2011 Each On Her Own Camino

2011  Each on her own camino. Mary Elaine Miedel born January 26, 2011; Gloria at Marty Savanick’s stores, her birthday group, the Goshen College sisters; the Lancaster Book Group, Elvin Kraybill; Menno House in New York City, El Camino de Santiago; Carlos and Elisa Diaz,  Luis and Patricia Sarmiento, Rob R. Schlabach (1945-2011).

Following my leaving Mennonite publishing and Gloria’s teaching in 2009, we did a number of projects and travels which I will note in this chapter, especially Gloria’s projects. But let’s start with a visit to the Wooster Hospital where our granddaughter Mary Elaine Miedel was born on January 26, 2011. As I post this in 2016, Mary is about the enter Kindergarten this Fall, and entertains us with her humor, goodwill, and imagination. In our great room she has opened up her own restaurant (menu patterned after the Oak Grove Eatery in nearby Wooster), with her favorite diner, cook, and consultant her grandmother Gloria. 

By the fall of 2009 Gloria started working for Marty Savanick and her family who had several stores in the area. Gloria worked several days a week at Collections by Marty in Scottdale and in Donegal. She and Marty were good friends, and the work was a good fit her interest and schedule. Martha and her husband Reuben (1995, 2002) had started the stores in the 80s, and they had grown until as of this writing they also included floral shops, the former Demuth’s, in Scottdale and Connellsville. In the same way, the Provident Bookstore used to be where she bought gifts for her kids, now she had a store to buy gifts for her grandchildren; she is still working with Marty until a month before we moved to Ohio in July of 2015. 

Gloria was also a member of several women’s groups which provided much enjoyment to her. The oldest one was the one she referred to as her birthday group. A cohort of Scottdale women would get together for dinner at a restaurant chosen by the one having a birthday. I believe this group was going already before we went to Venezuela in the early 80s and consisted of Alta Dezort, Jennifer Hiebert, Marty Savanick, Marlene Schwab, Ruth Scott, and Audra Shenk. I may be missing a few members, but this mostly Mennonite group stayed together irrespective of the trials and tribulations of their congregations and husband’s employment; many of them were related to Mennonite publishing at some point.  

A more recent group Gloria joined since her post-teaching years was the Scottdale Mennonite women’s monthly meeting called Comfort Zone. This monthly group headed by Ilse Reist included the traditional sewing circle activities, but Ilse had added a cultural component of arts and public affairs, often bringing in speakers.    

Another group with whom Gloria met every year or two was her Goshen College friends or sisters as they called themselves. These were the women friends she knew during Gloria’s two years of Kulp Hall living 1966 to 1969. The group met in places such as Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, and at their own homes. In 2007 Gloria hosted the group for a few days, getting pleasure in showing them our new house and also taking them to various sites such as Fallingwater. The group consisted of Judy Beechy of Goshen Indiana, Phyllis Weaver Crouch of Peoria, Iowa, Judy Noe Gingerich of Goodlettsville, Tennessee; Cynthia Winegard Peterson of Pella, Iowa; and Lucy Yoder Weber of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

A third group Gloria joined in 2009 was a Scottdale book group which was organized by Becky Halfhill, a high school librarian (think against stereotype, an extraverted librarian) with whom Gloria worked at Connellsville from many years. Her husband was John Halfhill, our Southmoreland superintendent who had retired in about 2010.  Becky also worked for Marty Savanick part-time and was a civic activist about town whether acting on the stage at the Geyer Theater, promoting causes, or running for office. Aside from books, part of the distinction of this group was to provide a kind of safe house for small-town political and social liberals. Politically, our area still carried a strong Democratic Party registration advantage, a legacy of the coal miner and industrial union days, but most of our neighbors were socially conservative. Our then Presidential candidate Barach Obama incorrectly declared in 2008, we were bitter (that’s the inaccurate part), and hanging on to our guns and religion (on that he was accurate). 

I believe she may have joined this group about the same time she dropped out of the Lancaster-based book group which I had been a part of since the mid-eighties. In the mid-80s John A. Lapp sent a letter noting that he, Elvin Kraybill, Don Kraybill and Carl Keener had talked of "developing a group of people who would meet periodically to discuss the great questions of life." He invited us to the first meeting which was to be at the Alice and John Lapp residence, Lapp said "Elvin was mightily moved by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, so we are suggesting that be the focus of the first meeting. Don has volunteered to direct the discussion." Others who attended that first meeting were Merle and Phyllis Good, Urbane and Gwen Peachey, and Emerson and Ruth Lesher. Carl and Gladys Keener soon brought James and Gloria Rosenberger and whoever happened to be the State College pastor at the time.

This is not an attempt to give the full record, as others came and went at various times. The group met twice a year for a half-day including a meal and generally discussed one novel and one non-fiction, often one Mennonite related and one of general interest. As I write this, the group met at the Rosenberger’s house in State College on April 26, 2014, and the two books were David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, and The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and their Secret World War by Stephen Kinzer; surprisingly most of the originals were still in attendance over a quarter century later. Several years ago, Elvin Kraybill probably expressed many of our sentiments in an e-mail when he said “the book group has enabled me to continue long-running discussions in the dorm that were a highlight of my college years, when we explored faith, tradition, ethics, politics and community. With this group, I have read many books I otherwise would have missed.”  

Gloria’s other big project was a mother-daughter pilgrimage, the 500-mile El Camino de Santiago which she and Elizabeth did for a month in the summer of 2011. They started in Roncesvalles in France and walked across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, staying at hostels in the evening. This was an amazing adventure of physical and spiritual endurance and their story to tell. Elizabeth created a large illustrated photo journal book of the walk which she gave to Gloria at Christmas of 2011. I joined them for the last 100 miles, now an outsider trying to appreciate their daily rituals, close bonding and Camino philosophies they had internalized during the month. 1. Each is on her own camino. 2. We are where we are supposed to be. 3. Focus on one day at a time, dear Jesus. Okay, I added the “dear Jesus.” I was very proud of them.

While the women were on the Camino I spent two weeks going to southern Spain to visit Carlos Diaz and Elisa Molina in Seville and then spending several days in Madrid (the Prado never disappoints), and then northwest for a few days with the Luis and Patricia Sarmiento family in Marin, a little seacoast town by Pontevedra. These people were old Venezuelan friends (1982) who had found their way to Spain. The Sarmientos had developed a vigorous Mennonite church in Venezuela and now retired to Spain, and the Diaz family had developed a bookstore business in Seville; both were generous hosts and being with them helped revisit and bring closure to our Venezuela days. During my travels on Spain’s fast trains and comfortable buses, I read Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha until I lost it at a Metro station in Madrid.  

We did other traveling projects in 2011 within the United States. In May (9-24) we spent two weeks managing things at the Menno House in Manhattan while Elizabeth’s friend Rachel Smith was on vacation. The mornings involved taking care of registrations and room changes (maid service). A memorable afternoon was visiting AmeriCore volunteer Peter Koontz’s community garden project in the Bronx, and one evening we went to see one of my favorite plays, King Lear (with Derek Jacobi) at the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) theater: “Pray, do not mock me./I am a very foolish fond old man,…/And to deal plainly/I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”

Rachel Smith had some fix-up projects at the 19^th Street house in the Gramercy where you can find all kinds of little shops: hardwares, dry cleaning, grocers, bakers, and cobblers, a veritable 1950s small-town America thriving in post-modern New York City. Meanwhile in our own Kingview neighborhood of Scottdale our last cobbler Harry Echard died on February 7, 2011; a year earlier we had taken him some fresh eggs on his 90^th birthday. Alas, a year later our last Everson cobbler closed his shop, so I suppose we’ll need to go to New York City for shoe repair. Thank you, Wal-Mart.

We also had time for long walks around lower Manhattan, including walking across Brooklyn Bridge. Heading uptown we often passed Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church at the corner of 5^th and 29^th Street. Both my mother Mattie and Gloria’s mother Berdella were regular readers of Peale’s Guideposts magazine of positive and hopeful stories. Peale died in 1998, but then I thought I saw him resurrected on September 9, 2011, when I went to see the televangelists Joel and Victoria Osteen at the Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh. The power of positive thinking seemed alive and well in America. Meanwhile, as I post this, I note that one of Peale’s parishioners the businessman Donald Trump is running for President of the United States.

The Fall had a melancholy note with the death of my cousin Rob R. Schlabach on October 30 in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; cause of death was an aggressive cancerous tumor in his head. Rob was a minister in the Berlin Northeast District and a leader in the Ohio Sustainable Agriculture movement, especially in the Holmes County area. Of all my Amish cousins, we knew Rob the best, no doubt for having been neighbors of Gloria’s family and his father Roy was my mother Mattie’s favorite relative. In his younger years Rob wrote a moral tract against bed courtship Ein Risz in der Mauer (1980), and he also helped to write an Amish catechism-type booklet called The Truth and Work (1983).

I had a good visit with Rob in September when he came back from his first cancer treatment in Honduras. I suppose it’s one of the contradictions of human existence that Rob who was surrounded by close family, neighbors and church all his life allowed himself to be taken in by a fraudulent out-of-state doctor and died quite isolated in a foreign country. Anyway, Rob’s body was returned, given a church burial, and is now in our Creator's good care. Gott lobe und danke.

We did other family expeditions that year with a summer week (August 6-13) at Lakeside along Lake Erie. Paul and Carol and their families spend every summer there, so an enjoyable part of their lives. Then in the fall, October 20-24, we went to visit Sarah and Kevin Kehrberg in Asheville, North Carolina, where they had settled. What a fascinating region with the many Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward Angel) sites, but the greatest joy was to see our writer niece, her musician scholar husband, and their curious children in their home, church, and cultural setting.

Between Christmas and New Year, Gloria, Elizabeth and I took our own curious grandchildren Sadie and Aaron on a train trip to Washington D.C. The Capital Limited makes a direct run from Connellsville to Union Station where we stayed on the Mall. We visited many of the capital sites, but the kids had been reading Abraham Lincoln stories, so the tour of the Ford’s Theatre stood out. On the final morning, our little grandson Aaron pulled some money out of his pocket and offered to buy the breakfast for all of us; I knew some transitions were coming on.      

Most of this chapter comes from my 2011 “Items of Interest”personal file, datebook, and memory. The Lancaster book group origins come from a John A. Lapp letter, October 14, 1987; Elvin Kraybill’s comments come from an e-mail to the group October 13, 2012. The King Lear lines are from Act IV, Scene vii. The Rob R. Schlabach paragraph is from a longer e-mail I sent to the family 10/30/11.