Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [49]
Our money was tight, as always. And the first few weeks were tough. During the day, we toiled in the hot Florida sun, mixing mud and slinging heavy concrete blocks on a mason crew. And gradually, as the days and weeks passed, we settled in.
We pooled our funds that summer and bought an old 1971 Mercury Cougar, an old-style powerhouse with a 351 Cleveland engine. Being Amish farm boys, we had no clue what a 351 Cleveland was, but everyone seemed impressed when we bragged about it.
With our own wheels, we were as free as we’d ever been. We worked shirtless in the sun all that summer. Hard, lean, tanned to a deep, deep brown, and impossibly fit, we were in the prime and passion of young adulthood.
And life was pretty good. We lived in a tiny one-room shack, a converted garage behind someone’s house. It was truly small, probably twelve by fifteen feet, with a tiny bathroom and shower, a bed in one corner, and a pullout couch. But it was our own. We made friends among Amish youth from other settlements across the land and found they were a good deal like us. On weekends, we partied hard. (This was back when the legal drinking age was still eighteen.) We hung out in bars on Saturday nights until they closed, then drove home, solidly impaired, yet always arriving unscathed. In those bars I imbibed and enjoyed shots of Wild Turkey whiskey for the first time and marveled at the way it made me feel.
One Saturday night that fall, in the Flamingo Bar, located in some faceless strip mall in suburban Sarasota, someone tutored me on the intricacies of the game of football. I’d never understood it before, but that night I saw for the first time what a great and brilliant game it was. On an old color TV on the wall, the New York Jets were playing some other team I don’t remember. It was preseason, and the Jets were engineering a furious but futile comeback in the closing minutes. And on the spot I rashly declared myself a Jets fan. It has been a long and mostly dreary journey since that night. But hope springs eternal.
As the weeks trickled by, we did the things that young men did back in those days, and while we didn’t necessarily prosper, we survived.
Of course, our survival did not include much thought about the future. Not in any coherent sense. Vaguely, we figured we’d return to Bloomfield. And the Amish church. Someday. And make it work, as we had seen so many others do. As some of our buddies had already done. But there was no set date; in close to the purest sense, we lived from day to day and from week to week. Nothing more than that. It was as if we existed in a mental fog.
I still smoked. Ever since my Nebraska days I had been hooked on tobacco. I couldn’t imagine starting a day without that first delicious cigarette. No, it wasn’t healthy. But at that age, youth believes it will live forever.
* * *
It was a strange thing, and I don’t quite understand it, even today, but when we were out there, living and working in normal society, thoughts of home, the good things— the security, the family, the comforts—somehow always crept in and drew us back. And so it was that year in Florida.
Sometime that fall, probably in September, we both knew that we would be back home in Bloomfield by winter. It didn’t seem like a bad thing. We’d been gone for the better part of a year, and we longed for our old haunts, our old friends.
By late October, both of us had returned. This time, we were determined to make it work. This time, we would do it. This time, we really meant it.
That vague and distant future, never more than two weeks out, was now upon us. The time had come for us to do what we had seen so many others around us do, including wild youth we had met and befriended in Pinecraft. (A good many of them are settled and married today, with families. Amish.) Now we, too, would walk that path. It was time.
In my head I figured I could make it work. I knew I could. Somehow. But in my heart, well, those were days when promptings from the heart were quashed. Ignored.