April break. Rachel and I drive through Pennsylvania to
look at some places she might go to school. We make our way south and
west, from Easton to Allentown, Lancaster to Carlisle, and finally on to
Gettysburg.
Parts of it remain legitimate farm country. Through much
of it, though, the farms, or the last bits of what used to be farms, are just
remnants of what used to be, nearly lost now amidst the relentless sprawl,
half-hidden by the ubiquitous billboards. I try to say to Rachel how all
this seems to me -- how evocative and bittersweet. And that is even
before we see two Amish buggies plugging along the roads of Lancaster County.
I think of how my grandparents used to talk about this
countryside, how they couldn't get over how "built up" everything had
become during their lifetimes.
KC and I went for a ride with Claude and Naomi once, Grammy and
Grandpop Shisler, just after Claude had gotten out of the hospital. He
had, finally and suddenly, a painful sense of his own age and health. He
was eighty-two then.
We took them to lunch in Lederach. Naomi tried to
steer him into ordering things that wouldn’t be quite as bad for his heart and
his weight. The salad for an appetizer, instead of the salty pea soup.
But she knew he was too set in his ways. And why not? He was
eighty-two, after all. He should just have the hot soup and be
happy. It has good chunks of ham and lots of crackers on the
side. Just the way we like it.
After we finish the rest of our lunch – sandwiches and the
obligatory iced tea – we take the long way back to the nursing home. The
Mennonites who live there, whatever their faults, at least are honest about
where they are. This is not a “senior center” or a “retirement
community.” They are old and not afraid to say they live in a nursing
home.
They had insisted we take their car, but I was permitted
to drive it. The latest of my grandfather’s long line of lightly used
Oldsmobiles or Buicks. He used to buy them two years old and sell them
four years old – not a bad way to do it. This last one, however, was just
that – the last one, which he'd had for ten years or so. He hardly drove
anymore. Still, it was sad that he had decided this would be his last
car.
He gives the directions as we go, along a winding route
past the landmarks of his childhood in and around Souderton. This was
real farm country not so long ago, and still had a few cornfields and
silos. But the suburban Philadelphia sprawl was overwhelming. My
grandparents could see through it, underneath it, to the land and the houses
and the barns of seventy years ago. A few of these landmarks are still
there. My grandparents help me imagine what's gone.
We drive along in
the hot sun. Grandpop, of course, sits up front with me. Grammy (do
only Mennonites use this word?) sits in back with my wife, whispering things
about men and chuckling. It makes me smile.
We drive by the old fieldstone house my grandfather was
born in. He shows us the gully across the road where he and his dog used
to chase frogs and fish in a small stream at the edge of a field. Now the
gully cuts through an impeccable lawn behind a house with a satellite
dish. My grandmother says that lately he has been talking about this dog
all the time.
Up the road we pass the barn where my grandfather’s
grandfather collapsed and died. The stone foundation and parts of the
lower walls are still there. Grandpop tells us how his grandfather was
working in the barn in the middle of summer, probably a day like today, when he
just collapsed and died. My grandfather was six years old.
When our tour is over, we leave them back at the nursing
home and drive away. I wonder if I will have a grandson of my own.
If I do, there won’t be any stories about how my grandfather died working in a
barn.
I worried then that my grandfather would hang on a few
more years, he and Grammy each trying hard not to be the first to go so the
other wouldn't die of loneliness. But then he finally would die -- the
men, at last, go first -- but not, I feared, until someone called an ambulance
and the paramedics worked to revive him and he was rushed to a hospital where
doctors would put lines into his tired veins and tied him to machines and maybe
even shocked his weary heart. There was something to be said, I thought
then and still do, for dying out in a barn, working with the other men, on
a summer afternoon.
As it turned out, he died at the nursing
home, with perfect suddenness. Grammy said he was sitting on the edge of
the bed when he bent down to tie his shoe. When he sat up, he simply laid
back on the bed and died. She called the nurse, but he was gone.
She laid with him there for a while, a couple of hours, before she was
ready to let them take him away.
Grammy died a few years later. Naomi. A beautiful,
old-fashioned name. She was my mother’s aunt, and then her
stepmother. My mother’s mother, Susanna, died from multiple sclerosis
when my mother was ten. During Susanna’s invalid years, Naomi came to
live with the family, taking care of her sister and helping Claude care for the
house and the four children. Not too long after Susanna died, but not too
quickly either, Claude and Naomi were married.
Naomi was, as the speakers at her service reminded us, a
woman of simple pleasures and generous spirit – a Christian woman through and
through, who actually lived like it. She lived simply and carefully and
took pride in doing every last thing, from housekeeping to piano to penmanship
(so much about her penmanship!), all as well as her talents and diligent
practice would allow.
My Aunt Barbara gave the eulogy, as Naomi had
desired. Barbara is my uncle Harold’s wife, who has published some poetry
and essays in various Mennonite publications over the years. She spoke
well and with obvious affection for Naomi, gently working a nice metaphor
involving apples in and out of her stories and reflections about Naomi, as we
all looked at a beautiful basket of multicolored apples overflowing on a table
at the front of the room.
And yet Barbara’s fine eulogy, and the warm remarks of the
others who spoke, were overshadowed in the end by a story told after the
service, about Naomi quitting school when she was sixteen, an age when
Mennonites of her generation “turned plain” and entered the church. One
version of the story is that her parents pressured her to leave school, I
suppose because attending school beyond that age was viewed as too “worldly”
for a sixteen-year-old girl, and maybe for a boy as well. Another version
is that her parents had nothing to do with it, at least directly, but that
Naomi was too ashamed to go to school wearing the small, white cap that
Mennonite women wore at the time (some still do) and that she now would wear
once she had entered the church.
The two versions are, I suppose, not really that
different. They have the same, sad ending either way.
All of this now seems, already, a long time ago.
We'll see where Rachel goes to school. If
one of these schools is right for her, I wouldn't mind a few more drives
through Pennsylvania.
