Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [94]
Goshen was among the most progressive Amish areas in northern Indiana. A land of Canaan and the focus of the wishful gaze of many longing eyes from the southern districts. I was happy to shake the Ligonier dust from my feet and move to a land free of harsh, strange people like the mad bishop. A land of milk and honey. Goshen.
I never saw the mad bishop again. I never missed him, either.
* * *
I settled into my new home, a rather ramshackle place, but livable. Batching it, alone, for the first time in my life. Mostly, I liked it. An English coworker from Goshen picked me up each morning for the ride to the factory in Topeka, as it was too far to bike, and I paid him a few bucks every week in return. Soon, I decided to go buggy shopping. I found a nice rig with rubber-tired rims, which were fully allowed in my new progressive church. I also bought a plump little mare, not too wild and fully road trained. I was set.
My Goshen Amish neighbors all welcomed me. They stopped by, introduced themselves, and invited me over for supper. They included me in their lives as best they knew how.
An elderly Amish widow lived alone next door, a few hundred feet away. Barbara was suspicious when I first showed up at her doorstep, but she warmed up immediately after we had chatted a bit. Might she have an old copy of The Budget I could borrow? I wanted to catch up on the news and Dad’s latest letters. Her crinkled face lit up. Oh, yes, she did. After that, it became a weekly tradition. I stopped by to read the latest copy, sitting at her kitchen table, while she fussed and mothered me. Smiling, she served coffee and cookies while filling me in on the latest local gossip. Much of the time I had no idea what she was talking about, but I smiled politely and listened, commenting now and then where I could. We laughed a lot together. Lonely since her husband’s death a few years before, she eagerly anticipated my visits. In some small way, we each filled a void in the other’s life. I had no family in the area. Widowed and childless, she was alone. We quickly became fast friends.
It was one of the most idyllic periods of my life as an Amish person, outside of childhood. Settled and calm, I absorbed and lived each day. I enjoyed life and laughed again. Not the hard, desperate laughter of the past, but the true thing, laughter from the heart, deep and real. I still saw Sam regularly, and we hung out as much as possible. He beamed at the new me and checked now and then to make sure I was still doing okay in my newfound faith. I was.
Holed up in my bachelor home, with little social life, I buried myself in books. By then I had accumulated quite an impressive library of my own. Each evening, after a meager supper of soup and sandwich, I lit the kerosene lantern and read into the late hours of the night, working my way through Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization and random chunks and chapters from dozens of other books. My mind was hungry, and I fed it. And each night, long after the dim lights died in the houses of my Amish neighbors, I sat there, absorbing and devouring knowledge from those pages.
But it was not good to be alone so much. A man needs people around him, some sort of structural support. My friends tried to provide what support they could, but they all had friends and families of their own.
A single guy with no connections