Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [91]
“I’m Sam Johnson,” he said. “Who are you?”
Johnson. Johnson. Strange name, for an Amish man. “Ira Wagler,” I replied. I waited for the inevitable flash of recognition. Wagler. Wagler. And sure enough, it came.
“Wagler?” he exclaimed. “Not related to David Wagler? Are you his son?”
I admitted that I was, though rather sheepishly.
He chuckled. “Well, well. Imagine that, meeting the son of that famous man on the streets of Topeka.” And somehow, strangely, I was instantly at ease and chuckled back at him.
Sam was different. I sensed that right off. He was sharp and intelligent, asking keen, incisive questions. From anyone else, it would have been offensive. But somehow, from him, the questions were okay. He was curious, and that was fine. I was intrigued. We stood there on the sidewalk in Topeka, Indiana, on that sunny fall afternoon and talked comfortably, like old friends. Like we’d known each other our whole lives.
His story flowed freely from him. He had not been born or raised Amish. As a young single man, he had joined from the outside—learned the language, joined the church, married, and had a family.
It is almost impossible to pull off something like that, to join the Amish from outside society. A lot of people think they want to, even believe they will, until they try it. Over the years, hundreds have made the attempt, but probably fewer than a dozen or two have actually pulled it off. Once they get inside the culture, the romance wears off in a week or two. The harsh, plain lifestyle. The endless hours of labor, from dawn to dusk and beyond. And even if they clear those hurdles somehow, the language barrier nails them. You gotta want it, really want it, to hang in there. It’s an almost impossible accomplishment, especially long term.
I stood there and gaped openly at him as he told me his tale. “How could you do something like that?” “What in the world possessed you to even want to?” I actually asked those questions the first time I met him. And a whole lot more. And I didn’t even know the man. I was entranced, almost mesmerized by our conversation. It was like an oasis, out here in the middle of this barren desert in which I was dying of thirst.
He sensed my eager, hungry mind, and we stood there talking as time passed. First minutes, then an hour. Suddenly then, he pulled back, startled, and glanced at his pocket watch. He must be getting on home. His wife was expecting him, and he was already running way late.
I wasn’t ready to let him go just yet. “When can we talk again?” I asked.
He seemed as excited as I was. “We can meet again, here in town, after work. Soon, very soon. I’ll check with my wife, so we can talk longer,” he answered.
As we parted, he spoke words that jolted me: “It’s not by chance we met this afternoon.”
I could only nod. I biked home in a daze. Finally, a man who understood me. A man with whom I could actually communicate. It seemed like a miracle.
That night, over supper, I told Phillip and Fannie about the man I’d met. Who in the world was he? Where did he come from? They knew him. Of course they did. Everyone, it turned out, knew Sam Johnson. Phillip and his wife seemed excited that I had met someone who had impressed me so deeply.
In the weeks that followed, Sam and I met regularly. Usually in town. And our friendship grew. He invited me to his house for supper one evening. I met his smiling, beautiful wife, Ellen, and his two rambunctious young sons. It was a lovely little household, and something stirred inside me, seeing him with his family. He had it all, it seemed. Why couldn’t something like that be mine as well?
It could have been, of course, with Sarah, back in Bloomfield. But somehow, it didn’t seem the same, what he had and what I could have had.
Within a month, we were fast friends. Best friends. I learned to trust him as I had trusted no one in my life before.
He listened a lot and spoke a lot. He challenged me, both intellectually and mentally. When I grumbled about the Amish, their simplemindedness and their shallow