by Ira Wagler
Then we headed out of town, taking the highway west into the burg of West Grove and then right onto the gravel road that led to the farm. By two o’clock, we were pulling up to our parents’ house.
It was all pretty much the same as it had been the last time. The old white bungalow with a few rickety buggies parked forlornly in front of the shop. We parked and got out and yawned and stretched and stretched. Then headed up the concrete walkway to the house, where Mom met us at the door. She smiled and smiled and chattered in welcome. Nathan handed her the poinsettia. She feigned surprise. Oh, for me! You shouldn’t have. And we followed her into the warm, familiar kitchen, where her ever-present pot of coffee simmered on the humming stove. Sat at the table while she poured us each a cup.
She fluttered about and smiled and smiled. Her boys were home. And indeed we were.
After a few minutes, Dad, hearing the commotion, came clumping in from his tiny office attached to the north side of the house. He walked gingerly, limping on his gimpy knee. “Hello, boys,” he said, peering over his wire-rimmed glasses at us.
And we stood respectfully and shook hands with him, and he spoke our names. We gave him his gift of chocolate cherries, and he sat down to visit a bit. How was the trip? Good, we said. Did you drive all night? Yes, we did. You must be tired. Yes, we are. And so on.
My father had an ironclad rule. No son who owned a car could live at his home. For the first few years after we left, his face darkened if we so much as drove a car onto his property and parked it for a short visit. But by the early nineties, we’d reached an uneasy, unspoken truce. He wouldn’t fuss overmuch if we parked our car out front, as long as it was clearly understood that it would be only for a few days. Over Christmas, for instance. We honored the truce. And to his credit, so did he.
We settled in and sat around then, whiling away the late-afternoon hours, laughing and chatting with Mom as she bustled about, filling us in on all the latest local news while preparing supper. She hovered over the hot stove, stirring up a pot of her milk-based bean soup laced with herbs, because she knew it was our favorite. And she knew her kitchen was the only place in the whole wide world where we would ever find it.
Darkness fell, and the hissing mantel lanterns were lit, brightening the entire house. We sat down to eat, and it was a comfortable, pleasant thing. Just Dad and Mom and my brother and me. I know Dad was technically shunning me at the time, so I must have sat off to the side a bit, or we just ate cafeteria-style. Whatever it was, it was. Nobody made much fuss. After supper, we sat drowsily, nodding off on the couch. And as bedtime approached, Dad cleared his throat and announced it was time for evening prayer. We knelt and heard again the rich, mellow rhythm of my father’s voice as he recited the five-minute High German evening prayer from memory.
At one point in these years—I don’t remember exactly when—after the others had retired, I sat up with my father and we talked. Just he and I, man to man. He had many questions about my college classes and what I was learning. I was comfortable and open with him for the first time in my life. The hours passed, and the hissing lantern flickered low. At midnight, as the cold crept in, Dad got up and stirred the dying embers in the stove and restocked it with firewood. And with that, we finally went off to bed.
After that first time, we made it a tradition. The first night of any future visit home, he and I would sit up late and talk. Those are among my most treasured memories of my father.
Nathan and I slept in the bedrooms that a few years ago had been our own. The smoky kerosene-oil lamp flickering dimly on the nightstand. The bed smothered with plump feather comforters Mom had carefully placed there. I snuggled in, the cold night air engulfed the room, and the high clear chimes of the old black wall clock struck once as I drifted off into fitful slumber.
The next morning I awoke early, startled by my surroundings. Dad called for us to come and eat the breakfast Mom had fixed. Eggs and bacon and toast and thick, rich gravy. Dad and Mom had usually already eaten, so there would be no awkwardness about shunning. Nathan and I sat at the table and groggily stuffed our faces with the food on which we had been raised.
After breakfast, Dad took up the Bible and read a passage of Scripture for devotions. Nathan and I glanced at each other. We might even have winked a bit. This was the ideal moment for the obligatory admonitions we knew would come at some point. We were trapped, a captive audience. It was Dad’s time to deliver a mini-sermon about how we were living in the world and of the world. How we should even now change and return home and establish ourselves as upstanding members of the Amish Church. “Me and Mom believe that’s the right thing for you to do.” Me and Mom. Mom never had any voice in the matter. She was just included in the narrative. That’s how he always wrapped it up.
Might as well get it out of the way, we figured, and get on with things.
And so he did. The same old song, exactly as we’d heard it many times before. Just a slightly different verse. Seems like it must have been a Bloomfield rule or something. If your worldly children come home to visit, make sure you lecture them. Don’t let that chance slip by, or you will have sinned.
It would have been nice, just once, to go home and not be subjected to that particular refrain. But mostly, we learned to just let it pass and let it go.
After the obligatory lecture was over, Nathan and I thanked Mom for her delicious food and took off to tour our old haunts. Stopped to see our older brother Titus, who was calm and collected as always. Then to Chuck’s Café in West Grove. Reconnected with the local farmers we used to hang with. Then around the settlement itself, stopping here and there to say hi to an old friend. And stopping by at our siblings’ houses for coffee breaks and sweets.
Everywhere we went, the fire-engine-red Grand Prix was a source of great fascination. Someone must be doing well, people would comment slyly, to drive a car like that. We grunted vague replies and pretended the car was Nathan’s. Didn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind that it might be a rental.
Bloomfield was expanding. Every year, it seemed new buildings had sprouted where only pasture grasses had waved before. Or some English farm had been snatched up by an Amish farmer. The character of the community changed. New names, new faces from people we had never seen before, people who had moved in from Jamesport, Missouri, and other troubled settlements.
The day slipped by and another night. And then Christmas dawned. We slept in, awoke late, and got up to Mom’s fresh coffee. For the Scripture reading that morning, Dad read the Christmas story from Luke. No short sermons forthcoming this time. That little chore had already been done. Mom bustled about, covering hot dishes to take to the noon meal at my brother Joseph’s house halfway out the lane. By eleven, a line of buggies trickled in. All the family gathered, as we always did on this day.
Nathan and I joined them. A large group. Our brothers and their wives, our sisters and their husbands. And all their children. The house soon echoed with our boisterous talk and great peals of laughter, common sounds at any Wagler gathering. A ragtag line of nephews hung in the shadows, rough and rugged boys, growing like weeds. They spoke shyly to their “English” uncles and discussed us among themselves. Soon enough, they, too, or a good percentage of them, would taste of the world outside the boundaries of their own.
A sumptuous feast was spread, and we gathered about. Heads bowed as my father prayed the blessing. And then we dug into the food.
After lunch, as everyone lounged around, dozing and drowsy, Nate and I made noises to depart. It was best to start back that day, to beat the heavy post-holiday traffic. Dad wished us safe travels. Mom gripped our hands and smiled and slipped us small gifts of stocking caps and gloves or similar practical things.
And then we left. It was time to go. We could feel it.
This was not our world. It would never be our world again. Sure, it was “home,” but in cold, hard reality, we were strangers. We didn’t fit, and we didn’t belong.
And as we absorbed that truth, the deep stirring desire to re
turn home for Christmas diminished in our hearts. Receded gradually, almost imperceptibly. Until it pretty much died, and we could find little reason to go back.
Law School
It’s a thing of wonder and some amazement now, when I take the time to stop and think about it. Not that I do, much. One of the strangest little side trips of my life, in a long and distinguished line of strange little side trips. That’s what going to law school was. I’ve often thought to myself, What were you thinking? If you wanted to get educated about as far away from Amish roots as possible, law school would be the place. And Dad? I think he was so astonished that he didn’t have much energy left to protest. Oh, sure. He huffed and puffed around a bit. But he did that all through my college years, too. Maybe I had worn him down, or at least his power of resistance had been greatly diminished.
I mean, you think about it. The Amish and the law. The two mix about like oil and water. The Amish don’t trust the state. They never have, and for good reasons. Our ancestors were hunted down like wild animals and killed by the authorities. Burned. Beheaded. Drowned. The Amish code of conduct includes a few simple rules that are passed on by word of mouth from hundreds of years of ancestral memories. Do not ever, ever trust the state, do not go to war, and never call on the law to protect you if you are wronged. The law. You obey it, as long as it does not get in the way of your duty to God. You try not to get entangled any more than you need to. You hang low, you walk quiet and humble. You never, never poke the beast. And here I was, walking into a jungle like that to learn the laws and the ways of worldly people.
That had to be a shock for Dad, right there. Or maybe not. I had already ventured out and conquered college. I think Dad was half-envious of that. By the time I got around to going to law school, he probably wasn’t all that surprised. He might even have mentioned the matter with awkward pride to visitors when they came around. My son Ira is in law school. He was overheard saying that. Just never that I saw or heard.
The Amish don’t shun lawyers entirely. You can’t, in today’s world. You have to use lawyers for transactional things, to survive. Things like buying and selling farms. Setting up a business. An attorney will write it all up. But the Amish do not sue. Well, I can’t say never. There are always exceptions. One or two who will step out of line and go after their rights. That happens in any group, I guess. But I remember that when I was growing up, Dad didn’t believe in calling the cops. Not for any reason. That was what he claimed. We never had much of a reason to, so Dad’s resolve was never really tested that I saw. I don’t know what he would have done, had an English person robbed him or invaded his home. I imagine he would have cooperated with the police. I don’t know that. But anyhow. That’s the background I came from. And now I was heading to law school to learn how to be a mean, wicked attorney. I think that was how a lot of my people saw it back then.
It was a long time ago, when it happened. A little bit of background on how it all came about. I graduated from Bob Jones in the summer of 1993. I wanted to take a year and work, to save up a little money for the next level. And to take a break for a bit. You get burned out with too much schooling. It’s still a little foggy to me exactly how I got roped in. But I did. For one year I was a teacher at a private Mennonite high school in the next county north, which was Lebanon. I walked into that classroom the first morning dressed pretty dapper for a teacher in a Plain Mennonite school. I smiled at the students. There were probably thirty kids, total, in all four high school grades. I smiled first. Then I looked grim. “I’m a new guy,” I told them. “I’ve never taught school before. But here I am. This is a new day. A new dawn. There will be order and there will be discipline.”
The students smiled back. And a few of the ringleaders took it upon themselves to test me out those first few days. When that happened, I didn’t smile. I looked mean and hard and grim. Mess with me, I signaled to the ringleaders, and you will pay. They weren’t bad kids. Just lively and used to doing what they wanted to. I was a hard-core disciplinarian, but I was fair. And the days passed into weeks, which passed into months. And the school year flowed right by and passed, there at Lebanon Valley Christian School. I wished my students well. And maybe it was just because they knew it was safe to say because I wasn’t coming back, but a lot of them told me they wished I would come back and teach again. I was honored by those words.
After that year, I was done with my break. Ready to head on to new roads, more education. In the fall of 1994, I walked into the Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as a student for the first time. I was excited, of course. A little scared, too. I guess I was thinking a lot of things, not all of them practical. I knew I wanted to keep on getting my education. I was the first in my family to go to college. That broke every mold. And now I’d go for one more level, I figured. Either a master’s degree of some sort, probably in English, or something like law. It would be cool to go to law school. About as far from my Amish roots as one could imagine. Those things were all factors. And I wondered, too, Could I really do it? I mean, there are a lot of legends out there about how tough law school is.
I remember that summer before I started. I had enrolled, you have to get that done way early. So I went through all those steps. Took the LSAT. I went and sat for that test without ever cracking a single book to prepare for it. These days, you can take courses to get ready for big tests like that. You probably could back then, too, in the early 1990s. I just wasn’t all that tuned in. Plus, I’m sure I would have grumbled at the cost. My budget was a shoestring, as it was for years after that. Anyway, I just signed up and went and took the test and did OK. Not stellar. But respectable. That’s how I scored. Respectable.
And I was excited, walking in as a student. Law school. They made movies about how tough it was to go to law school. That old classic scene where the aged and learned professor looks disdainfully at his class for the first time never happened. The students are mostly guys in the classic scene. The professor addresses them with words to the effect of “Gentlemen. I want you to look to the right and to the left, at the two people beside you. When this semester ends, one of the three of you will have washed out.” That didn’t happen. The stodgy old professor couldn’t have addressed us as “gentlemen,” because a lot of the students in the Dickinson Law class of 1997 were women. Half the class, I’d say, or more. And a third of the students didn’t flunk out, either. Had the studies been that hard, I doubt that so many of us would have enrolled. You can’t have that, not when you’re the oldest independent law school in the country. Which Dickinson was, back then. Not anymore, though. My class was the last one to graduate from an independent Dickinson.
I don’t know. It was so long ago. Life in law school was intense, especially the first few months of the first semester. I remember you could have cut the tension with a knife. Small knots of students shuttled about, tense and nervous. The second- and third-year students looked at us frantic first-years, all bored. Get over yourselves. First-year law students (called 1Ls) took mostly core courses. The first semester, especially. Torts. Contracts. Property. Uniform Commercial Code. A few others that escape me at the moment. It didn’t take me long to see this was a new level. Here, the students were motivated. They were here because they chose to be, not because their parents sent them. And they were here to graduate as high as they could in their class. It was a little shocking to me, to absorb and react to that level of competition.
In law school, I didn’t work part-time waiting on tables. There was no time for that, I figured. I boarded in a dorm room for the first time in my life. The Curtilage, the place was called. It was what dorm rooms have always been, I guess. A place with a narrow little hard bed, a desk, a chair, and a closet. You had to otherwise furnish it yourself. At least the rooms were private. One student per room.
I settled in that first semester. Got to know a few people. Made some friends. By the second year, I had settled into the social schedule of the law school, too. Two things happened every week,
like clockwork. Every Friday afternoon—well, late afternoon, after classes—there was a beer party at the Curtilage. Several kegs of quality beer. I never was much of a beer man, then or later, when the alcohol came calling. But I usually took a red Solo cup and filled it with the frothy brew and mingled and socialized. The second thing that happened like clockwork every week was we went to Blondie’s Inn down on the main stretch. Not sure if the place is there anymore. Years ago, I heard some mumblings about a fire. Anyway, the place was packed, so you could barely turn around. A massive crowd of law students closed the place down every week.
The first year, I never went to Blondie’s much, because I didn’t drink much. That changed by year two, for whatever reason, and for better or worse. Before that, and through all my Amish years of Rumspringa and other frantic running, I never, ever had any issues with alcohol. Then, during my second year of law school, I discovered single-malt scotch. That stuff is an acquired taste, so I was putting on airs, probably, at first. Lawyers drink scotch. I was going to be a lawyer. Voilà. And by the time the second year wrapped up, I was drinking some sort of whiskey pretty much every night of the week. That long journey was just beginning. The hard road stretched before me.
I have many good memories of my three years at Dickinson Law. I got to know a lot of people and made some friends I’m still connected with today. The first semester, I got close to several women in one of my classes. We formed our own little study group, me and those three women. Kelly, Kimberly (or Kim), and Karen. Ira and the Special Ks, someone called us, and so we called ourselves that, too. Me and the Special Ks had many good times during those three rather intense years of studying at Dickinson.
Ever since leaving the Amish decades before, I had been vaguely conscious of the fact that there was a certain subset of people out there. The beautiful people. They’d always been around. I just wasn’t always aware of them. They first nudged their way into my life (in a way that I noticed) at Bob Jones University, back in the early 1990s. I was too busy to pay them much mind, but I saw them. The GQ guys, always impeccably dressed. The guys who combed their hair swept off to the side, held in place by some high-shine hair grease. Pomade, I learned later it’s called. They wore the latest cool shirts and khaki pants and shiny new leather belts and loafers. The women had it a bit harder, having to wear skirts and all. Still, they stood out, too. It took a while for the whole scene to work itself into my awareness. Don’t get me wrong. The beautiful people were never rude, there at BJU. Just cooler than you could ever hope to be.