Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [17]
Naturally, a pocket of hard-core, conservative Amish people resented and resisted my father’s efforts. These people felt that one should read only the Bible. And maybe The Budget. Any other supplemental reading was deemed unnecessary and possibly sinful. Sad to say, those people still exist out there.
Regardless of the response, when I was growing up I could never admit my last name to any person even remotely connected to the Amish without being asked if I knew David Wagler. I always admitted reluctantly that, yes, I knew him. Not because I was ashamed or anything, but because it just got really old really fast.
The questions always continued: Are you related? Again, a grudging affirmative. More persistent and increasingly excited questions would invariably follow. Eventually the truth always emerged to rapturous exclamations of disbelief and accelerated heart palpitations. Seriously.
Once, in the mid-1980s, my brother Nathan and I were staying in Sarasota, Florida, for a few months over the winter, and an elderly Mennonite man from Arthur, Illinois, drilled us with the usual litany of questions until he finally got us to admit who we were. After our confession, he leaned on his tricycle in stunned silence for a few moments. He seemed drained.
I couldn’t resist, so I said playfully, “Just think, now you can go back home and tell everyone you met David Wagler’s sons.”
He stood mute for another moment, still leaning faintly on his tricycle. I thought he might not have heard my comment. Then he quavered, “They probably wouldn’t believe me anyway.”
Today, my father is still well known in the Amish world, though his star is receding. The middle-aged to elderly speak of him, but the younger generations increasingly know him not.
Dad wrote steadily for many decades, producing many thousands of pages. Some of his stuff was good, some was okay, and some was, well, hard-core Amish polemics. Writing was his life’s focus, and he neglected many other important things in pursuit of his passion—including, to a large extent, his wife and his children. That’s not a judgment. It’s just a fact.
He was a strong, driven man, and I deeply respect his accomplishments. But I wonder sometimes how far he could have gone had he not been hampered by Amish rules and restrictions. And whether he could have found a broader audience for his writings.
I have often tried to imagine what my father would have been like as a young man. Knowing him for the dreamer he is, I have wondered what he thought as he listened to his friends share local gossip and their meager dreams and humble goals.
Like me, I’m sure he was always painfully aware of how much more there was beyond the boundaries of his unsophisticated world.
Perhaps, lured by the modern conveniences of the surrounding society, he longed to drive one of the roaring roadsters that passed his plodding team and wagon in the heat, leaving him strangled and choking in swirling clouds of dust.
Perhaps, tempted by the throbbing dance music wafting from the pool hall in town, he allowed himself to briefly roam far and free from the mental chains that bound him.
Perhaps at times he questioned his roots and his background and the value of the traditions his elders clung to so tenaciously.
Perhaps he chafed at the narrow confines of the simple, unquestioning Amish theology that demanded his abject submission to an ageless tradition that taught any other path would lead to eternal damnation in the fires of hell.
Perhaps all these things and more occurred, calling to him, daring him to forsake forever the seemingly senseless traditions that confined him.
Perhaps.
But unlike me, in the end, he chose to stay.
8
On the outside, Amish communities seem stuck in time, immune to change. But in reality, even places like Aylmer are in a constant state of flux. Nothing stays the same.
Events unfold. Below the surface, things are always happening. Disputes