Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [65]
It was a tiny, classic, country place, boasting no more than six or seven tables and a small counter with four stools. I helped myself to a cup of steaming coffee and sat there and traded lies and tall tales with the locals. In time, I developed deep friendships with some of them. It was a world I treasured, without which I would probably have lost my mind.
In retrospect, I believe the café meant so much to me because the people in that world accepted me as I was. I was Amish. Dressed in barn-door pants; a battered, old, black felt hat; and galluses. I was different, but those people didn’t care. I had nothing to prove to them. They had no boxes and drew no lines to hem me in. Neither did they expect me to leave my world for theirs. They seemed to genuinely enjoy my company, and I certainly enjoyed theirs. And for those reasons, I was inexorably drawn to them, to the point where I was more comfortable around them than among my own people.
There is no question that the world at Chuck’s greatly hindered me from fully immersing myself back into the Amish world. My English friends were free. Free to make choices as they saw fit. Free to live, really live. Free to drive cars and battered four-wheel-drive pickups. They farmed with tractors, not with sweaty horses. They spoke of the movies they watched, the things they did that I could not do. I listened hungrily, and enviously, to their talk.
Dad must have sensed my mental state, because he did his best to keep me from that world. He hated the café because it was pulling his son from his world into a dimension he could not control. From the first, he instinctively sensed the danger. And, in time, he grew increasingly alarmed at my obstinacy. He frowned darkly when I left to hang out. He tried to warn me. He scolded and lectured me to stay away.
And then, of course, I saw Sarah. After she joined the church, we started going steady, seeing each other every Sunday night.
Our relationship was the same as thousands of others before us in the Amish world, progressing naturally to the ultimate culmination—marriage. I was always excited and eager to see her. She was beautiful, bright, and well read. She spoke articulately and wrote well. And as our relationship progressed, she fell in love with me. And she told me so and gave her heart to me.
And I fell in love with her, too. Enough so that I promised her my heart and my life. But strangely, at the very point where I should have been excited—anticipating our future together—some spark inside me rose in resistance and held me back. The doubts were small at first—the fear of committing to something as serious as marriage. And revulsion at the thought of becoming an Amish man, married, bearded, confined, and grim.
In spite of my love for Sarah, the doubts and fears multiplied and took root. Sprouted in my head like the corn sprouting on our river bottom. And as the weeks and months passed, they slowly expanded into full-fledged plants, crackling, crackling, and growing in the night.
And I subconsciously began to resist the path that should have been so clear for me. Unfortunately, resistance was followed by distancing, then by withdrawal.
As Sarah and I proceeded to each new level, I felt the pressure knotted deeper in my chest. The box closing in. Tighter. And darker. I could not express to Sarah the doubts that rose like monsters in my mind. So I closed off emotionally instead and withdrew from the woman I had courted, the woman whose heart I had claimed. It was a strange and terrible thing.
I was not honest enough to speak to her about it—where I was, and where I was going. She sensed it soon enough, though, my emotional distancing, and tried to communicate to me her fears, her insecurities, and the strength she so desperately needed from me. I refused, at that point, to admit to her the obvious. That she was losing me.
Though I did not realize it at the time, the clouds were quietly gathering in the distance. Coming together to form a perfect storm. At first I had no intention of ever