by Ira Wagler
Such were my thoughts as I drove this same road many times over the years to see Dad. That was my reason for going, each time. And we went to a few places we hadn’t been before, me and my father. We got some things hashed out, or at least discussed. As old as he was, I figured he probably wouldn’t remember much of what we had talked about for long. But we talked about those things, such as they were, in the moment. I told him some stuff I never figured could ever be said. And he talked to me honestly, like he never had back when I was growing up around him. I am beyond grateful that the opportunity came and that we both took it. And every time I left, I thought this might well be the last trip like this. It never was. He always fought hard to stay alive and stay alert. It was a matter of some pride to him that he had lasted more years than any of his siblings. Not that it makes any difference in the end. Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, like the preacher says. All that is true.
And now. Now I was going to see him again. Maybe this would be the last such drive north. I didn’t know, that day. And I didn’t fret about it. I did think about it, driving along. What should I be focused on as I’m going up to see my dying father? I mean, surely there are profound things a son would naturally mull over in a time like that. I remember thinking, The primary thing you focus on right now is the road. Keep your mind sharp on that. It won’t do you any good to go see Dad if you don’t get there. And I thought, too, God, I know Dad’s suffering. I ask you to take him, even right now, this minute. I’m completely at peace if he leaves before I get there. So feel free. I mean, you are God. Take my father home.
Past
I left the Amish a long time ago. More than half my lifetime. I was twenty-six, going on twenty-seven. And this is how it was, how I felt. They were my people, the Amish, and they would always be, but I could not abide with them. I could not live that way. It was too hard, too maddening. And there had been a long slog over a lot of broken roads before I figured out that I could leave and not be lost. When that truth sank in, I was done. Never again would I wander as lonely or as far as I did back in those years of running and searching. I could almost get nostalgic about it. But nah. I was tired, and I was done.
I thought back on it a lot of times. Now and then, I tried to see it all from the perspective of my parents. How did they feel when I walked away? After all those years and times I returned once more? Then I settled in again and walked right up to the door of marrying Sarah, the beautiful Amish girl. After all that, I turned my back and threw it all away? How did they feel, watching that happen? It had to be hard on them. Both Dad and Mom. It had to be. And looking back at it from here, it seemed like Dad was always opining and admonishing. Mom was quiet. Her silence spoke her pain. She smiled, real enough. But she knew what suffering was. And she knew what loss was, too. The men in her family saw to that, her husband and her sons.
So there they were, my parents, back there when I left for good. There they were, in an awkward place. Wherever he lived, Dad was always a pillar of the Amish community. He was a pillar in the larger Amish world, too. So well known, so widely read, so hugely respected. And here one more of his whacked-out sons went haywire. Threw everything to the winds and ran. People clucked and said what they had said for years: “David Wagler has wild sons. Can’t control them.” It had to be a bitter pill. He kept walking, though, as he knew how.
I remember him talking about Sarah, the beautiful Amish girl I had left behind. Dad had always liked Sarah a lot. He had a special place in his heart for her. Mom did, too. They both looked on her almost as a daughter. Which she came pretty close to being at one point there, I guess. They never could quite let it go, my parents, their visions of what might have been. This is simply an observation, not a judgment. It was what it was. As life mostly is.
I remember Dad telling me, “You wronged that woman. And you will pay for it one day. You can’t treat someone like that, so it doesn’t come back at you. You will pay.” I just stared at him. Outwardly, of course, I shrugged. So what if I had to pay? I probably needed to, in some way. But that’s still better than it would have been, had I stayed. That would have been disaster. I’m glad I didn’t see the mess life would have been, had I not left when I did.
Still. I never forgot my father’s warning, so flatly spoken. What goes around comes around. And I think Dad might have smiled secretly to himself a few times in the years that followed. His words turned out to be prophetic, probably way sooner than he’d ever expected. Straight and true like an arrow, his words were. I did pay for how I treated Sarah. Multiple times on multiple levels, I’d say. The old man knew what he was talking about on that one. Of course, those things always look a lot bigger in the moment, when they’re coming at you. In retrospect, after the passing of years, it all levels out a little. And you realize a lot of that hard stuff from way back when, a lot of that was just life. Other people go through things like that, too, maybe way harder things than you did. It’s a little unsettling when that raw little truth comes knocking on the door.
It took long enough to hit me. I certainly had little grasp of what it all meant back when Dad warned me I would pay for how I had treated Sarah. This was right at the time I was settling into my post-Amish world. Back in Daviess. That was where I headed instinctively. I didn’t have a lot of connections anywhere. No real network of any kind. So I went to the land that harbored the roots of my family from both sides. And Daviess welcomed me.
It’s hard, remembering after all these years. What it felt like to walk from my Amish world into an English one. Well, at the beginning of my new life, there were some remnants of Plainness among the Mennonites. The Plain Mennonites were a stepping stone, pretty much. But they treated me with kindness and respect. Overall, I have good memories of the Mennonites and Daviess. It was a new place with new dimensions, my post-Amish world.
In such a world, you get to go buy yourself a car.
The year was 1988. I had saved a decent stake from working in the factories in northern Indiana, a stash of $9,000. It seemed like a small fortune, more money than I had ever seen before at one time. I took half of that and bought an ugly tan-gold T-Bird, a 1984 model, if I remember the year right. Me and that old T-Bird traveled tens of thousands of miles on the open road and saw a lot of life together over the next few years.
I worked construction in Daviess right after I got there. That was about the only real marketable skill I had. My pay was next to nothing. I boarded in a little trailer house owned by my Wagler friends, the family that had taken me in years ago when a lot of turmoil was going on around me. They were distant relatives, Dean and his brothers. The trailer house was set up nicely on one of their turkey farms. And I settled into my move from the Amish world into a modern world.
On Sundays I went to Mount Olive Mennonite Church. They had a few habits that I wasn’t used to. Most notably, they had church services on Wednesday nights as well as Sunday mornings. Wednesday-night prayer meeting. Sitting in church had never been on my list of favorite activities. Attending an Amish church service meant sitting on a hard bench for a long time. Your back got tired, and you might or might not hear something you would actually remember from the sermon.
Mount Olive is a pretty strict place. Lots of grim-faced men peered around suspiciously to make sure nobody was having too much fun. Life was serious. Our somber faces must always reflect some degree of awareness of that fact. Too much smiling was unseemly and ultimately sinful. It reminded me a little bit of the old Aylmer people, way back in my childhood, how humorless they had been.
I remember my first Wednesday-night service at Mount Olive. I wasn’t used to going to church during the week. But I was told that was how the Mennonites did it. And seeing how I was fixing to join the Mennonites, I might as well get used to it. (I never did.) The prayer meeting was kind of like a Bible study, really, except it was the whole church. Someone had a topic of some sort. The topics were short sermons and were usually dry as a bone. There was a lot of admonishing going on, about what it meant
to live right. And lots of Amens. After the topic that first night, we split off into small groups. I tagged along with the little group of youth as we walked down to the basement. We sat in a circle, and someone asked for prayer requests. People said things like “We need rain. Crops are real dry.” Or “Let’s pray for so-and-so, that he’ll get saved.” I can’t remember a personal, vulnerable request ever coming from anyone. Judgment would have been too harsh.
That Wednesday, after the requests were gathered, someone started praying. A short prayer, maybe a minute or two. Then the next person in the circle prayed. I stirred and looked around in panic. The prayers were creeping right around the circle, and soon it would be my turn. I had never prayed aloud in public. I didn’t know how. What should I say? The guy next to me was taking his turn. He prayed, and then it was my turn.
I remember that time only because of that frozen moment. I sat there, silent and paralyzed. I couldn’t speak. After an agonizing five or ten seconds, I waved my hand. I pass. And mercifully, the guy on the other side of me didn’t hesitate. He prayed his little prayer. And it went on around the circle until it was finished. Nobody mentioned anything about how I had not prayed. But I felt pretty ashamed. At the next prayer meeting, I managed to squeak out a few words. It was hard to force myself. I just didn’t come from a place like that. In time, I got to be decently fluent in speaking aloud to the Lord. But my spoken prayers were never long. They still aren’t. Not anything like the unspoken prayers in my heart. Those prayers go on and on, every day, like a preacher who doesn’t know when it’s time to shut up and sit down. I’m OK with that, though. I think the Lord is OK with that, too.
Daviess and Vincennes
I’m a glutton for tough times and hard roads, seems like. And the winter of 1988–1989 was tough for me in many ways, which isn’t that surprising. This was just one more struggle in a long string of struggles.
There wasn’t a lot of support around me as I settled into my post-Amish world in Daviess. And always, it seemed, something hard rose to confront me. That winter, I was reeling from the abrupt loss of a relationship I had desperately wished would work out. It did not. Instead, it collapsed into dust and ashes around me, because I could not speak my heart.
I hunched down and absorbed the bitter pain of a loss such as I had never known. Dad’s little prophecy came true, what he’d spoken about me paying for how I had treated Sarah. Did it ever. Still. It was probably more intense in my mind because of how alone I felt. And how alone I was in my new world, my new life in Daviess. It’s not like I could communicate much, not like I could really trust anyone around me, to talk to. Mostly because I didn’t know how. And somewhere, in the spasms of that pain, the shadows of a plan came to my mind. Leave this behind. Strike out into a new place. Get my GED, the equivalent of a high school diploma. Get that, and maybe enroll at Indiana’s Vincennes University in the fall.
I wasn’t sure just what all was involved. At twenty-seven, I had a limited education. I couldn’t imagine taking the tests for my GED without some preparation. So I made some calls. There were classes one could take at a local school in Washington, Indiana. Tuesday nights, if I remember right. And a week or so later, I walked in and enrolled. Tentatively, a bit scared. I don’t remember the nice lady’s name, but I remember how helpful she was. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, yes. Come on in. We’ll analyze where you are. Take some placement exams. We’ll figure out what you need to learn. And we’ll teach you what you don’t know, so you can get your GED. And go on to college. Don’t be afraid. You can do this.”
Grateful for her words, I took the placement exams. And amazingly, in pretty much every category, I was already at college entry level. Except one. Math. I had a strong but basic eighth-grade education from the Aylmer Amish school. Since then, I had devoured countless books. I had read and read and read. Much trash. And some good stuff, too. But who goes out and learns math on their own? A math brain, I guess. Definitely not me. Still, I was astounded and emboldened. I could do this. And I began attending classes, there in Washington, to learn some basic elements of math. And to polish up my writing.
And after a couple of months of attending those weekly classes, I took the plunge. Went in and sat for my GED tests. I don’t recall many specific details of that day, except I was fairly confident. And when my scores came back, they were good. Actually, in a very high percentile. The nice lady smiled and congratulated me. She knew I could do it. This is the beginning. Now go enroll at Vincennes. Here’s all the information you need to do that. And I did. Enrolled at a real university, for the fall of 1989. I was excited. This was a new road, a new day. I knew what was behind me, I’d just walked from there. There was no way I could possibly envision what waited ahead for me.
Three days before my twenty-eighth birthday. That’s when I walked through the doors of Vincennes University as a student for the first time. Clutching my new bright-blue JanSport backpack loaded with textbooks, I entered the halls of the Humanities Building. That’s the stuff I had signed up for, mostly. English. Literature. History. Speech. And one lone remedial math class, way across the campus.
It was a magical and frightening time. Magical because of the new possibilities that so suddenly seemed within my grasp. And frightening because of where I’d come from. I was a simple ex-Amish man, with not a day of high school under my belt. That’s intimidating, any way you look at it. And yet here it was before me. All I had to do was walk forward through the open door. College. The real thing. A world that called to a deep place in my heart. And to me, it was pretty much a miracle, this university. Vincennes University. A two-year school. The gateway to my journey through a world I had never dared to imagine.
I lapped it up from the first day. Timidly, I took a seat in my first class. Way in the back of the room, which would forever after be my most comfortable spot. World Literature, with Dr. Rodgers. A frail little wisp of a man, not that well-spoken. But very knowledgeable. He hemmed and hawed and welcomed us. This semester, we will be exploring this theme and that theme in our studies. We’ll be writing a paper every month. The syllabus described our course. Syllabus? What was that? I had never heard that word before. Had no clue what it meant.
I would soon hear a lot of words that I had never heard spoken before. Words I had read, words the meaning of which I knew full well. But there’s a difference between reading a word and hearing it used in actual conversations, properly articulated. I cringed at the way I’d been pronouncing some of them. And I listened and learned.
That first semester, I signed up for what was considered a full load. Fifteen hours. English I. History of some kind. Literature. And a few other classes I can’t recall. But it was the humanities—the reading, the writing, that side of the brain—that was my strength. And I walked naturally through those doors, which seemed to call my name. I was new there. Didn’t know whom or what I could trust. So I went by instinct.
And to me, it was like a smorgasbord, the university. It was as if I were seated at a table groaning under the weight of a great feast of so many mysteries I longed to touch and taste. And feel. I eagerly read the assigned literature. Completed the writings on time. I was serious, focused, and hungry, and that was soon plain to those around me. Within a month, all my professors knew my name, knew who I was. And to their credit, every single one of them acknowledged and welcomed this student who had emerged from the backwoods of the “peaceful people,” the Amish. Every single one. Their doors were always open to me, and I soon felt calm and comfortable enough to just stop by and chat. To talk of things. To pick their brains. I was right at ten years older than the average college freshman. I’d lived ten tough years of life most of my classmates had never seen and probably would never see. And to me, it was a huge privilege just to be there at this formal place where knowledge was the market.
After that first semester, fifteen credit hours were not enough to occupy my mind. The second semester, I took eighteen hours. And in my second year at Vincennes, on a f
ull merit scholarship, I enrolled in twenty-one class hours both semesters. Sure, this was a junior college. Not a four-year school. Not as rigorous. But for me, well, I could not have found a more perfect launching place. Vincennes University was a shining city on a hill.
Those were glorious days of high adventure. I felt like I was on a mountain, looking out over the vast expanses of fertile valleys below. This, this was the journey I had been searching for, without even knowing. Somehow, I recognized that.
I rented a room to stay in, a few miles from the college. An attic bedroom. I think I paid $150 a month. And I worked, too.
Right then, Daviess County was buzzing with a great deal of gossip and speculation. A group of visionary investors had just opened a huge new restaurant complex on the outskirts of Montgomery, Indiana. Named The Gasthof, it featured Amish-style cooking and had a large gift shop. One of my friends told me they were still hiring servers. I’d often considered waiting on tables. The classic job for a student: you worked, you got your tips, and you got money to live on. Now, as a full-time student, I definitely needed some cash flow. I decided to apply.
I walked in one afternoon. The place was simply breathtaking in its vastness. Rough timber framing with wooden pegs. Post and beam throughout. Seating space for several hundred diners. Two banquet rooms, including one on the second floor. And the gift shop. After ogling the place, I inquired about a job and met with Gene and Mabel Bontrager, the managers. We hit it off right away. I was hired on the spot for Friday and Saturday evenings. They told me to wear a white shirt and black pants and black shoes. And to come Tuesday evening for training and orientation. Half the minimum hourly wage plus tips. And so began my career as a waiter, one that would last through four years of college.