Stories for a Picnic
Today at our Labor Day church picnic two people commented on my not having posted anything on the blog recently. It's true, of course, and it's due to blogging having to get in line behind other priorities. Actually, it's due mainly to having to spend my time thinking mostly about things that don't mesh well with blogging--which requires lots of thinking before any writing can happen. Or I can simply report what other people have been thinking and saying. Much easier.
*****************
First, I wish you would all have had the privilege of listening to Leroy H.'s storytelling at the Labor Day program before lunch today. I was a little late getting there (yes, Sharon, again), so I didn't hear the beginning. I can't recount all the stories, but I'm sure if you had heard them you would have joined in on a lot of knee-slapping laughter, sympathetic nods of understanding, and bright-eyed interest from the audience.
When I got there Leroy was talking about the time a Kirby sweeper salesman tried to sell his mother a vacuum cleaner, which she pointed out to him was not sensible since their house had no plug-ins. They were Amish and had no electricity in the house. Not to be dissuaded, the salesman offered to take them to his church, which was a Mennonite church, and they accepted. Thus began a church journey away from being Old Order Amish and has led finally here to Center Church in Kansas.
Along the way, the family members who stayed Amish responded to the Hershberger family's change in status with varying degrees of acceptance. Perhaps the least accepting was Elizabeth's sister Ida, Leroy's aunt. She was married to Denny (Danny?) Gingerich. Especially after Denny became a deacon, he and the family felt more responsible than ever to be good examples, and keeping themselves properly separated from family members who had strayed was important. So the rift remained--to the point that one day when the Hershbergers had notified the Gingerichs that they would visit at a certain time, they arrived to find the house empty--an obvious message of non-welcome. The Hershbergers had driven hundreds of miles to make the contact.
In recent years, at the funeral of Leroy's cousin, the son of Ida and Elizabeth's brother John, who had left behind a large family of children from ages 2-21, Leroy got a request from the dead man's children to please tell the Taily story. Earlier, at another family event, he had charmed them with that story, and they wanted to hear it again. Leroy did not agree to tell that story because he thought it was too inappropriate, but he agreed to tell other stories, which is how he found himself standing in front of a group of children and young people seated on straight backless benches, outside, with hundreds of funeral-goers milling around just beyond the fringes--busy power-visiting, as Leroy put it.
People began cocking an ear in the direction of the storytelling event, and to Leroy's surprise, he saw Aunt Ida sidling up to the group. He also saw his mother about to cross Ida's path, and watched them engage in a little interchange. Later he heard that Ida asked Elizabeth why she was wearing such a long dress. "You would have never done that if Mom had asked you to," she accused.
Completely blindsided, Elizabeth said simply, "I repented." (The laughter here was partly because of amusement at Elizabeth having been at a near-loss for words. This is a rare occurrence.)
Then Ida asked, "Where did Leroy learn to tell stories like that?"
Still taken off guard, Elizabeth said something like, "In school, I guess." (How's that for explaining to an Amish woman the benefits of a degree in English from Yale University?)
Something seemed to thaw in the relationship between the families, and later Denny asked Leroy if he would come for a visit and tell his stories to the whole family if he could get them together to listen. He said he'd come, but first, he extracted a promise from Denny that he wouldn't play the trick again of going off somewhere and not being home when he arrived.
Leroy and his parents did pay them a visit, and this time they were served a wonderful meal of Amish comfort food--on separate tables, mind you--to maintain a proper separation, but separated only by about a foot and a half of space at the ends of the tables--not a dark, closed-door house. After the meal, the large family of Denny and Ida arrived, each with their own large family, and Leroy entertained them. It was a love-filled time together.
At some point, Leroy told Denny that he had heard a story about him, and he wanted to know if it was true. He had heard that he was offered $15 million for his 200-acre farm because it contained an unusual kind of sand useful for use in hydraulic fracturing (fracking), and Denny had told him no. The sand was unusual in that the tiny stones are round instead of straight-sided. Thus, they work much better for injecting into fissure lines underground, since they cannot pack together tightly and clog up the transport lines prematurely.
Denny essentially affirmed the story, but explained the decision further. After the offer came, Denny said he would have to let his children help decide, since they would have the burden of spending all this money. The children decided that if they got that money, they would never have to work again, and that wouldn't be good for them, so they turned down the offer. Besides, Denny loved his farm just the way it was, and didn't want the top of it lifted off, the sand stripped out from underneath, and the top put back on. He loved the hills, the trees, and the pond that attracted wildlife.
When Denny told the agent what they had decided, after he recovered from the shock, the agent offered $19 million instead. "No. That would be worse," Denny said, and the dumbfounded man left.
****************
In the visit to Denny's home, Leroy saw a china cabinet that Denny had designed and built. When he opened the cabinet doors at the bottom of the piece of furniture, however, it contained firewood instead of china. Denny explained it all. The china cabinet actually covered a hole in the floor. In the basement underneath there was easy access to an outdoor woodpile, or perhaps the wood was thrown down a chute into the basement. Then the firewood was loaded into a box attached to a winch that could be raised right up to nestle inside the china cabinet doors.
In the early design and trial stages, however, something went wrong, and a loaded wood box got stuck on its way up the line, and when Denny gave the winch an extra crank, the woodbox came crashing down and broke on the basement floor with a terrible crash. Denny, a prankster, as the larger Gingerich family has a reputation for being, saw an opportunity, so he walked over to the bottom of the stairway and lay prostrate on the floor, holding very still.
Predictably, his wife Ida came to the basement door to investigate. "Denny," she called. No answer. "Bisht du alraat?" (Are you OK?) Still no answer. "Denny, vonn du alraat bisht, shaff dich doe roof," (Denny, if you're alright, get yourself up here) Ida said, already walking away from the doorway. Leroy surmised that Denny had tried that trick too many times before to fool Ida--or maybe she was just uncommonly shrewd.
****************
Another Gingerich relative, Rudy, who had a business repairing motors, also hosted for the men of the community a conversation center around the pot-bellied stove in his shop. This proved to be an ideal setting for plying his prankster trade. He got a lot of mileage out of driving several nails into the seat of a wooden chair the men often sat in, and then hooking up wires to those nails, and trailing the wires to a device (Motor?) on his workbench that delivered an electrical charge through the wires and nails when Rudy pressed a button. He tried it the first time when he had a single visitor. The way it usually worked after that is that anyone who had been treated to the prank, and had leaped out of the chair, levitating above it for a moment, as Leroy described it, would hang around long enough to witness the performance of the next victim. And so on, till the room was full of victims and witnesses.
One day a 400-lb. English driver-of-Amish-people came into the shop, and Rudy was faced with a moral dilemma. Is shocking English people OK? Amish is for sure OK. But English? Rudy decided in the affirmative. The shock had predictable results, except that when the levitation was over, and the man sat down heavily again, the chair split right in two, and was never used for noble purposes again.
*****************
Leroy is mostly bald, with a long, flowing gray beard, expressive blue eyes, glasses worn intermittently in a perched-on-the-end-of-the-nose style, and has no shame. All of those things, with a fine-tuned ear for language, and concerted effort to learn the storytelling profession, combine to make his stories memorable, especially when the telling strikes chords of familiarity and insight, with just a twinge of intrigue and daring. He's single, so his storytelling efforts have never been narrowed down to a handful of offspring. Instead, the "whole world" comprises an adoring audience--when Leroy's in fine storytelling fettle--or is that mettle? Both, I think.
*****************
First, I wish you would all have had the privilege of listening to Leroy H.'s storytelling at the Labor Day program before lunch today. I was a little late getting there (yes, Sharon, again), so I didn't hear the beginning. I can't recount all the stories, but I'm sure if you had heard them you would have joined in on a lot of knee-slapping laughter, sympathetic nods of understanding, and bright-eyed interest from the audience.
When I got there Leroy was talking about the time a Kirby sweeper salesman tried to sell his mother a vacuum cleaner, which she pointed out to him was not sensible since their house had no plug-ins. They were Amish and had no electricity in the house. Not to be dissuaded, the salesman offered to take them to his church, which was a Mennonite church, and they accepted. Thus began a church journey away from being Old Order Amish and has led finally here to Center Church in Kansas.
Along the way, the family members who stayed Amish responded to the Hershberger family's change in status with varying degrees of acceptance. Perhaps the least accepting was Elizabeth's sister Ida, Leroy's aunt. She was married to Denny (Danny?) Gingerich. Especially after Denny became a deacon, he and the family felt more responsible than ever to be good examples, and keeping themselves properly separated from family members who had strayed was important. So the rift remained--to the point that one day when the Hershbergers had notified the Gingerichs that they would visit at a certain time, they arrived to find the house empty--an obvious message of non-welcome. The Hershbergers had driven hundreds of miles to make the contact.
In recent years, at the funeral of Leroy's cousin, the son of Ida and Elizabeth's brother John, who had left behind a large family of children from ages 2-21, Leroy got a request from the dead man's children to please tell the Taily story. Earlier, at another family event, he had charmed them with that story, and they wanted to hear it again. Leroy did not agree to tell that story because he thought it was too inappropriate, but he agreed to tell other stories, which is how he found himself standing in front of a group of children and young people seated on straight backless benches, outside, with hundreds of funeral-goers milling around just beyond the fringes--busy power-visiting, as Leroy put it.
People began cocking an ear in the direction of the storytelling event, and to Leroy's surprise, he saw Aunt Ida sidling up to the group. He also saw his mother about to cross Ida's path, and watched them engage in a little interchange. Later he heard that Ida asked Elizabeth why she was wearing such a long dress. "You would have never done that if Mom had asked you to," she accused.
Completely blindsided, Elizabeth said simply, "I repented." (The laughter here was partly because of amusement at Elizabeth having been at a near-loss for words. This is a rare occurrence.)
Then Ida asked, "Where did Leroy learn to tell stories like that?"
Still taken off guard, Elizabeth said something like, "In school, I guess." (How's that for explaining to an Amish woman the benefits of a degree in English from Yale University?)
Something seemed to thaw in the relationship between the families, and later Denny asked Leroy if he would come for a visit and tell his stories to the whole family if he could get them together to listen. He said he'd come, but first, he extracted a promise from Denny that he wouldn't play the trick again of going off somewhere and not being home when he arrived.
Leroy and his parents did pay them a visit, and this time they were served a wonderful meal of Amish comfort food--on separate tables, mind you--to maintain a proper separation, but separated only by about a foot and a half of space at the ends of the tables--not a dark, closed-door house. After the meal, the large family of Denny and Ida arrived, each with their own large family, and Leroy entertained them. It was a love-filled time together.
At some point, Leroy told Denny that he had heard a story about him, and he wanted to know if it was true. He had heard that he was offered $15 million for his 200-acre farm because it contained an unusual kind of sand useful for use in hydraulic fracturing (fracking), and Denny had told him no. The sand was unusual in that the tiny stones are round instead of straight-sided. Thus, they work much better for injecting into fissure lines underground, since they cannot pack together tightly and clog up the transport lines prematurely.
Denny essentially affirmed the story, but explained the decision further. After the offer came, Denny said he would have to let his children help decide, since they would have the burden of spending all this money. The children decided that if they got that money, they would never have to work again, and that wouldn't be good for them, so they turned down the offer. Besides, Denny loved his farm just the way it was, and didn't want the top of it lifted off, the sand stripped out from underneath, and the top put back on. He loved the hills, the trees, and the pond that attracted wildlife.
When Denny told the agent what they had decided, after he recovered from the shock, the agent offered $19 million instead. "No. That would be worse," Denny said, and the dumbfounded man left.
****************
In the visit to Denny's home, Leroy saw a china cabinet that Denny had designed and built. When he opened the cabinet doors at the bottom of the piece of furniture, however, it contained firewood instead of china. Denny explained it all. The china cabinet actually covered a hole in the floor. In the basement underneath there was easy access to an outdoor woodpile, or perhaps the wood was thrown down a chute into the basement. Then the firewood was loaded into a box attached to a winch that could be raised right up to nestle inside the china cabinet doors.
In the early design and trial stages, however, something went wrong, and a loaded wood box got stuck on its way up the line, and when Denny gave the winch an extra crank, the woodbox came crashing down and broke on the basement floor with a terrible crash. Denny, a prankster, as the larger Gingerich family has a reputation for being, saw an opportunity, so he walked over to the bottom of the stairway and lay prostrate on the floor, holding very still.
Predictably, his wife Ida came to the basement door to investigate. "Denny," she called. No answer. "Bisht du alraat?" (Are you OK?) Still no answer. "Denny, vonn du alraat bisht, shaff dich doe roof," (Denny, if you're alright, get yourself up here) Ida said, already walking away from the doorway. Leroy surmised that Denny had tried that trick too many times before to fool Ida--or maybe she was just uncommonly shrewd.
****************
Another Gingerich relative, Rudy, who had a business repairing motors, also hosted for the men of the community a conversation center around the pot-bellied stove in his shop. This proved to be an ideal setting for plying his prankster trade. He got a lot of mileage out of driving several nails into the seat of a wooden chair the men often sat in, and then hooking up wires to those nails, and trailing the wires to a device (Motor?) on his workbench that delivered an electrical charge through the wires and nails when Rudy pressed a button. He tried it the first time when he had a single visitor. The way it usually worked after that is that anyone who had been treated to the prank, and had leaped out of the chair, levitating above it for a moment, as Leroy described it, would hang around long enough to witness the performance of the next victim. And so on, till the room was full of victims and witnesses.
One day a 400-lb. English driver-of-Amish-people came into the shop, and Rudy was faced with a moral dilemma. Is shocking English people OK? Amish is for sure OK. But English? Rudy decided in the affirmative. The shock had predictable results, except that when the levitation was over, and the man sat down heavily again, the chair split right in two, and was never used for noble purposes again.
*****************
Leroy is mostly bald, with a long, flowing gray beard, expressive blue eyes, glasses worn intermittently in a perched-on-the-end-of-the-nose style, and has no shame. All of those things, with a fine-tuned ear for language, and concerted effort to learn the storytelling profession, combine to make his stories memorable, especially when the telling strikes chords of familiarity and insight, with just a twinge of intrigue and daring. He's single, so his storytelling efforts have never been narrowed down to a handful of offspring. Instead, the "whole world" comprises an adoring audience--when Leroy's in fine storytelling fettle--or is that mettle? Both, I think.
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
2:47 PM
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