized cans. And then I saw it, there, packed in a nice orange box with black writing. Van Der Hagen brand. An old-time double-edged safety razor. It almost looked out of place. And I stopped, intrigued.

I picked up the nice orange box with the black lettering. Looked it over. The safety razor was a butterfly model, which means you can screw and unscrew the end of the handle. The top opens right up, and you insert the blade, then screw it shut. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, a memory shook loose, of how that worked. I had done it before. Decades ago. A lifetime ago. The Van Der Hagen safety razor came with ten blades, all neatly packed in a nice little package. That’s what the back of the box said. Twenty some odd bucks for all of it. I weighed the thing in my hands and in my mind. And then I placed the box into my shopping cart. I had absolutely no clue of the door that had cracked open, no clue that I had taken a first tentative step through that door, no clue of the vast new world I was about to discover. No clue at all, of any of that.

I took my little safety razor home. The next morning, I sprayed some foam from a can and rubbed it on my cheeks, and on my throat and neck, below my beard. And I scratched away. It felt good, and the result was vastly better than the electric shaver I had been using for the past few years. I don’t know what possessed me, to ever buy an electric shaver with those round spinning blades. It never gave me anything close to a close shave. By midmorning at work, the stubble shone from my face like a black and gray harvest. Me and my Van Der Hagen butterfly safety razor got along just fine from day one. This is the new me, I thought to myself. I’m gonna start paying a little more attention to how I look. Just the basic stuff. Nothing fancy.

And another little bunny trail, here. Ever since leaving the Amish, decades ago, I had been vaguely conscious of the fact that there was a subset of people out there. The beautiful people. They’ve always been around. I just wasn’t aware of them. They first nudged their way into my life (in a way that I noticed) at Bob Jones University, back in the early 1990s. I was too busy to pay them much mind, but I saw them. The GQ guys, always impeccably dressed. The guys who combed their hair swept off to the side, held in place by some high shine hair grease. Pomade, I learned later, it’s called. They wore the latest cool shirts and khaki pants, and shiny new leather belts and loafers. The girls had it a bit harder, having to wear skirts and all. Still, they stood out, too. It took a while for the whole scene to work itself into my awareness. Don’t get me wrong. The beautiful people were never rude, there at BJU. Just cooler than you could ever hope to be.

I remember, too, how Dr. Bob III, a gaunt giant of a man, ranted and raved against the beautiful people one day in his chapel sermon. They had all the wrong priorities, he roared from the pulpit. All their beautiful clothes and their cutting-edge styles would go down in flames and end up as dust and ashes. The Lord was not ever pleased with such things. I heard that sermon, dressed in my detestable plain cut suit coat. I looked around and felt a little bad for the beautiful people. It took so much effort, to look and dress like that. And now, Dr. Bob was hollering at them. Oh, well. I shrugged. It was a world I never knew or could even remotely imagine. I was a peasant, judging the elites of worldly society with disdain.

I walked on through life, far from the beautiful people. And it’s not that I considered myself particularly ragged or uncouth. I was just a guy who had emerged from a plain and simple place. I was clean enough, I felt. I splashed my face with Skin Bracer or some sort of cologne every day, before heading out to classes or, in summer, to work in the construction world. Around that time, a friend pulled me aside one day. She was the wife of a friend of mine, and she told me. You’re wearing too much cologne. It’s too strong. Be more discreet. I was very embarrassed, but I thanked her and meant it. After that, I splashed on way less of whatever it was I was using.

Going forward, I never paid much attention to the beautiful people. I was too busy to be bothered by them. And I had my own issues in life. But there was one other place I saw where those people proliferated. In law school. There, they were beautiful, and they were just a little bit better. Always impeccably polite, of course. And nice, and friendly. But it sank through my dense head, in those three years. These people lived on a different planet than the one I came from. I would have no chance at all of ever associating with them, of ever really being accepted by them. I could never go out with one of their women. I was way too ragged and uncouth for that. Not that the realization of any of that was a big deal. But at this level, relationships mattered. Connections mattered. And the beautiful people looked out for each other. I was never perturbed enough to be really bothered by it. But still. It was what it was, and I saw what I saw.

Moving along, then. Me and my new butterfly safety razor got along just great. After a few days, I got to thinking. I wonder if I should get me a shaving brush. You know, to get the lathered cream brushed in nice and deep. So I could enjoy a better shave. So I checked, on Amazon. And right away, I found a nice little set for fifteen bucks. A brush, a cheap, plain green shaving bowl, and a small round bar of hard shaving soap. Van Der Hagen brand, again, all of it. Hmm. I wondered how soap like that would work. I had never used any shaving cream, except the kind that spritzed from a pressurized can. I had never used a brush and hard soap. I placed my order. And while I waited for my new treasures to get here, I poked around a little online. What other shaving stuff was out there?

And it’s so strange, these days. And half scary. When I searched on Amazon for shaving products, and placed my order, all of a sudden all these shaving ads started popping up on my Facebook feed. And when I clicked on any one of those links, five more showed up. I’m telling you. It’s a jungle out there. But it’s a delightful jungle, too. Or can be. I’m not going into a lot of detail about brands, here. But I will mention a few of the first ones that showed up. Brickell Men’s Products. Right there on my Facebook feed was a nice flashy ad. Try our products for free. Free samples. Interested, I clicked the link. It looked like good stuff. All I had to pay was shipping. Six bucks. Good deal. I bit.

And the other brand that came right up at me was WSP. Wet Shaving Products. A small company, it turned out later. But man, did they ever have some decent stuff at decent prices. Before I knew it, I had read pretty much through the entire site. There was a lot to learn, I saw right away. I checked out all the shaving soaps. And I looked longingly at some of those nice badger hair shaving brushes. I really needed one of those. That, and some hard soaps and maybe a nice little bottle of aftershave. This is how they get you suckered in. Not that I didn’t have my eyes wide open. I did.

My first order came, from Van Der Hagen. A stiff brush. Boar’s hair, I think. That, or synthetic. It was too cheap to be listed. A nice puck of hard shaving soap. And a swell little green shaving cup, that you use to brush the soap to lather. I kept perusing the Wet Shaving Products site. And the next thing I knew, I had ordered a starter kit. A real badger brush, a bottle of aftershave splash, pre-shave oil, and a small tin of Mahogany soap. And then the sample box arrived from Brickell. It had many small containers of the products they offer. Face Wash. Charcoal Cleanser. Restoring Eye Cream. Moisturizer. Aftershave Balm. I mean, it was all there.

I looked at that nice little package of men’s grooming products. And I looked at my shaving kit that had arrived from WSP. It was as good as advertised. The brush was soft. I opened the little tin of soap and swirled the wet brush around and around. The soap turned to lather. I felt a pang of joy. It actually worked. And then I thought to myself. What am I? Turning into one of those people I never had any use for? A beautiful person? I mean, look at this stuff. It’s made for men who have no idea what it is to hardscrabble your way out of nothing. It’s made for soft hands, not grime and grease. It’s made for a pampered, spoiled generation of men who never knew what it was to touch and till the earth.

But then I thought, too. Why not? Why not use these things? What’s wrong with keeping your face cleaned and washed? What’s wrong with moisturizing your hands and face? Why can’t I enjoy some of those things in life, as well? I’ve been a hard man, all my life. Never spent much time pondering over what it is to have a nice, soft shave. Or good clean skin. There’s nothing wrong with these things. So why not?

And so I started using the products, every day. In the shower, I scrubbed my face with the Cleanser. And after I had finished and dried, my routine developed into a little dance, almost. A splash of this, a dab of that. Wipe this goop in your hair. And I rubbed the Restoring Cream on the bags under my eyes. Every morning and evening, I did that. The bags tightened, then all but disappeared. Well, comparatively speaking, I mean. I marveled. Maybe there was something to this grooming procedure, after all, that was good for you. And through it all, I never touched a drop of liquor. And the weight kept sliding off, one pound after another. Day after day, and week after week.

I had made some fairly drastic lifestyle changes. Not for any particular reason, but just because I thought I should. And I turned my back on a few old doors and timidly walked through some new doors, into a great wide new world. A world with tastes and sights and sounds I can’t quite say I’ve seen before. At least not this vividly.

It’s a beautiful place. Each morning is a new high. I actually get up fifteen minutes earlier than I used to, to start the new day. Anyone who knows me knows that this is insane. That Ira voluntarily gets up early for anything. I never did such a thing for devotions, even, at least not in any sustained way. And it’s almost a ritual. I get up and rejoice in my heart and look with a grateful face to God. Thank you for life, and all that it is.

And then I wash and oil my face and use a shaving brush to lather up. The whole process is a production that I enjoy. I can fully shave with not a whiff of a cut, using the right products. And of course, the wet shaving world opened whole new dimensions I never saw or knew of before. Face moisturizer. Pre and post shave tonics. Hair pomades, and olive oil spray. Beard oil. The list goes on and on. I never knew there were so many men’s care products on the market. You can be a beautiful person without half trying. Or at least you can use the products they use to stay “beautiful.”

The thing is, I feel beyond refreshed when I walk out the door to face each day. I feel alive. Each day brings what only that day can. And one night, well, one night about a month ago I stopped at Amelia’s to pick up a few things. It was still early on in the process, the new lifestyle I had started. I greeted the cashier as I checked out. She has worked there for years, and we always chat about life. And that night, she looked at me.

“Your face looks different,” she said. “It’s like you’ve been in the sun. What have you been doing with yourself? You look great.” Nah, I told her. I haven’t been in the sun much, not since I went to the beach a month ago. But I’ve been trying to take better care of myself, including my face. Thanks for noticing. She smiled, and we chatted about other things. And then I just floated on out of there.

And I’ve been accumulating a good bit of product, the last six weeks or so. You get on those web sites, and you can’t help but order this soap or that brush or that aftershave tonic. I don’t know. In some ways, I think, it’s a lot like the whiskey world. So many tastes and colors and scents and hardware. It’s like walking through a garden in full bloom. And plucking a few flowers from the garden here and there, to give to some pretty girl when you meet her. You just walk along and whistle to yourself.

It takes a while, to fill up your cabinet with decent stuff. Just like it takes a while to get a good assortment of quality whiskey. I’ve sent off for quite a few small to medium orders, and the little boxes have flowed in. From all kinds of vendors, with all kinds of brands. West Coast Shaving is probably my favorite vendor, with the largest selection. Fendrihan, for the Man of Distinction, is a close second. And the brands, well, those are numerous, like the stars in the heavens. Brickell Men’s Products. Caption’s Choice. Ghost Town Barber, by Chiseled Face. Pinaud Clubman, in all its glorious varieties. Col. Ichabod Conk’s Bay Rum splash. Dapper Dan (it’s a real product, not just in the movies). Lucky Tiger. Wet Shaving Products. Tabac. Stirling Soap. The Holy Black Trading Company. Fine Snake Bite tonic. Sir Hare (my favorite shaving soap, so far). Viking’s Blade. Son of Zeus. And on and on it goes.

These days, the boxes are barely a trickle, coming in. As the money was flowing out a bit, as I was getting stocked up, I thought about it now and then. I’m spending less per week than I was spending at the bar. And when you left the bar, the money was gone. Whoosh. Here, I was accumulating. So, yeah. Go ahead and grab a bottle of that premium small-batch brand of aftershave splash. And another brand, another flavor of hard shaving soap. And this open-combed safety razor is on sale. Umm. One more medium grade badger brush? And look at this pre-shave oil. I’ll take a bottle of that, too.

And you come back to earth, gradually. Eventually, you do. You look around. Yep, it’s a beautiful new world. It’s still there, and it’s still real. But I think I got enough stuff now, to last a while. I probably have enough really good shaving soap to last until I’m seventy. Which isn’t all that far away, when you think about it. Oh, well. It’s all good.

It’s a new process, and it’s a new pride. And it affects life right where it is. My face is soft and clean, every morning. Clean, and clean shaven, around my beard. And, of a Sunday, I’m dressing up now, at least compared to what I used to do. A starched white or striped shirt. A tie. A nice vest. Khaki pants or jeans. I even got me a silver pocket watch and chain, to wear with my vests. Because what’s a Sunday vest without a pocket watch and chain? I like going to the Lord’s house that way. Spiffed up a bit.

People notice. The other Sunday morning, I stopped at Sheetz on the way to church, for my coffee. Like I always do. The clerk looked at me twice, as I was paying up. I was all decked out in a white shirt, vest with watch and chain, a tie, shiny face, and slicked-back hair. I smelled good. Discreetly, like a sharp-dressed man should. I looked like a dude, a dandy from the big city. He took my money. And then he asked me. “Are you on the way to church?”

Funny, I thought. No clerk anywhere has ever asked such a question before, on a Sunday morning. Am I on the way to church? I smiled at him. I am, I answered. And then I said, kind of half kidding. You gotta look a little snazzy for the Lord. He laughed. Then he said. “Good thing the Lord only looks at the inside. Not that you don’t look good. But I’m just saying.” I laughed back. I hear that, I said. And, yes, it is a good thing.

And the new pride spills over, right into my life here at home, too. I’ve lived in this house for seventeen years. One night, a few weeks back, I found myself cleaning and scrubbing the cabinet above my bathroom sink for the first time, in all that time. It had just never occurred to me before, that I should.

And it hit me, as I was washing the little glass shelves. It had all started with the wet shaving. You take the time to do that, it becomes a production. A ritual, a process. Then you start grooming, a little, how you look. Then you start accumulating all kinds of oils and aftershaves. And then you start cleaning up the place where you keep your stuff. It all flows naturally, from one phase to the next. Clean up your life, clean up your face, and you’ll clean up your house, too. It sure is strange how that works, I gotta say.

I am absorbing and enjoying the twists and turns and curves and hills on this new road. Who knows, where it will all end up? It doesn’t really matter, I guess. For now, for today, I will seize and savor the moment. I will embrace each new stage of the journey, and revel in it. And I will keep walking.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers.

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Vagabond Traveler: The Second Gate…

Toil on, son, and do not lose heart or hope. Let nothing you dismay.

You are not utterly forsaken. I, too, am here–here in the darkness

waiting, here attentive, here approving of your labor and your dream.

—Thomas Wolfe

_________________

Well. I guess I can finally tell it. It’s been a long, long time coming. More than a year ago, I wrote, right here on the blog. It’s time to go shop my second book. I think I’m ready, now. It’s time, to set off on that journey. It’s time to set out for one more city. And since I wrote those words, there has not been a whole lot more to say about it all. Not until now. And here’s the story of the journey, from that day to this one.

The publishing world is a brutal, brutal place. It just is. I’ve always known that. But I kind of skirted around the reality of it all, with my first book. The writing of it came. And then the editing. And then the book was launched into the world. Amazingly, or maybe not, it took off, right from the start. I hunkered down for the ride. And a wild ride it has been.

And since then, life has just been what it was. Up and down and sideways and forward and back. That’s how I walked. That’s how the journey went. And one thing never happened, there early on. There never was a second book that came.

It was about time, I felt, back there a year ago. About time for the second effort. Not that it was burning a hole inside me, or anything. In publishing, if your first book does any good, they tell you. It’s time for the next one. They nudge around, kind of hem and haw. And then they ask. That’s just how it goes. That’s the formula. And way too many writers crank out a second book, when it’s not really in them. They think they have to. And that’s why so many sequels fall flat. It’s because they never came from where the first book came from. From what I’ve seen and felt, this is what I can tell you.

Anyway, back to the market. The publishing world is a brutal brutal place. You step out, you speak, and by some miracle, it works. Your voice gets heard. Your book sells. And that’s all fine. But the people in that world are focused on one thing. Can you write a second book that will sell? Not that I’m grumbling at the publishing world, for being what it is. I’m not. It’s the market. It is what it is, and it will not change.

I remember emailing my agent, back last year. Chip MacGregor. It’s kind of funny, I always thought. I have never bothered Chip, much. Just never felt any need to. I consider myself a very low-maintenance client. I never make much fuss or hassle. Heck, until just lately, I barely ever talked to the man. Well, way back, when he took me as a client, we talked a time or two. We never got very conversational. Which was fine. Then, when the book was coming together, we chatted a few more times. Other than that, we never did. There was no need to. He did his job, getting me through the door at Tyndale. And after he made that connection, he simply got out of the way and let things happen. I’ve always appreciated that about the man. He doesn’t bug you, if you want to be left alone. And he never bugged me, either, in the years since. Oh, sure. Once in a while, here came a short email. He was just checking. How am I doing? I’m fine, I always said. And that was that, until six months later, when he checked in again. Such is the relationship I had with my agent, all these years. It’s a wonder he didn’t cross me from his list. But he never did.

Anyway, I emailed him, out of the blue, last year. I think I’m ready to shop my second book. Is that something you want to do for me? “Of course,” he emailed back. And I asked. Do you think there’s a market for my stuff? It’s been a few years, since Growing Up Amish got published. Will people remember who I am? The publishers, I mean. And I gotta respect the man’s response. He never made any guarantees. You can’t, in publishing. But he told me. “There are plenty of big publishers out there who will be very interested in seeing what you have to offer.” OK, then, I told him. I’ll send you some stuff early next year. This was last year. And by February or so, I sent him a batch of my writings. Fifty pages.

I don’t know how other authors do it, to submit their stuff. From what I’ve seen in the guidelines of most agents, the process is pretty rigorous. Kind of like walking a tightrope. You gotta submit a real manuscript, or at least a good start to one. And you gotta follow all the rules. Double spaced pages. Chapter breaks. Potential titles. Blah, blah, blah, and then, blah and blah. It’s endless, the list. It’s always been wearying to me, to think of all that attention to detail.

But those first fifty pages were pretty organized. I worked hard at what I figured was a real opening chapter to a real book. I even had it professionally edited by my old friend, Susan Taylor. She edited my first book. She retired a couple of years ago. I hunted her down. Will you edit some of this stuff for me? I asked her. I’ll pay you. She could and did. It felt like old times, going back and forth with her. And it all looked pretty good, I thought, when I sent it off to Chip. I’ll see what he thinks, I thought to myself.

He got back to me a few weeks later. Lots of suggested corrections, he had. Do this. Clean up that. Edit this. Ah, come on, Chip, I grumbled to myself. Who knows, what a publisher wants? And I told him. Why don’t you let me clean up some of my writings, that I got on file and on my blog? I’ll get you a hundred pages or so. It’ll be disjointed, but it’ll be good stuff. Any potential publisher can look at it and see I’ll need some editing help. I mean, that’s how it worked last time. Why can’t we try that again? Chip allowed that he could see my point. Send the writing, he told me. So I went back to my computer. Over the next few weeks, I edited and prepared over a hundred pages of older stuff I had already written. Individual stories. Some old blogs. I cleaned it all up. Double-spaced it, even. And off it went.

Chip took a few weeks, to look it over. And really read through it. He liked it, he claimed. I don’t think we talked, then. Just emailed. I asked him. Do you think Tyndale might be interested in publishing my second effort? Chip was pretty confident. “Of course they will be interested,” he wrote. “Your first book sold a lot of copies. Tyndale should jump on this.” OK, I said. Let me know. And I went back to doing what I do, which is mostly plugging along through life, and writing an occasional blog. I never mentioned much on my blogs, that I was shopping another book around. No sense getting your readers all riled up, before anything develops. That’s what I figured.

And all was quiet, for weeks and weeks. Never a peep from Chip. Not unusual at all. Last time, he disappeared for six months, if I remember right. So I didn’t sweat it. Not much, anyway. Sure, I thought about it. What’s going on? But I also knew that the publishing world moves at a glacial pace, like an old man, hobbling along with a cane. Nothing is ever sure, not before an agreement is made. The weeks passed, then the months. I got restless. What’s going on? Why isn’t Chip getting back to me?

I didn’t take notes at the time, so my sequence of events might be off a bit. But eventually, I nudged Chip. What’s going on? Any word from Tyndale? There was no word. And then Chip forwarded a message from a small publishing company. That editor claimed to have cried all the way through my stories. Unfortunately, that publisher was too small to marshal the resources needed to edit my work. Would Ira consider taking on the editing role himself? The editor asked.

So Chip asked me. Would I? I will, when I have to, I said. Not before. Did all the big publishers reject it, yet? No, they had not. He was still waiting to hear back from a few. Well, let’s wait, then, I wrote. And I asked, too. What’s happening with Tyndale? Chip seemed mildly vague, with his answer. Tyndale wasn’t saying yay or nay. They were just pretty much ignoring my stuff.

Well. You gotta wonder why a publisher wouldn’t jump on the second offering from an author who brought in a million bucks (or at least hundreds of thousands of dollars) with his first book. And, yeah, I knew. Many of the people I worked with at Tyndale had moved on. Or retired, like Susan had. But not all. And there had been a departmental shakeup, too, that I knew of. The place wasn’t the same as it had been, back in 2010-11. But still. I was disappointed in Tyndale. The publishing world is a brutal place. That’s a given. But they could have relaunched my first book along with the release of the second. Anyone with half an eye could see that. It just doesn’t make much sense to ignore potential profits that are as good as guaranteed. Not to my way of thinking, anyway.

Chip was astounded, that Tyndale didn’t bite. I wasn’t all that astounded, but I sure felt deflated. It just seemed like something that was destined to happen. A road block, thrown right up in front of me. Good grief. If something can go wrong, it will. But we talked, then, Chip and me. And he spoke calmly and wisely. “If the book is not wanted at one place, we will take it to a place that does want it,” he said. “Let me keep shopping around.” I felt better, at his words.

But deep down, I felt ripples of uneasiness. The market sure wasn’t falling over itself, to take my stuff. What if no one wanted what I wrote? What if there were no takers? What then? In the publishing world, as in life, I guess, no one cares much what you did six years ago. What have you done lately? Publishers focus on one particular thing. Can I make them money? And I got no problem with any of that. No one publishes a book just for fun. And no one should. If you don’t figure to make money, there’s no sense even bothering with it.

See what you can do, I said to Chip. Keep me updated. I’ll wait to hear from you. He said he would. And it wasn’t long after that, that I got a happy message. An editor from Harper Collins was very interested. A guy editor. Most editors are women, these days. Like someone told me, once. “Publishing is basically ten thousand women, and a couple hundred men, mainly in production and sales.” That’s true, I think.

And Chip told me. The man from Harper really loved my work. It might be just exactly what he’s looking for. I was a little astounded. Harper Collins. One of the Big Five publishers in New York City. That was Big Time, like Peter Gabriel sings. Bigger than Tyndale, for sure. I agreed, of course, when Chip wanted to set up a time for us to chat with the editor man from Harper.

It happened a week or so later. At the last moment, Chip took ill. So he couldn’t join us. I called the number right at 5:30. And the editor was there. We spoke our names. Introduced ourselves. And we talked. It’s a big deal, when an editor from Harper Collins takes the time to talk to you. A big deal. We got along great. I felt calm. He had a lot of questions about how the first book happened. And what I figured would have to happen for the second one to become real. I was totally honest. I write raw stuff. I can tear your heart out. Make you laugh. Make you weep bitter tears. I just have a hard time connecting it all into a book. That’s what the Tyndale people did last time. Connected everything. That’s what I’m looking for now. Editing and connecting.

The man seemed impressed, I gotta say. He dug a little deeper into my “philosophy of writing.” I told him. I don’t believe in writing courses in college. I’ve never been to a writer’s seminar in my life. You either got it inside you, or you don’t. That’s the way I see it. He seemed to hear my words. And he told me. “A guy like you should be talking at these seminars. There’s a lot of people out there who need to hear what you’re saying.” And we chatted, too, about what my story line might be, for the book. It’s a lot of father/son stuff, I said. I’m open to suggestions. I’m totally open to a publisher’s guidance. That’s why I need a publisher with some resources. I need some time and I need some help, to get it all together.

An hour whooshed by. Then another ten minutes. He needed to go. So we wrapped it up. He was definitely very interested. But. But. He had to get the concept through the Publishing Board, there at Harper. Yeah, I said. I know all about Publishing Boards. They’re like the Wall of China. You can’t get around, and you can’t get through. I know it’s a real job. He said he’d be in touch with Chip, soon. And I thanked him for the time. We hung up. I didn’t feel exhausted or anything. But it was a big deal, to chat with an editor at that level. I knew that, right as it was happening.

Chip and I chatted via email, then, the next few days. And I went back to my daily routine. Go to work. Work on my blog now and then. And wait. I should hear something from the editor man soon, I figured. Surely within a month.

And the weeks swept right on by. I heard nary a peep from anyone. Oh, well. No use fretting. I’m sure the man is fighting his Publishing Board, to get his idea through. And then, out of nowhere, another message from Chip. He had another editor who wanted to talk to me. A lady, this time. From another big publisher. Hachette.

Hachette? I thought to myself. I wonder what company that is. Sounds French. I googled the name. And learned soon enough. Hachette is one of the Big Five in New York City, just like Harper Collins is. The company was French, actually. And it had bought out the publisher Time-Warner. That name I knew. Wow, I thought to myself. That’s wild. First an editor from Harper Collins, now from Time-Warner. This is big time. There must be something they like about my stuff. Either that, or Chip just has good connections. Maybe both. And Chip scheduled a conference call with the Hachette lady, for one evening after work. This time, he wasn’t sick. So the three of us connected.

It went well. At least I thought so. The woman lives down south, in Nashville. She sure had a strong southern accent. We talked, and I told her pretty much what I had told the guy from Harper. I can send you all kinds of good stuff. Stories that will tear at your heart. But someone needs to fuse it all into a book. That’s what happened with the first book, back in 2011. And, I know. That’s a lot of years that have passed. I know, an author is supposed to crank out his second book way before I did. It doesn’t matter to me, I said. It didn’t come, so I didn’t write it. I think I’m ready, now. I’m ready to try, anyway.

And the nice lady seemed impressed. She loved my style of writing, she told me. That’s why she reached out to Chip. And we talked. Of course, she would have to go back and present the whole idea to her Publishing Board, too. Of course, I said. I don’t claim to know a lot about publishing, but I do know that much, now. From all I’ve seen in the past. I think we talked for almost an hour. And then we wound things down. And I thought to myself. I hope there’s a bidding war between this woman and the Harper guy. That would be nice. I’ve been wanting that black Jeep ever since I drove one down to Florida to see Dad last April. A nice down payment on a book might get me a nice down payment on that black Jeep. Who knows? That was my random thinking after I chatted with the lady from Hachette.

And I thought about it a lot, back then. The Harper guy called in May, the Hachette lady in June. And I mulled it over, in my head. It’s kind of wild, that people from that level of the publishing world reached out to me. It’s a big deal. And I knew, too. Before another book will ever come, the right door has to open. The second gate to the golden city. That gate has to open, or there will never be another book from me. Not that such a thing would be the end of the world for me. I’ve always claimed that. And I meant it, too. I’ll write another book when and if it gets here. If it never does get here, well, at least no one can ever take away my first book. That’s what I always told myself, anyway. Maybe I was whistling past the graveyard. Maybe I was just trying to calm my mind.

I knew what part of the problem was, if no offer came. Chip had hedged at it, delicately, a few times. My “platform.” It’s nowhere close to what it needs to be. Mostly because I don’t pay any attention to it. I’m supposed to be connecting to 50,000 people every month, which just boggles my mind. How in the world does one do that, and remain real? How do you do that without pestering people to read your stuff? I have never done that. I have never paid any attention to increasing my platform. I blog when I feel like it. I post on Facebook as life unfolds around me. I mean, I live. Or try to. That’s one side of the equation, when a publisher looks at me. My platform is sadly lacking. The other side? I’ve written a NY Times Bestseller that’s approaching 200,000 copies sold. It doesn’t compute, any of it. And it almost makes their heads explode, the bean counters in the publishing world.

And June soon passed into July. I never told many people about the two Big Five publishers who had reached out. Well, I told my family. I figure family has the right to know about most things as they happen. And I told my coworkers at the office. Some of those people, I’ve been working with for years and years. There’s not too much I hold back. So I told them. And I said to everyone I told. At this stage, there is nothing sure. Nothing concrete. But this has to happen before anything else can happen. The door has to open, one crack at a time. The gate to my second book has to open, however slowly. This stage has to happen, or there will be no others. And I drank scotch on the rocks quietly and intensely as the month of July rolled by.

August came. That’s my birthday month. Another year, coming at me. Fifty-six. One of these days, I’ll be hobbling along with a cane. And, of course, August is the month of the Great Annual Ira Wagler Garage Party. This year, I scheduled it for the 19th. And this year, I invited people from just about all over. From the Midwest and from the South. Family. Friends. Relatives. Neighbors. Come one. Come all, I told them. This year will be a special year. And I thought to myself, too. It sure would be nice if I could announce it at my Garage Party. My offer for the second book.

As August rumbled by, the Garage Party came and went. And this year, my nephew John Wagler and his wife Dorothy flew in from all the way out in Iowa. And my niece Janice came, too, from Florida. And her brother, Steven, drove up from his home in South Carolina. It was a big old gathering for a big old party at Ira’s Garage. It was a great, grand affair. But I never breathed a word in public about a book deal, because I never heard an offer from anyone about a book deal. After the party, I got to thinking. I’ve heard nothing. Nothing. Maybe it’s time to start getting a little nervous.

And somewhere in about here, it just hit me one day. I’ve been drinking way too hard, all summer. Way too hard. Sure, I could blame the pressures of not knowing about the book. I could blame all that. Those two Big Five publishers who nibbled, yet kept shrinking back. And one day, soon after my Garage Party, one day I just said to myself. I’m tired of waking up, all exhausted from the whiskey. I’m intensely ashamed of being a big, fat slob. I’m tired of feeling so bloated and heavy, tired of bulging out of my biggest clothes. I’m tired of being tired all the time. And I made a snap decision. I’m quitting. I won’t say forever, because that’s too long. I’ll just say, for now. At least until I lose a bunch of pounds, and get to feeling a little better. So that’s what I did. Just quit drinking, stone cold. One day, I’ll write a blog about alcohol and me. That’ll be the title. Alcohol and Me. That, or Running with the Devil. Either one would work, I think.

I nudged Chip now and then. Bothered him more than I ever had before. It’s just how it went. September came. And Beach Week approached. This year, I was alcohol-free, going in. A few weeks before we left, I got a merry little note from Chip. Virginia is taking your book to the Board this next week. Virginia. That’s her name, the lady from Hachette. Wow, I thought. She’s taking it to the Board. Publishing Boards have traditionally not been very kind to me. My stuff squeaked by the Tyndale Board, somehow. But before that, the Harvest House Board deemed my writing “not sweet enough.” I never forgot that. How obtuse those people were, on that Board. I have been very leery of all Publishing Boards since then. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of them, near as I can tell. And now the concept of my second book was being presented to another Board by a brave warrior editor who was willing to go to battle for me.

I felt very tense about it. But still. This had to happen, before anything real could happen. Before any offer could be made. The Wall had to be crossed. Passed through. Whatever. Oh, well, I thought. Beach Week is coming right up. At least I’ll know, one way or the other, by the time we head down there. And the week came, that the Board would hear about my book. I tried not to think about it, much. I just hoped the writing would be good enough to persuade. It was too late to change anything, if it wasn’t. Oh, well. Just keep walking. That’s what I told myself.

And the week passed. No word came. Nothing. No yay. No nay. Saturday approached. I packed for the beach. And we headed out, Wilm and me. Just like we do every year. It was my turn to take my truck. We arrived. Everyone else did, too. And Beach Week came at us. It was a little different for me, being alcohol free and all. I had lost a solid dozen pounds or more. And that week, I gained a few of those pounds back. Not from drink. From all the good food. We feasted like kings, as we always do. The difference this year was, I was in bed by eleven or before. Every night. And every morning, I was the first one up. A halo hovered over my head, I felt like. By the time the others stumbled into the kitchen, I had dined magnificently on eggs and buttered toast and bacon, and was drinking coffee and orange juice. I read. I wrote a bit. And I never heard a word from Chip, about the Publishing Board at Hachette. Not a word. Nothing was going on, apparently.

And soon the week had swooshed right by. We all headed for home. The tension inside had lurked, latent, all week. And after I got home and Monday morning rolled around, I still had heard nothing. So I sat down and wrote an email to Chip. What is going on? Come on. This is crazy, that I’ve heard nothing. And Chip wrote back, very calmly. He wasn’t sure what was going on. He had emailed Virginia. He was expecting to hear from her any time. Sure, I thought. I mean, why would anyone be contacting us now, when there had been only silence for weeks? I was stressed, I will say. All my eggs had been shopped out, in one basket. If there were no takers, I would have to find another road. Another door. And I’d have to start all over, in the journey. I did not want to do that. I really did not want to.

And it was all a little surreal, in that time. How I felt, and how I looked at life. I had quit drinking, stone cold, a mere few weeks before. And I wanted a drink real bad, as the tension levels escalated inside me. I really did. A good stiff scotch would have tasted so, so delicious. But I never went there. Not other than in my head. All of life is a choice, at least those parts of life in your control. Yeah, you can be addicted to this or that. Still. What you choose to do, how you choose to handle that addiction, that is a choice. Nothing more. Nothing less. And it was a choice for me in those tense and murky days, not to drink. I’m not saying I never will again. Drink, I mean. I rarely say never. But I chose not to at that time. I’ve still chosen not to. And I’m down twenty-six pounds.

I waited then, to hear from Chip. Something had to give, one way or the other. Something had to break. I plugged off to work, every day, that week. No news. No word. Tuesday came. Wednesday. Then, on Thursday, I got home from work. Checked my emails. And there was something from Chip. The subject line was two words. Good News! I fumbled with my mouse. The computer half locked up. Come on. Open. And then the message opened. A single line. “Look what came in last night, Ira… a real offer! Have a look, then let’s talk…” Below the line, he had forwarded the message he had received. From Virginia, at Hachette. She was making a formal offer for Ira Wagler’s book.

And she wrote what she was offering. A contract. She was looking forward to helping me craft a follow-up to my first work. And she wrote the standard contractual terms. The upfront offer. The percentages that would follow. The black Jeep might be a real possibility, down the road, I’m thinking. But at that moment, I just sat and absorbed. And Virginia wrote, toward the end. Speaking of Ira Wagler, she said. “His writing is well-loved by the folks here.” And I just sat and looked at the message. Here it was. The thing I had been stressing about for months and months. The offer had come. From FaithWords, a division of Hachette, the publisher formerly known as Time-Warner.

And I thought to myself. I sure could use a good strong scotch about right now. But even as the urge flashed through me, I knew I would not choose to do that. The celebratory drink would have to wait. Right now, I just needed to sit and let it all sink in. And, oh, yeah. I needed to tell someone. I looked at my phone. And then I called Janice. The book deal came through, I told her, my voice sagging with relief. Janice knew all about the stress I was in. We had spoken about it, down at the beach. And she listened to me telling her how the offer had finally come. And she told me she had known it would, and then she told me she loved me. In a moment like that, that’s just about all you need to hear. That someone loves you.

In my heart that night, I danced in silence with myself. And over the next few days, I murmured the news to a few close friends. My family. The people at work. And one or two others. But I could not tell the world, not just yet. Chip told me. From the New York publishers, the formal contract will take some time. Months. But there will come a pre-contractual memo, with all the details. When that memo gets here, the offer is set. No backing out, from anyone. And even that memo took some time. Well, he had the final negotiations to work through. And then, one day last week, after work, here it came. The memo. It came through. And now I can tell the world. I have an offer for my second book. A real offer, from a real publisher.

Virginia wants the manuscript by sometime next summer, maybe June or so. And then, they want to release the actual book in the summer of 2019. A year later. It takes time, as I remember, for a book to work its way from writing to publishing. So right now, well, right now I’m back to earth and looking at the road ahead of me. The next eight months are going to be intense. That’s all there is to it. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s a big, big deal. It really is. And I feel a lot of emotions. A lot of relief, too. The market actually took what I had to offer. There’s nothing like that feeling. And I know, as I approach the second gate leading to the road to the second city. The city of my second book. This journey will be a lot different than the journey of the first book was. The thing is, I know a little bit about what the jungle is like, ahead of me. I’ve been there before. The first book was a long time, coming. So was the second book. And one thing I have learned, when it comes to a new journey like the one I’m fixing to travel.

I will walk forward. Whatever comes, I will face the future. I am not afraid. The Lord has blessed me once again by granting me one of the deepest desires of my heart. That’s a beautiful thing. I am grateful. To Him, and to all of you, my readers. Thank you for always being there.

And now, I stand and lift my face to the heavens in gratitude and praise. Walk with me on this new road, through this second gate to a new and glorious dawn in a new and shining city. It is ours to grasp and hold, the joy and celebration of it all.

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Rachel’s Tears…

…Her face was suddenly contorted by that grotesque and pitiable grimace of

sorrow that women have had in moments of grief since the beginning of time,

and digging her fist into her closed eye quickly with the pathetic gesture of a

child, she lowered her head and wept bitterly.

—Thomas Wolfe

___________________

We knew her passing was imminent, and that morning the text was on my phone when I got up. Miriam went to be with Jesus early this morning. And there it was. The final word we knew would come. Miriam Graber, my first cousin. A person I had known all my life. And now she was gone. And I thought to myself. There’s one more senseless blow for the Homer Graber family.

Homer and Rachel Graber were connected to my family in a special way, since way back. Rachel is my father’s younger sister. She and Dad are the two youngest in their family. And back when Dad was dating Mom, Homer Graber came calling at the farm of Joseph K. Wagler. He was attracted to the youngest daughter, there. And Rachel smiled and smiled, and welcomed him. I don’t know what Joseph K. did. He might have looked a little grim when Homer first came around, what with Rachel being so young and all.

They got married in a double wedding ceremony on February 3, 1942. Dad and Mom. And Homer and Rachel. They were young, all of them. But especially the brides. Mom was just shy of nineteen. Rachel was seventeen, almost eighteen. I’ve always heard they pushed up the wedding date, so the men might not have to go to service in camps for WWII. They were needed at home to take care of their wives, and to farm. That was the plan. It halfway worked. Homer was never called up. Dad was. He served as a conscientious objector in camps in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

They settled there in Daviess. Both couples. After his conscientious objector service, Dad bought a small farm just north of town on Montgomery Road. I’m not sure where Homer and Rachel lived. On his home farm, maybe. And life came at them all. Of the two couples, one would soon taste the bitter cup of sorrow and loss.

They had children, Homer and Rachel. A daughter, Leona. Then a son, LeRoy. When the boy was small, maybe two years old, he got sick with diarrhea. They got him to the doctor, then the hospital. But back in those days, the care just wasn’t what it would be now. Weakened by dehydration, LeRoy sank lower and lower. Rachel still talks about it today, how he settled in to sleep. “Good-bye,” he said to his Mom. She was not sure how to take that. He insisted. “Good-bye.” And then he went to sleep. He never woke up. The Grabers buried their firstborn son, there in Daviess. Rachel wept quiet, bitter tears, and grieved. She wasn’t bitter, not in her heart, I mean. She totally accepted the loss. But her tears had to be bitter-tasting. There is no other way they could have been.

A few years after he got back from his service, Dad moved his little family to Piketon, Ohio. A new Amish community had started there. A small group of radicals, the kind of people Dad naturally gravitated to. Piketon never made it big. It didn’t last that long, either. Less than a decade. And soon Dad was moving again. The western Amish are way more footloose than the Blueblood Amish of Lancaster County. Especially today. But even back then, they were. And this time Dad joined a group settling in Canada. Aylmer. And this time, a few families from Daviess joined the Aylmer settlers. Bishop Peter Yoder, and his wife, Martha. Dad’s brother, Abner Wagler, and his wife, Katie. And Homer and Rachel Graber.

I’m not sure of all the dynamics involved, as to who actually wanted to pick up and leave Daviess, and who didn’t. I always figured Homer would have been content there. It was the strong Wagler blood in Rachel that drove them to move. For the sake of peace, and because he loved his wife, Homer went along with it. I don’t know that. I just think it. And I’ve always heard it told. Homer smoked, when he lived in Daviess. In Aylmer, that would not fly. Tobacco use was strictly forbidden. So Homer enjoyed his last cigarette on the truck hauling his family’s belongings from Daviess to Aylmer. He drew that last delicious drag in deep, then threw the butt out the window. And that was it, for Homer and his tobacco. He never touched it again. As one who knows what it is to be addicted to both cigarettes and whiskey, I’ve always found this little tale fascinating. And I’ve always respected Homer for making a hard choice and sticking with it.

In Aylmer, life moved on for Homer and Rachel, and for my parents. More sons and daughters were born to them. My sister Rachel was the first baby born in the Aylmer Amish community. She was named after her aunt. Well, Mom had an older sister, too, named Rachel. So I guess my sister was named after two aunts. A baby girl arrived at the Graber home a year or so after my sister was born. They named her Miriam. And, of course, my older brothers, Stephen and Titus came along, as did Miriam’s younger siblings, too. We grew up together, the Homer Graber children and the David Wagler children. Hung out. Laughed and played and fought and got into all kinds of mischief.

Homer was a hard-working, simple man, not given to viewing much of life in any shade of gray. It was black and white. I think he viewed my father’s writing with some suspicion. How could any man sit in an office and type, right in the middle of the day, when there was work to be done in the fields? Homer muttered to his boys and shook his head. The man was always busy farming, and selling feed and seed from his farm store. Homer had a real drive for business, there was never any question about that.

In the early 1970s, Aylmer was in a bit of a flux. I’m not sure what forces were surging below the surface of things. But people were moving out. Peter Stoll and much of his clan left for Honduras, where Peter had idealistic visions of proselytizing the natives. Bishop Peter Yoder moved to the new fledgling settlement sprouting to life in Marshfield, Missouri. And Homer and Rachel Graber moved to Marshfield, too. My Mom always said, back then. “We’ll go where Pete Yoders go.” But when the good bishop left, Dad stayed put, right there in Aylmer. He would not move, not before he had to. And he never would move to Marshfield.

I have vivid memories of that time. I felt sad that Homer’s sons and my good friends, Reuben and Philip, were leaving the community where we had lived all our lives. The Homer Graber family left for Marshfield in January, right in the middle of a brutal snowstorm. That’s what I remember, anyway. And we soon got used to not having them around. We went to Marshfield now and then, to visit, too. And Philip and I wrote each other sporadically. And life moved on, as life always does.

Somewhere in the early 1980s, the Amish settlement in Marshfield kind of went kaput. It had never grown to more than a single district. I don’t know what the issues were, why it didn’t grow more. Some say this, and some say that. It was church problems, most likely. When a settlement stays dormant, or shrinks, that’s usually the number one reason. Not always, and maybe not there. Still, I recall that Marshfield had plenty of internal turmoil. Much of that turmoil has traditionally been blamed on Sam Beachy, an unorthodox Amish preacher who had settled there.

And at some point, Homer Grabers left, too. I’m sure that was a tough decision, to just uproot and move away like that. After investing all those years in one place. Still. You do what you figure is best. In 1981, they packed up and moved to Rexford, Montana, for a year or two. That was always meant to be temporary, until they could find another suitable settlement. And then, in 1983, Homer and Rachel moved to one of the most unique Amish communities in the country. Kalona, Iowa.

Kalona is, well, it’s just different. It always has been. I’m not sure it’s that way anymore, but when I was young, you could always tell when a married Amish man was from Kalona. He would have his hair parted in the middle, combed out and back from his forehead. And they wore tiny, pointed hats, too, the Kalona men. And the people could farm with tractors, too, I do remember that. Steel-wheeled tractors, but tractors nonetheless. I always was a bit envious of that single fact alone, about Kalona.

Kalona has one of the strangest top buggies ever designed in the Amish world. Absolutely unique. Small, with a boxed tail. And doors that slide up into the roof. I had never seen such a thing, and I gaped when I saw my first Kalona buggy. The Kalona people, too, are quite unique. You can tell where they are from by the bone structure of their faces. And by the way the men comb their hair, of course. They are hard-working people. Set in their ways, but hard working. And one more thing. I don’t know how to say it nice, so I’ll just say it. Kalona has the dubious reputation of being one of the most gossip-infested Amish and Mennonite settlements in the world. Maybe that reputation is earned, and maybe it isn’t. It just is what it is. And I’ll leave it at that.

Into this world, then, Homer and Rachel moved with their remaining single children. The sequence of events gets ever more murky with the passing of the years. I don’t figure it’s that important, anyway. I just know that Homers settled there, close to the west edge of the settlement. Miriam would have been in her upper twenties then. She moved with her parents and family to this new place. I still marvel today that Homer and Rachel moved right into this strange new land and made it work. That took some nerve. There is no other way to look at it.

The next two decades, I suppose, were about as peaceful a time as there ever was in the lives of Homer and Rachel Graber. They settled there, in Kalona. Their children soon paired off, and most of them got married. All except Miriam. She was a beautiful girl. Always smiling. But near as I can remember, she never so much as had a date. She was content at home. And at home she stayed.

And then, in 2001, Homer took sick. And before anyone knew what was going on, he sank and died. Right there, at home. He was 79 old. Which isn’t that old, when you see how Rachel survived him until today. Still, his time on earth was over, just like that. I remember how the clans gathered for the funeral. Ellen and I were young-married, back then. I can’t remember if she accompanied me or not. I know a bunch of us got motel rooms in nearby Iowa City. And we attended the ceremony as Uncle Homer was laid to rest, there in Kalona. It still seemed like a foreign place to me. But I guess it wasn’t to Homer and his family, and that’s all that matters.

Rachel soldiered on alone, then. Who knows, what she thought? She bore her sorrow in stoic silence. Maybe she pined to leave this earth, this vale of tears, and go and join her beloved Homer. I don’t know that. It would not be, in any case. She would remain, there in her home, for many more years than anyone could have imagined.

Rachel settled in her role as a widow, with gravitas and dignity. All the children were married, soon, with children of their own. All except Miriam. She remained at home, with her mother. Content to live at home. She worked part time, cleaning houses. And the two of them seemed inseparable, Miriam and her Mom, it seemed like. Where you saw one, you saw the other. Miriam was always smiling, always good-natured.

Rachel faced a few more sorrows, along the road. At some point, back in the early 2000s, she came down with cancer of some kind. I’m not sure, it might have been in her stomach. She rejected any kind of chemo treatment. And she went natural. Drank carrot juice and ate only raw vegetables and fruits. And she exercised. Went walking a lot. She strode down the road, determined and vigorous. And she beat the cancer. I don’t know if it was the vegetable diet and exercise, or if her body was simply too old for the cancer to grow in. Whatever the case, she was pronounced cancer free after a few years.

And another sorrow came, a few years ago. Her daughter, Esther, had married Alvin Yoder way back in Marshfield. They had sons and daughters, a large family. And after Marshfield collapsed, Alvin and Esther had moved to Windsor. Missouri. There they lived for many years. But Esther was not well. She had serious heart issues. And she gradually sank lower and lower. A few years ago, she passed away, there in Windsor, and was buried there. The Graber family gathered around their mother to lay one of their own to rest. And before Esther was buried in the ground, a niece, one of Rachel’s granddaughters, got tragically killed in a four-wheeler accident. The family staggered from the continuous blows. And Rachel wept again. First, it was a son. Then her husband. And now, a daughter and a granddaughter, right after each other. It was all a bit much to absorb.

The years slid on by. And one more large sorrow loomed. No one could have known, and no one could have seen it coming. Which is just as well. If we knew what all the future was bringing at us, half the time we would be too paralyzed to move.

Life moved on for the Graber family in Kalona. And then, earlier this year, the shocking news came throbbing out. Miriam was the fourth daughter in the family. Right close to the middle, in the lineup. She was always smiling, always pleasant, and she always saw the glass of life as half full and filling up. Never as half empty and draining down. And now, Miriam had stage four cancer. And again, the Graber family staggered with the blow. The rest of us, the cousins, we simply absorbed the news in silence and disbelief. I mean, you don’t look too closely at such news when it comes. You hear, but you kind of balk at it. And that’s the way it was with us. We heard. Tried to absorb. And we half tried to ignore it, too. Maybe it would all go away.

They took her to a clinic in Chicago, somewhere, for treatment. I don’t know if the clinic people made any kind of promises. Probably not. Maybe they insinuated they could help. One thing I learned long ago. I don’t question anyone’s decision on where they go for cancer treatment. Go to Mexico. Go natural. Go with the latest chemo. It’s your life, it’s your fight, and it’s your choice. I remember years ago, when Ellen worked at Hershey Medical, on the cancer floor. She saw all the latest approved treatments. She administered those treatments. She got attached to her patients, before they all passed on, one after another. And she told me more than once. If she ever gets cancer, she’s going to Mexico for treatment. Or she’ll go natural. She would never, never take chemo. That’s what she told me. I never forgot.

I was kind of out there on the edge of things, this time around. I never went to visit Miriam. I mean, I had known her all my life. There never was a time in my memory that she was not a character in my world. Still. She was older than me. Same age as my older siblings. I don’t know if anyone in my family made it to see her. I know my niece Dorothy stopped by a few times. Dorothy lives there, in the Kalona area, with her husband Lowell and their children. Each time she stopped to see Miriam, she duly reported it on the family site on Facebook. Rachel was taking it pretty hard, Dorothy told us. She walks around and cries and keeps asking why she can’t be the one to go, instead of Miriam.

Miriam had worked hard all her life. She was looking forward to relaxing and getting some traveling done in her later years. It was simply not to be, as the cancer aggressively closed in. She grappled, fought for life. But the vile disease just kept encroaching, encroaching. And early last week, we heard the end was near. She was suffering dreadfully. As she grew weaker and weaker, her family traveled in to say good-bye.

And Miriam Graber passed from this earth on Wednesday morning, September 27th, in the predawn hours. Her suffering was over. So were all the earthly joys and hopes and dreams she had ever harbored in her heart. I heard that day from her brother, Reuben, my boss. The funeral would be on Sunday morning. I chatted with Reuben. He was flying out on his plane. Did he have room for me? He wasn’t sure. He was picking up a couple of his sons in western PA. He’d let me know.

On Thursday morning, he called me. He didn’t really have room for me on his plane. But he had plenty of airline miles saved up. He would get me a ticket. Whatever works, I told him. You certainly don’t have to feel obligated, but I do really appreciate that. And thus it was that early on Friday morning, I was driving Big Blue through the predawn darkness, over the toll road to the Philadelphia Airport.

It’s no secret that I detest airports. I don’t mind flying, necessarily, but I absolutely despise the way they treat you before they let you in. I parked in the long-term lot and boarded the bus take me over to the United Airlines area. I had packed light. A shoulder bag, and a small suitcase on wheels, small enough that I wouldn’t have to check it in. I’d keep everything with me all the time. And I joined the line, there in Philly. That early, it wasn’t bad. And half an hour later, I had been herded through, prodded and patted down with all the rest of the cattle. I seethed as I took my stuff from the conveyer and headed to a nearby bench to put on my shoes. Good Lord. The security apparatus at any airport is the most colossal waste of resources you could imagine. It simply is.

My ticket took me from Philly to O’Hare in Chicago, then a change of planes over to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Just a bit north and west of Kalona. I’ve always been leery of O’Hare, because it’s just such a vast place. Any kind of blip, and your flight gets delayed in and out. Still, my trip from Philly to Chicago went about as smoothly as it could have. And the next leg was smooth, too. Shortly after 3 PM, I walked off the plane in Cedar Rapids.

I’ve taken to wearing a hat, lately, especially when traveling. And for this trip, I unlimbered a nice little fedora I had picked up over a year ago, on sale, of course. A Stetson fedora, made of the softest supple leather. I had never worn it. That day, I did. Back brim up, front brim down. And it looked pretty snazzy, I gotta say. Kind of gangsterish. In Cedar Rapids, I walked out to where I had reserved a car at the Alamo counter. Nope, the Enterprise people didn’t get me, this time. Maybe I was still a little bitter at them for sticking me with that red jelly bean, back in July. So when I booked online, I picked Alamo.

The nice lady smiled at me when I told her my name and reservation number. She seemed taken with my hat. Not that she mentioned it, but something about me impressed her. And I don’t figure it was my face. She punched around on her computer. Treat me right, now, I told her. Oh, yes, she would. And for no particular reason that I could tell, she upgraded me to a brand new Hyundai Santa Fe SUV, with 2000 miles on it. She told me, and smiled brightly. I fell over myself, thanking her. It had to be the hat, I figured. And I took the paperwork and the keys and trundled my bag out the door to the brand new, dark blue vehicle that would be mine for the next two days.

My niece, Dorothy, had told me before I left. She had a bed for me. They had a nice motor home, parked out by the shed. She would get everything ready, and I could sleep in that. Seemed like a real cool plan to me. I got a plane ticket from Reuben’s points, and now a bed to sleep on from Dorothy. This would be one inexpensive trip. And then I got the SUV upgrade. Seemed like the Lord was looking out for me, right along on this trip. That’s what I thought to myself.

Dorothy was gone when I pulled into her place, so I parked over by the motor home and dragged my stuff in. Hung out the shirts I would wear over the next few days, so they wouldn’t be so wrinkled. I had been up since 4 AM, so I was tired. After unpacking, I stretched out on the nice firm bed for a short nap. Around 6:00, I got up and dressed, and headed over to the Graber place. It looked like they had just finished serving supper in the large shop where all the events would come down. I slipped in to the side room, where the coffin was set up.

Miriam lay there, as if asleep. She looked natural and relaxed. All that pain, all that suffering she had endured was wiped clean from her face. She looked calm and at peace. I stood there alone beside her for a few minutes and just absorbed my memories of who she was, and what she had been. And then I turned and walked out to the main room, where the family sat, all lined up. Tonight was Friday night. Mostly the older people would come through. Tomorrow night, the young people would come and most of the relatives from out of state. And the youth would sing, I was told later. I got in line to greet the family.

The line moved slowly, as people took their time, talking to the Graber family. And then I approached. Aunt Rachel was the first in the line. She huddled in her chair, bent and old. I stooped and took her hand and spoke her name. She lifted her face and smiled. I’m not sure she recognized me, with my beard and all. I had at least dropped the gangster hat outside, on the table with all the other Amish hats. Rachel smiled into my face. I am Ira, I said. And she smiled again as she recognized the name. We spoke briefly, and she thanked me for making the effort to come. And on down the line I went.

I took a seat in the back with extended family. It was a somber group of older people who filed through that evening. They came, they lined up and shook hands with Rachel and her family. And then they sat back, on row after row of backless benches. There were no smiles, there was no chatter, there was no visiting. Just somber faces, sitting in stony silence. Shortly before nine, a young preacher stood and spoke a short devotional, then a prayer. And we were all dismissed. I headed on over to Dorothy’s house.

She had just arrived home from working at a fund raiser all day. We sat at her kitchen table and talked. My mind flashed back to the last time I had sat in that room. After little Abby died, back in 2014. Dorothy and Lowell have traveled far on this journey, but the pain still lingers. You can tell. We talked and snacked on fresh pecan pie. And there went my diet, boom, blown right out of the water. Soon after 10:00, I headed out to the motor home to sleep.

Saturday morning. Moving along, here. I had planned to run over to Bloomfield to visit my brother Titus over lunch. They would attend the funeral on Sunday. But it had been a few years since I had been to Bloomfield. The Reunion in July, 2014. That’s been a while. So I wanted to run over and see some friends, do lunch with my brother, then head back to Kalona in time for supper at the viewing. After chowing on the breakfast of waffles Dorothy insisted on fixing for me, my diet sank out of sight, down, down, I loaded up and headed south and west. Bloomfield is right at ninety miles away. Shortly after eleven, I pulled into the L&M Cafe in West Grove. Chuck and Margaret’s daughter, Linda Clark, runs the little place now. It’s just down the road from where the old cafe was, years ago. Linda greeted me with a big hug. Mrs. C was at the Pancake Festival in Centerville, so I wouldn’t get to see her. Chucky, Jr. and his wife were visiting from their home in Arkansas, so that was a bonus I had not expected. After sipping coffee with my old friends, I headed over to the home of Titus and Ruth.

Titus greeted me at the door. Ruth was at the neighbors, and their son Thomas was helping with work on a nearby farm. That’s fine, I said. I don’t need much for lunch. We sat and talked and caught up. Titus had just received a copy of Dad’s new book, the fourth in the lineup. Fresh off the press. Stories Worth Remembering. A quaint little title. And after a while, Ruth wandered in. She fixed a quick lunch, and we all sat there at the table and ate together. Bloomfield sure is a different place than it was way back when I lived there. Every time I come around, this little fact becomes more evident to me. Titus and I sat and visited after lunch for an hour or so. It was nap time for him, so I took my leave. I drove through the community and then through the town of Bloomfield. The old square is almost dead now. Certainly a lot more quiet and run down than it was decades ago.

And a strange little incident came at me on the way out. I stopped at a gas station, for some coffee to fortify me on my drive back north. I was getting sleepy. I walked in, all spiffy in my gangster fedora. I recoiled from the coffee, though. In the pot it looked black and thick, like oil. How fresh is this stuff? I asked the attendant, who was working nearby. She was pretty, and looked to be around 18.

She smiled, all brightly. “It’s three hours old,” she said. “But I’ll make you a fresh pot. Today’s my last day here, so I can get away with brewing fresh coffee for as long as I want.” She got busy brewing. I thanked her. We chatted.

Her new job was better paying, she told me when I asked. And she was hoping to maybe get to college, too, in a couple of years. I asked questions and she talked. And she told me. She likes to write on the side. She was working on a short story she’s getting ready to submit for publication.

Well. What was I gonna do with that? We talked about writing. I told her. It’s more important to get people to feel what you’re feeling than it is to pay attention to grammar rules. She looked thoughtful and nodded. “That makes sense,” she said. And I told her, too. Don’t take writing classes in college. That’s all formulaic, and it will ruin your voice. Just write. That’s the only real way to develop your voice. Write. I had no idea what she thought, about me giving her all that advice. Still. We just chatted right along. She told me the title of her short story, and the name of the magazine she was submitting it to. I nodded and spoke encouragement.

The coffee was done, then, and I poured me a cup. Thanked her. And I asked her. Did you ever hear about the book, Growing Up Amish? She smiled. Yes, she had. Someone was just talking to her about it the other day. And I told her who I was. The book is about this area. It’s a NYT Bestseller, in its seventh printing. Sold almost 200,000 copies. I was just here, visiting family. She smiled and gaped at me a little wide-eyed.

It was time to go, to head on north. I wished her well, in her new job and in her writing. We shook hands. I thanked her for the fresh coffee. And then I left.

I pulled into the Graber homestead right at 5:30. Crowds milled about. Supper was being served. I ducked in to where the food was, and filled me a plate. Good, simple stuff. Noodles, potato salad, buttered bread. I walked into the next room where people were eating. And there I saw many of my siblings. My sister Rosemary, from Aylmer. Rachel and Lester. Naomi, without her husband. Stephen and Wilma. And Rhoda and Marvin. It felt almost like a family reunion. I guess that’s what funerals are, a lot of times. Family reunions, just a little more serious ones.

I sat beside Rosemary, and we ate and talked. They had brought Dad to the funeral. He wanted to come. So they brought him. They had left way early that morning. My cousin, Lydia and her husband, Clayton Zehr, had come along to take care of Dad. After eating, I walked into the front room and over to the table where Dad was. He had just finished eating. He sat there, on his wheelchair. He didn’t look much different than he had when I saw him in Florida last April. He was talking to someone, so I stood aside until he was free. He turned to me then, and we shook hands. He smiled and spoke my name. “Ira.” Hi, Dad, I said. And we chatted a bit, just catching up. Did you have a good trip? Yes. Did you? Yes.

I strolled around for the next hour or so and visited with different people. As darkness settled in, the family sat in a receiving line. Rachel sat in stately chair in the middle, her children on both sides of her on benches. And Dad was given a seat of honor beside his sister. I backed his wheelchair into the spot. The two of them sat there, somber and dressed in black. And the people filed in through the side room where Miriam lay. And then they walked up past the front line and shook hands with everyone there. Dad and Rachel got special attention. I sat in the next row behind Dad, beside Marvin and the others in my family.

And soon after eight, they filed in. The Kalona youth. There were around 300 or so, I was told. From both the Old Order and New Order Amish churches in the area. They would sing. They filed in and sat like we used to sit, back in Bloomfield. A bench of girls, a bench of boys, all across the room. It took a while, for 300 young people to walk in and get settled on the benches. Eventually the room was filled. And then they began to sing.

Their voices echoed in harmony through the vast open shop area. It was beautiful and haunting, and it took me back to many years ago. Here, in this room, all these young people were singing. And it struck me again, for the first time in a long time. How it felt, way back, to be part of a group like that. I whispered to Marvin, beside me. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt what I’m feeling now. We whispered back and forth, my old friend and me, just like we did at the singings in Bloomfield a generation ago. The songs rose and swept and swelled around us. I sat there, almost frozen in rapt attention. The thing is, I whispered to Marvin. The thing is, these young people don’t really grasp, they can’t really grasp, what they are a part of and what they are singing. They’re just doing what they have always done, which is fine. It’s just beautiful. It brings back so much in my head.

After an hour or so, the youth closed it out. Sang the last song. My cousin Philip Wagler stood then, and delivered a short exhortation, then read a poem. Philip and Fannie had come from their home in Michigan, where Philip was ordained some years ago. And more recently, he was ordained a bishop. He spoke loudly and clearly. Some memories of Miriam, growing up. And then we stood, while he read a prayer. Then we were dismissed.

And then the youth filed out, past the coffin, which had been set up at the far wall, just before the exit. They all paid their respects to Miriam. Lord knows Miriam had been a part of that youth group for many decades, in the past. Only when she had grown older had she stopped going to the singings. And it was all good. She just did what was comfortable to her. And now the youth filed past in silent respect. I mingled a bit, chatting with people. Then I headed on over to Dorothy’s place and my bed in the motor home. Traveling gets tiring. I fell into bed and slumbered hard that night.

The next morning, early, I was up and dressed. Dorothy had breakfast ready at seven, for me and all my siblings. We sat around her kitchen table and ate and drank coffee and talked. It was quite a clamorous time, as is usually the case when a bunch of Waglers get together. And I headed out, soon, then. I needed to get some gas into my SUV. I would head out from the funeral, to catch my flight back that afternoon. And shortly before nine, I pulled in to where the funeral would be. I met my siblings outside, and we all walked in together. To the section where close relatives were seated. Close to the front, off to the side a bit. The family sat up in the front section. Again, Dad was given a seat of honor with his sister on the front row. The two of them sat, heads bowed, huddled and old and tired. Again, for one more funeral of one more person so much younger than they are.

And shortly after 9:30, the first preacher stood. David Raber, from Hicksville, Ohio, via Daviess. He spoke in a strong Daviess accent. A fairly brief sermon. Then the second preacher stood. Henry Yoder, a local from the area. Before 11:00, he sat down, too. In Kalona, they do something I can’t remember seeing before at an Amish funeral. After the sermons, the home bishop gives his testimony, then asks the remaining seated preachers for their testimony, too. By the time all five or six preachers stood and added their very important but totally redundant and droning observations, another half hour had passed. I kept glancing at my watch in frustration. My flight out was scheduled for that afternoon. I would not have time to go to the graveyard for the burial.

After the last preacher had finally wound down with his testimony, the people started filing through, for one last look at Miriam. And soon enough, it was our time to file past. The line was directed outside. I stood about for a while, then walked back in and sat beside my brother, Titus. We watched as the Grabers said their last good-byes. Family by family, they went up and surrounded the coffin and grieved. From oldest to youngest, each family went.

Somewhere in the middle, Rachel stood and walked up to the coffin. Her son, Joseph, stood and pushed Dad up in his wheelchair. And the two of them stood and sat there, together, alone. Rachel was grieving the hardest, of course. This was her daughter. But Dad sat there solidly with her. I don’t know if he reached out and took her hand, but he might have. After a few moments, Joseph pushed Dad back to his space. Rachel remained standing beside the coffin as the last of her children came. They stood, they stroked Miriam’s face, and they wept. And then the service was over.

I walked out and mingled briefly with my siblings. Here and there, some total stranger came up and asked if I was Ira. Yep, I said. I am. And they spoke to me, of how they had read my book or liked to read my blog. I looked around for those in my family. I could see only a few. I told them. I’m leaving. I have to go catch my plane. I set my gangster fedora firmly on my head, and walked to my car and headed north and west.

Behind me, the buggy hearse had pulled up to the large shop. The pallbearers carried the coffin out and loaded it. And Miriam Graber was taken on her last ride. Later it was told how a group of young people had stood behind the knoll, there at the graveyard. And they sang. Their echoing voices sounded like angels singing, it was claimed, as the coffin was lowered into the earth. And the angels sang, too, in another realm as Miriam Graber was welcomed to her eternal home.

And Rachel stood and wept as men with shovels covered her daughter’s final resting place on this earth.

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Vagabond Traveler: Fifty-Six Years…

It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of

flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying

darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic

glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew

his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only

darkness was immense and everlasting.

—Thomas Wolfe

________________

I never paid much attention to the date as it snuck up on me. Well, I kind of glanced at it sideways, now and then, as the shadows of the day lurked close. But still. It just was what it was, and it would be what it would be. I didn’t figure it would hit me hard, like it did. But it did. Last week, I turned fifty-six.

And what’s the big deal about that? One might ask. Indeed. Every day, lots of people turn fifty-six. Well, I was surprised. And a little shocked, at the emotions that came rolling through me like a flood. I’ve lived intensely. And there were a few close calls, along the way, where there was a pretty good chance that I would never see that day.

And I thought about it, the night before. I felt pensive and a little sad. It had been a long time since it closed in on me like it closed in that night. It had been a long time since I felt as alone as I felt that night.

And now, now the day had arrived. Fifty-six. It’s a completely harmless number. I mean, there is little specifically attached to it, one way or the other. Still, I could feel the weight of it, heavy on me. And that day, I felt old and tired. You’re as young as you feel, the saying goes. Well, I feel my age.

A part of it, I think, is that I can look back to the past and clearly remember my father when he was my age. At fifty-six, he had just uprooted his family, and moved from Aylmer to Bloomfield. At fifty-six, he had a seething young son, who had just turned sixteen. At fifty-six, the old lion and the young lion faced each other, and prepared for battle. And the young lion prepared to rebel, to break free, to go out and wander the earth. That’s what my father saw when he was exactly my age. It’s all just a bit jolting, to absorb. At least, for me, it is.

When he was my age, my father was a giant among his people. He had seen so much, he had felt so much, he had lived so much. And he wrote what he saw and felt and lived. In his own voice, he did that. And in a strong sense, I guess, I feel honored to have lived as many days on this earth as my father had seen in a time that I clearly remember. Fifty-six. I feel it, every day of it. I have not seen and lived the things my father saw and lived, but I have walked a lot of miles. I have felt my full number of years, I have seen hard roads. And I feel tired and alone.

My actual birthday was pretty much uneventful. Most of my siblings called, and I got most of them answered as I was working. A short few minutes to chat with each one, as they wished me a happy day. We call each other on our birthdays. That’s my family, right there.

Titus called from Bloomfield. We got to talking. I told him. I’m a little awed, to think that I have seen as many days in life as my father had seen when he moved his family from Aylmer to Bloomfield. I guess the next generation always encroaches, as the old generation fades away.

And my older brother Joseph called, too. The Amish preacher. He lives in Kentucky. After wishing me a happy day, he told me. He had been up to Aylmer, to see Dad, a few weeks back. How was he? I asked. “He seemed well, for his age,” Joseph said. And I asked. Did you stop to visit David Luthy? Yes, he had. How is he doing? As well as could be expected, Joseph thought. He is old, now. And living alone. And I asked another question.. Did you preach, at church? Yes, he had preached. And we talked about it. Because of his health issues, he has to kind of prop himself up behind a chair, to stand. When he no longer has the strength to do that, when he has to sit down to preach, that’s when he’ll be done. That’s what Joseph told me. I thanked him for calling. We hung up.

Bouncing around now, and looking back to another place and time. Ten years ago, I had just started this blog. I had been writing for a mere few months. And I turned forty-six that summer. That seemed old. And here are some excerpts of what I wrote back then. At forty-six.

**************************

And so, at forty-six, I take stock. Personal life: Holding on. Marriage: A shambles. Job: Good. Health and diet: Better than ever as an adult. Fitness: Better than ever. State of mind: Fluctuating. My faith: Lord I believe. Help me in my unbelief.

In the wreckage-strewn fog of recent events, I consider and weigh the circumstances now surrounding me. Once more, a new stage has begun. It has been set for some time, and the curtain rises. It reveals one more road to travel. One more fork on that road. Choose. To the right or to the left. And then, a thousand more choices, or none at all, which is in itself a choice. Forty-six and alone. Again. Like I’ve been for most of my life.

Every life is laced with sorrow and loss and broken dreams. Circumstances vary from person to person. Each journey is distinct. Each destination, a choice.

The people that comprised my world as a child are now scattered to the winds. Or have passed on. I think back on some of my earliest recollections and remember. The colors and the smells and the tastes. The characters, floating in and out of my mind through the fog of years, the parameters of that childish world, so provincial, so confined, yet so vivid and alive. And always, it seemed to me, as my awareness and imagination increased with age, that I was simply an observer, a chronicler, and not really a participant in that world.

I can tell you the story, I can sing you with words, I can soar you to the heights, I can lament to you a tale of lost time and past worlds. I can tell you of life’s culmination in suffering, knowledge and death; the plower plowing, the sower sowing, and the reaper reaping. I can weigh the cost to the last tenth-ounce, a father’s angry and unspoken sorrow, a mother’s silent pain to the last teardrop, the unutterable heartbreak of a wounded child.

I can tell you of betrayal so deep it stabs to the core of the heart, of the foundation of years brushed aside like so much dust, of pain so keen it numbs the brain, of walking amid ruins enveloped by dust and ashes and fog and noise. I can tell you of doubts and fears and regrets that could haunt a man to his grave.

I can tell you the sound of thunder and rain in soggy fields and the sound of cornstalks crackling as they grow from black river bottom on a muggy summer night, of the pale shadows cast by the harvest moon over stubbled fields and shocks of grain. I can tell you the particular slant and warmth of the summer sunlight and the feel and texture of the ancient and massive boulders beside our barn’s loft ramp. I can tell you the people and places and events that I have known and lived. I can tell you of life from the eyes of a wondering child, the wild stirring passions of an agonized youth, the hopeless quiet despair of a restless and deeply frustrated man.

I can tell you things that have never been told.

But, as I look back and reflect, I realize that the singer hasn’t sung, the chronicler hasn’t chronicled, the lamenter has internalized his lament, and joy was absent. And that cannot and will not stand.

The gifts we have will disappear if not honed and used, and I have not used my talents for far too long. For many years, I could not find my voice. But the words are there, inside, where they’ve always been. They may be a bit rough and uncut at times. The tune may be flat in spots and the melody dissonant.

But the voice is forming. It’s not too late.

I will move forward. The voice is forming.

And it will sing.

*********************

And there it was. My voice at forty-six. At that time, I had posted twenty blogs. Been writing for less than half a year. But still. I knew instinctively. Whatever was inside me was going to come out. I knew that. And I look back from here, from fifty-six. I did sing. My story was my song. I told some things that had never been told before. I could not have imagined the journey of the book, twenty weeks in. But I knew that I would write my story. Somewhere. Right here, on the blog, if nowhere else.

It’s funny. I thought I had seen all there was to see, back then. All the dust and ashes and fog and noise any person would ever get to walk through. I was very naive. Today, I got so much turmoil swirling around me, about things I thought I knew, but obviously didn’t. But I’ve seen and learned a lot of good, life-altering things, too, in the last ten years. Bottom line. The Lord is who He claims He is. I walk along, clinging to a mustard seed of faith. It’s been a wild journey. I’m sure it will continue to be.

The Lord has shown me so many good things, so much I could never have envisioned. And yeah, I have meandered down my own paths, way too often. Kind of drifted off. When I’m on the wrong road, I usually walk until I smack into a wall. Then I stop. Look around, kind of startled and surprised. Then I look up. Umm, Lord, I guess you don’t want me going this way. OK. My bad, It was a wrong choice. Show me the right road.

His response is always gentle and composed. Do not be afraid. You are my child. You will never not be.

And so, at fifty-six, I take stock. Down the list, like I did ten years ago. Personal life: There’s some heavy fog out there. Marriage: It went away, long ago. I’m alone. Job: Good. Health and diet: Needs work. Fitness: Definitely drooping. State of mind: Relatively calm, from experience. There’s not much I haven’t seen. My faith: A mustard seed. Lord I believe. Help my unbelief.

There’s been a fog in my head, the last while. I just can’t seem to shake it off. Can’t seem to see straight. There has been a mask for all the pain rising up from deep places. Pain that waits, latent and brooding, until some trigger wakes it up. And I’ve always gravitated to one method of dealing with pain like that. Until you don’t know why you’re even doing it anymore. And then one day you wake up. I just woke up. I’m shaking the cobwebs from my brain. And I’m looking for the morning light.

It has struck me deep again, the clarity of it all. Life is about choices. Right or wrong. And I have been going down the wrong road, lately. Still. Even that was about choices. I’m starting to see more clearly now, a new road rising.

And so, to quote myself, from ten years back. Once more a new stage has begun. It has been set for some time, and the curtain rises. It reveals one more road to travel. One more fork on that road. Choose. To the right or to the left. And then, a thousand more choices, or none at all, which is in itself a choice.

I’m fifty-six. That’s not old. And it’s not young. It’s just where I am.

I am not afraid. I’m just tired. But not too tired to keep walking. And I can’t help but wonder. Can’t help but turn the thing over in my mind.

Maybe soon another song will come.

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