“And they called back to him forgotten memories: Old songs, old faces,
old memories, and all strange, wordless, and unspoken things men know
and live and feel, and never find a language for…”

—Thomas Wolfe
_____________

I didn’t think I’d go at first. When my Amish friends invited me to the youth singing at their home a few weeks ago. Scheduled for the following Sunday night. I wouldn’t know anyone. And everyone would stare. Deep down, I’m really a pretty shy guy. So I told them thanks, but I probably wouldn’t attend. I’d keep it in mind in case anything changed, I assured them. That’s what you always say, when trying to maneuver out of an invitation to somewhere you don’t particularly want to go.

Sunday night rolled around, and I had second thoughts. Got a hankering to go. Or a notion, as my Dad would say. The singing started at 7:30. I could slip in a little late. So I changed into “going away” clothes and headed out.

My friends live only a few miles from my house. As I approached, dusk was settling. Line after line of gray/black buggies sat parked neatly in a nearby field. Lancaster buggies. Rectangular boxes with distinct rounded tops. I inched into the drive, drove Big Blue into the field and parked beside a temporary volleyball court.

I heard the soaring voices as I approached the shop where they were singing. Walked up to a back door and slipped in unseen. Took a chair behind the men. The shop was long and low. Two bench-tables had been set up. Girls sat on one side of each table, boys on the other. Benches lined the remainder of the floor behind each table, benches filled with row after row of Amish youth. Girls on one side of the room, boys on the other.

They were singing German songs. Fast tunes, with some English choruses. The music swelled and rolled and echoed from the shop’s low ceiling. Perfect four part harmony. About 150 youth, singing their hearts out. Someone noticed me and handed me a song book. I found the page and sang along. Scanned the room around me.

Everyone was singing. The youth, the married men, the women. Even the children. Everyone was absorbed in the moment, or so it seemed. They were a part of this system. This group. This community. And suddenly I was struck by a deep brooding sense of loss and sadness.

They belonged.

I didn’t. I was an intruder.

The song ended. Another was promptly announced and someone started it. Off they soared again, the swelling rolls of harmony pealing through the building and outside into the night.

It was breathtakingly, hauntingly beautiful and it took me back. I sat there, silent, lost in the moment and in the mist of memories from the past.

**********************
Back twenty-seven years or so, to one of a thousand summer nights in Bloomfield, Iowa. A small Amish community at that time, consisting of two districts. The youth all gathered as one group for the Sunday evening suppers and singings.

They were a diverse group, assembled from a wide swath of Amish communities, big and small. Bloomfield was just a young pup of a settlement in those days. Families had moved in from fairly progressive places like Kokomo, Indiana and Arthur, Illinois. And from such regressive areas as Fortuna, Missouri and Buchanan County, Iowa. And every shade between.

It made for an interesting mix of young people. They developed into groups, loose factions, as those with similar interests gravitated to each other. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

A tall lithe young man walked among them. Dark complexion. Wild shocks of curly, coal black hair. Always a ready smile. Intelligent. Good natured. Quick to laugh. Outgoing, intensely loyal to his friends.

His brooding brown eyes absorbed all that went on around him. The things he saw and lived and felt, he considered in his heart and carefully stored in the recesses of his memory.

There was sadness too, in those eyes, and a hint of something restless and lost. He was a part of this group, these youth. These were his people. Yet, he sometimes felt detached, alone.

These were his people, but he knew there was so much more beyond this world, out-side its secure borders. And its ancient ways. Out there, waiting for him. He’d left once or twice, short spasmatic excursions into that other world, then returned. Tasted the forbidden fruit for a time, before nostalgia and homesickness drowned out reason and turned his face again to the place from whence he came.

But he found home wasn’t quite the same. It would never be again. Could never be again. And he could never truly return. Even as he participated in the community, its life and customs. He loved the camaraderie, the feeling of belonging. But, wherever he was at any given moment, the grass always seemed greener on the other side. When he was home, he heard the siren’s song of the outside world. When he followed that song into that outside world, the memories of home tugged at his heart and pulled him back.

Even so, he lived in a perpetual state of vague undefined optimism. He would live forever; he had no grasp, no concept of the rapidly accelerating flow of the river of time, and the years. The nebulous dreams, the joys, the pain, the turmoil of youth stirred in him. Always the thought, the dream, the knowledge, the great promise of a shining tomorrow. Where the intense passions and desires that burned in him would be soothed, requited.

Always he grasped, with tenuous grip the anticipation of something, something great and grand and fine. Something beyond. Always tomorrow, with its visions of splendor and a shining city. Always the dreams of adventures in strange and distant lands, to come home again after wandering the far country, tired, satiated, ready to settle down in peace and solitude in the quiet land. Always a brighter future of happiness and contentment, always just beyond the tip of his outstretched hand.

But that tomorrow never came. It would never come.

And so he mingled in, immersed himself in the vibrant details of life around him.

He enjoyed the singings, mostly. The buggies clattering as they gathered, around 6:30 or so, on a Sunday night. Rattling steel rimmed wheels on the gravel roads. The horses unhitched and tied up in the barn or at flatbed wagons strewn with chunks of hay. Small knots of youth drifting toward the house, where supper would be served. Hanging with his buddies as they all gathered in. The house father calling everyone to attention, all heads bowed for silent prayer.

Then the serious business of eating the evening meal with his friends. A long bench-table set up in the kitchen, laden with large pots of starchy foods. Mashed potatoes, noodles, some form of hamburger-helper laced meat, baked beans, potato salad and bread. And they filed slowly past and dipped great globs of sustenance onto plastic picnic trays. Walked outside to sit under shade trees or benches in the yard, and wolf their food.

Then dessert and coffee and hanging out, the swaggering boisterous talk, the local gossip, who was dating who, swapping tall tales, or adventures about hunting and fishing and trapping, or work about the farm.

Sometimes they played volleyball after supper, over makeshift nets, with rubber hoses as boundary lines, or baler twine. Shouting, leaping, hair flying as they played. Not a whole lot of strategy involved; everyone just merrily whacking the ball over the net.

As eight o’clock approached, a quick trip to the barn for “business,” then everyone standing about combing and patting down unruly heads of hair. He and his friends often filed in early, so as to grab the treasured back bench against the wall. Two reasons: they’d have a wall to lean against, and they could get away with more monkeyshines, unnoticed in the back. Bloomfield didn’t use tables at the singings, just row after row of benches. A row of boys, a row of girls, a row of boys, a row of girls.

At eight sharp, the first song was announced. And they sang. He didn’t consider himself much of a singer (he wasn’t), but he enjoyed it. Some nights, it was fun and inspiring. Other times, it was something less. All depended on how the evening started. And on the room’s acoustics. A small room with low ceilings, the singing swelled and echoed. A large room or heaven forbid, singing outside, and it just did not go so well. The first forty-five minutes they sang German songs, then English songs for the final half. In four part harmony, a practice Aylmer had never allowed, and one that was almost banned in Bloomfield.

And the minutes crept by, and they sang and sang. The old classic hymns. And the more edgy stuff. “No, no it’s not an easy road.” “You gotta walk this lonesome valley.” And it seemed to him sometimes, as the harmony swelled around him and his spirit soared and he consciously reveled in the mellow waves of song, that he could never leave, never forsake this ancient heritage, this priceless legacy. That no sacrifice would be too great to draw these things inside and keep them in his heart.

And the evening passed, and 9:30 approached. Someone announced and led the parting song. After its last notes faded, the young men got up from the benches and walked out single file. The singing was over for one more week.

They milled about outside. Socialized and chatted for awhile. Those who were dating were the first to scurry away, the young men to hitch up their horses. Each one pulled up to the walkway, where his date would hurry out, wrapped in a black shawl, head covered in a bonnet, and step up into the buggy. And off they clattered. In Bloomfield, courting couples tended to leave post haste for the girl’s house, because the date was decreed over at midnight.

And one by one, he and his friends hitched up their horses and left. Out onto the graveled or blacktopped roads, a long convoy of buggies with blinking orange lights.

When there was no opposing traffic, they sometimes raced their horses. Turned the highway into a drag strip. The challenger pulled up close behind, then lurched out to pass. And the challenged gradually released his reins, the horses opened up into full stride. Side by side, at breakneck speed, the buggies rocking dangerously, the horses straining with every possible ounce of muscle and sweat. Until one or the other pulled ahead and the loser conceded. Sometimes a car approached in the distance; the challenger was expected to pull back in line.

Then onto the gravel road, and up and down the hills surrounding his home. And eventually up the half mile long lane to the house. He and his brothers, laughing and discussing the day’s events. Scoffing at this thing, chortling at that. One of them led the steaming horse to barn or pasture, and they all gathered around the kitchen table for a few minutes, snacking on whatever goodies they could scavenge, before retiring for the night.

This was who he was. In time, he would conclude this was all there was.

And it was not enough.

*********************
I sang along again that night with the Lancaster youth. The first time in more than a decade that I’d attended a Sunday evening singing. Around nine, the parting hymn, and it was over. The young people sat around and visited, the few I knew came and shook my hand in welcome. Soon the buggies trickled out and headed down the road.

And I sat there for a spell and visited with my hosts. Thanked them for their gracious hospitality. Someone asked if the singing that night had stirred in me old memories of my youth. I nodded.

“It was so long ago,” I said.