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. 

2010 Frida and Diego

2010   Frida and Diego. Community of Latin American and Caribbean countries, a Mexico visit, Hugo Chavez, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Leon Trotsky, Ricardo and Yanet Ochoa, Elizabeth and Mennonite Central Committee Mexico, Ocean City, New Jersey; grand parenting, Gloria, Sadie, Four bothers biking Pittsburgh to Washington D.C.,  Naomi Moon (1924-2010), Charles (Chuck) Fausold (1929 -2010).  

In February of 2010, the leaders of the Latin American and Caribbean countries gathered in Mexico to form a community somewhat parallel to the Organization of American States (OAS) without the USA and Canada. The event hardly made the news at all in North America, but we were in Mexico visiting Elizabeth so we watched the developments. It seemed overdue for the Latin American nations to have a forum for their own unique issues and to consult and work together. The new group would include Cuba long excluded from the OAS by the USA.

The ideal of a Simon Bolivar-envisioned united Latin American was championed by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president. At the meeting, Chavez also personified some the difficulties when he almost came to blows with his neighbor the Colombian President Álvaro Uribe. The Colombian apparently challenged Chavez calling him a coward to which Chavez responded "Go to Hell!" Chavez saw a community south of the Rio Grande River which would be patterned after his Venezuelan socialism which he borrowed from Cuba. Some of the participants such as the Brazilian president Luiz Inacio LuLa made a ceremonial visit to Fidel Castro after the summit.

I am writing twenty-five years after the Soviet workers model ended, and yet the thoughts of these 20^th century ideas and personalities still reverberated especially in Latin America as Elizabeth guided Gloria and me around Mexico. It was a Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky tour. Elizabeth said we were on the trail of Harrison Shepherd, the character in The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver which we had all read. Kingsolver’s Shepherd was Mister Everyman mixing plaster for Diego Rivera’s murals and cooking for Rivera and Frida Kahlo with whom he became a life-long confidante. He even served as a secretary to the Russian exile Leon Trotsky,

There in the Belles Artes museum is the large mural “Man at the Crossroads” with Vladimir Lenin which the Rockefellers earlier rejected, and many other murals at the National Palace, all with virtuous workers of the world and greedy capitalists of the dollar. I think the first Rivera painting which caught my attention was “Liberation of the Peon” at Philadelphia Museum of Art in the early 70s, during my radical worker days. The innocent brown body being released and the four loyal horses; I never forgot it. We looked up Diego Rivera’s murals in San Francisco and Detroit when we visited those cities. I think my life-long fascination was Rivera’s popular honoring of the original and indigenous Mexicans in paradoxical combinations of capitalist tastes, proletariat dogma and artistic achievement.

We went to The Blue House now museum of Frida Kahlo who was an amazing story of an artist who turned her pain into productive energy and art. All this and married to the impossible Diego Rivera. Frida Kahlo caught our daughter Elizabeth’s imagination, and her own house at Regent Square has many Frida Kahlo images and reproductions; she is the one to tell the Kahlo story. Nearby was the house and garden where Leon Trotsky lived his last years in exile; in the sixties we marched with Trotskyites with calls for peace and justice. I think his appeal was in part the incongruity of an European intellectual type having once served as military head of the young Bolshevik regime in the 1920s. There is something charming to visit the Coyoacán courtyard where Trotsky tended rabbits and chickens (the cages were still there) and his large library behind a high fortressed wall which still could not protect him from Joseph Stalin’s henchmen. They finally killed him with an ice pick.

We got another view of Hugo Chavez and Venezuela when our old friend Ricardo Ochoa and his wife Yanet and children Daniel, Adriana, Erica visited us the last week of July 2009. We took in  white water at Ohiopyle and three rivers Pittsburgh, then picked up Elizabeth and headed for Ohio hosted by children Hannah and Anson, brother Paul and Carol, cousin Rob and Mary Schlabach. I remember visiting with Rob’s children about their alternative farming operation in which James asked Ricardo: “What’s wrong with your president?” One evening we went to see the Cleveland Indians and the Detroit Tigers with their Venezuelan players: Miguel Cabrera and Magglio José Ordóñez. The Ochoas had brought along a Venezuelan flag and waved it to outfielder Ordóñez who I later found out was a Chavista supporter.

Ricardo and Yanet were an interesting combination because he worked as a government economist and she as a Procter and Gamble executive. I had the impression that both stayed under the political radar and visited the states quite often, Ricardo for baseball and Yanet for business. But what I remember most was one evening when Hannah and Anson and our grandchildren built a bonfire and we sang camp and Christian folk songs. It was our common faith which had brought us together initially in the early 80s and was still the binding chord of our relationships. Hugo Chavez died March 5, 2013.

Elizabeth was in Mexico from August 2009 to August 2010, a year of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) service, helping out in administrative leadership while one of the country directors was having a baby. I loved our visit to the Bruce and Jamie Friesen-Pankratz family who went native and were working in public education, development, and latrines in a very rural barrio Zacango near Olinolá. One could say much more about MCC’s projects there, but Elizabeth told it at “Mexico Missives” http://lizannemiller.blogspot.com   In Pittsburgh, she had lived in a number of apartments; then she bought a house in Regent Square in April 2008. It was near the Parkway East, hence happily for us not far to visit. One of her first projects was to tear out the thick carpeting and we helped sand and seal the old floors, and then the next year after our week at Ocean City, New Jersey (August 2009),  Elizabeth took off for Mexico.

Ocean City (1980) still had some cachet for us, even if it was the most humble boardwalk along the Atlantic shore embracing little kids, ice cream, mini golf, bird sanctuaries, and Ferris wheels. Maybe it was the influence of the large gospel tabernacle which was still there (often full on Sundays and where we might catch Tony Campolo). We took our extended family vacation there and took a family photo before Elizabeth left the country and granddaughter Sadie to school. Gloria and I took care of Elizabeth’s house and the renters while she was gone. Eizabeth had projects outlined for that year such as sanding the upstairs wood floors, and painting. We enjoyed being her Regent Square house caretakers. Nice little art movie house across the street too.  

Meanwhile, there was grand parenting and here Gloria was clearly the leader. She and Sadie had a special bonding early on, and each Summer Sadie came down for a week and she and Gloria did all kinds of activities. Gloria loved sun bathing and Sadie played in the little plastic pool under the umbrella. Sadie had a theatrical sense and sometimes wore her grandmother’s bikini swimsuits. They also went over to Tom and Margaret Miedels' big pool. Sadie’s favorite indoor activity was playing school and soon she was the teacher with lesson preparations, assignments and three students--or mainly one. Aaron soon left for the nearby computer, Levi was expelled for bad behavior, and Gloria her favorite pupil was given good assignments and continued her straight-A student career with Sadie.

In the fall of 2009, I assembled a Little Cottages playhouse for the children which was a nice break from publishing and connecting with extended family. My uncle Abe Schlabach helped with the roof and gave me fascinating explanations on biblical prophecy. By January we spent a week with Sadie and Aaron while Hannah and Anson went south on vacation. On September 15, 2010 my birthday, Hannah, Sadie, Aaron and I went to the Wayne County Fair and took in the Home Talent Colt races and some small-time wagering. Sadie had an art exhibit in the education section of the Fair.

About this same time, Gloria and I bought bikes and took up some biking on the Allegheny Passage which runs through Connellsville, going from Pittsburgh to Cumberland in day trips. Other Millers, especially David, were also doing some biking; in fact one Saturday, most of us brothers and sisters and the Miedels biked down the Holmes County trail from Fredricksburg to Millersburg and back; the trail runs right through our old Holmesville childhood farm, now owned by the Smith family.

Then David got fever to do the complete Allegheny Passage and C&O Towpath from Pittsburgh to Washington DC, and we brothers joined him. The week of August 29 to September 4, 2010 David started at Pittsburgh, I joined him at Connellsville, and Paul and Roy joined us at Deal (near Meyersdale) which is also near the Continental Divide. We coasted down to Cumberland, Maryland, and from there on to Washington. One of us drove the trailer vehicle with bike racks, all joining for dinners and discussions in the evening and ending on the Washington Mall. We spent the night at the International Guest House where David and Brenda had been directors during their voluntary service days in 1969-70. It was good to be together for a week, but no one was urging to extend the time. We were getting old.

I was now old enough to have outlived some of my mentors and neighbors. Naomi Graybill Moon died on February 9, 2010. At the funeral, her husband Ivan (1917-2011) was already in lost memory land and died the next year too. We and the Moons had often gone to peace meetings in Pittsburgh together in the 70s, and we owned a TroyBilt tractor together for many years. Naomi was a friend to any and all, especially the ones with disadvantages, the poor kids of Kingview. She would come with them to school board meetings when they were in trouble. For many years, she was a proofreader at Mennonite Publishing House and wore the traditional Mennonite head covering every day.

Then Charles (Chuck) Fausold died on August 4, 2010, and he was a kind of model, somewhat on the nature of H. Ralph Hernley for me—also a Christian but a Methodist. For a decade we played tennis together on men’s night at Hidden Valley, and he had been Gloria’s principal at the Connellsville High School. He often walked his dog Star by our house in the summer evenings and we visited. But I was also getting older. On July 11, 2010, I led worship at Scottdale Mennonite for the last time. I forgot things, and Gloria said I talked too much. I knew she was right.  

The beginning section on Latin American came from newspaper and TV reports while we were visiting daughter Elizabeth in Mexico in February 2010.  Most of this chapter comes from memory and from my personal files, datebook, and journal of 2010. 

2009 John Updike (1932-2009)

2009   John Updike (1932 - 2009). “Forty Years of ‘Peacenjustice,’” Mennonite Central Committee, Ervin Stutzman’s Eastern Mennonite University consultation, Polyglossia editors, Chris Huebner, Mennonite Publishing “workers”; Gloria leaves Spanish teaching. 

Late at night on January 26, 2009, I was reading The Widows of Eastwick. The next day I learned that the author of that novel, John Updike, had died. His death felt like losing a college friend with whom one made an annual contact, a good neighbor who came to see us once a year. Daughter Elizabeth had bought me a copy of Widows for Christmas. An Updike book was often a Christmas gift, an easy choice, since he turned out at least one book a year—all told more than 50 books, which included 28 novels; other titles included 13 short stories, 10 poetry volumes and assorted collections of his prose. 

Part of Updike’s appeal was that we aged with him. I read him first as a Malone College student in the 1960s when he appeared on the cover of Time. He wrote of high school romance, young married life choices, mid-life angst and the regrets of older years. His most awarded four books, the Rabbit novels, have Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom dying at age 57. Death was never far away, even in youth.  Religiously, Updike was appealing because he also had the hope of the Resurrection. A confessing Christian, he imbibed the Lutheranism of his youth, read the theologian Karl Barth as a young adult and remained an orthodox C.S. Lewis-type Christian to the end. Although he seldom wrote extensively of his Christian beliefs, his characters and narrators were often religiously articulate.

Updike wrote of sex, and many of us got started on Updike because he was one of the most explicit writers of sex of our generation; he was the Hebraic Song of Songs poet for Baby Boomers. I read his short stories before reading Couples, that novel of the free-wheeling, loving and angry ’60s. During this year 2009, Gloria and I did our Labor Day US Open Tennis weekend, and one night went to see the Broadway revival of “Hair” at the Al Hirschfield Theater, the musical of sixties’ romantic freedom and youthful rage. I found myself sitting beside a mid-western 14-year-old and her grandmother; she sang along to “Hair’s” lyrics as sweetly as though we were at “The Sound of Music.” I felt old and sad and remembered the tragedies of Vietnam and Updike’s families.  

But I liked Updike and his families. In an epoch when writers and our imagination became fascinated with the minority experience—talented Jews, exotic immigrants, angry Blacks and Latin American revolutionaries—Updike found inspiration in our suburbs, in the domesticity of the split-level house. While most writers pursued the heroic and the absurd, Updike described the seasons, such as the fall, in The Witches of Eastwick: “There comes a blessed moment in the year when we know we are mowing the lawn for the last time.” People of the Pennsylvania farmlands, where he was born in 1932, and the Northeastern suburbs, where he lived most of his adult life, populate his stories.

John Updike seemed like one of our friendly non-Mennonite neighbors, having grown up in Shillington, south of Reading. In his Pennsylvania stories one might meet a Mennonite doctor or visit a conservative Mennonite-owned store. Sometimes Amish appeared in a story or poem. Updike described more than he disturbed. Although vaguely liberal in his politics, he never seemed to need to carry his politics on his sleeve, much as he did not do this regarding his Christian beliefs. He remained civil, decent, ironic and mannerly.

If Updike and we sinned, he seemed to regret it and went to church every Sunday; a generous God of grace was still around. One could think of worse neighbors. In fact, I was thinking of my own neighbors, my neighbors in western Pennsylvania, in the church and in the world. Hence, I wrote a goodbye to my Mennonite institutional neighbors with a piece called “Forty Years of ‘Peacenjustice.’” I think it grew out seeing a draft of what Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) called New Wineskins in which the term was all over the pages, a tired cliché. On May 14, I sent MCC a note noting peace and justice had been around for about four decades (hardly new) and many constituents were still using sturdy terms like generosity, service, compassion and charity.

Another event which elicited the reflection was attending a peace consultation with the seminary dean Ervin Stutzman at Eastern Mennonite University and reflecting on the quiet conservative exodus among the Mennonites during my lifetime. Stutzman had assembled an unusual mix of conference leaders, traditional nonresistants, mediation experts, academic theologians and political pacifists. I drove down to Harrisonburg, Virginia, with John Roth and some Goshen, Indiana, people.

I was especially encouraged to see people such as the theologian Peter Dula who stayed away from most of our meetings because of a new baby. I suppose more accurately, I was encouraged not to see him; I liked his priorities. Then I met a professional mediation trainer Lisa Schirch who had gained some fame or perhaps notoriety for giving sessions at the Pentagon. It seemed to me that mediation arts were a valid learning skill whether in business, the military, the streets or the church. And finally I met my old one-time inquisitor David Brubaker who reminded me of our earlier meeting in the second floor of the Kingview Mennonite meetinghouse when I was being investigated (2003). He smiled and said that it was good to meet under happier circumstances.

Ervin Stutzman was finishing his book entitled From Nonresistance to Justice: The Transformation of Mennonite Church Peace Rhetoric, 1908-2008. But unlike many of the triumphal approaches on this journey from biblical nonresistance to political justice (as in left-wing politics), Stutzman explored the losses as well as the gains of this movement. It reminded me that in my years of publishing there were few manuscripts which gave an argument for biblical nonresistance or which noted the paradoxes and dilemmas of the modern pacifism and justice project.

So I thought, until I met some young writers such as the newly babied (above) Peter Dula, the Canadian Chris Huebner, and the ex-Holmes Countian Peter Blum, all of whom were reflecting on John Howard Yoder in what I discovered was a nuanced approach to pacifism, theology, politics and culture. I invited Huebner to begin a Herald Press series which he called Polyglossia. The editors were Huebner, Dula, Jennifer Graber, and Alexander Sider, all of whom had studied at Duke University with Stanley Hauerwas. Graber, then teaching at the College of Wooster, also turned up as a great song leader at the Oak Grove congregation where daughter Hannah and Anson Miedel attended.

Our annual meetings--such as they were-- convened at informal settings during the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature. No minutes were taken but clearly Huebner was the leader of the group and would work with me on what should be published beginning with his own first book which we called A Precarious Peace.

Huebner looked like a unwashed character in a Mark Twain novel and often gave several contradictory points of view, assuming no center and universals. Still, when he was finished, you had the feeling that he was sane and could be trusted as an orthodox Christian, a good Mennonite and a pacifist. He would talk or write in long sentences and even longer paragraphs with many modifying and qualifying descriptors. But what redeemed him was a total lack of pretense and little interest in the polemical and political posturing so endemic to people who write in this field.

I edited his first book relying on my old expository and journalistic basics of shortening words, sentences and paragraphs. I don’t think he appreciated it, but I took some consolation in A Precarious Peace being the best book in the series. The Polyglossia series went through several titles and seems to have ended after my tenure, no doubt helped along by a new round of revelations regarding John Howard Yoder’s bizarre sexual appetites and predatory behavior.   

My other neighbors were near at hand in western Pennsylvania sitting around a heavy circular table in the library of the Mennonite Publishing House. If Ron Rempel of Waterloo, Ontario, and Phil Bontrager of Archbold, Ohio, took good care of publishing at the executive and board level, and they did, I had a new appreciation for the “workers” (as we used to say) at ten o’clock each morning when I joined them for coffee. Sandra Johnson, Betty Dzambo, Barbra Barozzina, among others discussed publishing and also our families, our pets, and the TV show “Dancing with the Stars,” in other words the goings on about Scottdale. They reminded me that life is lived quite close to the bone, and I learned why after forty years, Gloria and I were living in western Pennsylvania; it was our base.  

I had always thought we lived here for professional and church reasons, because of this historical accident placing Mennonite Publishing House in Scottdale, Pennsylvania. Now, I recognized that we also lived here because we enjoyed it, the community, the people, the churches, the neighbors, the schools and the land. It was home to us and our children. I ordered 50 Barred Rock chicks, and Gloria planted a big garden. Our old mentors for local involvement H. Ralph Hernley had died March 15, 2008, and Elizabeth Sieber Hernley had long since moved to Indiana. But their memory lived on, at least for me. Several friends suggested I run for the school board again which I did and won an election.

The same summer I left publishing, Gloria left Connellsville High School after 26 years. Her  Spanish honors students gave her a bouquet of flowers according to the local paper which had the story and a photo of the students. There was no photo of Gloria, and her quiet departure was all Gloria, needing little ceremony or outward affirmation. She had skipped her graduation ceremonies from Seton Hill College, as well as her graduation from the University of Pittsburgh (MA). She attended no parting teacher events. It was summer time, flowers, sunshine, grand children, and even a new job, but that can come in 2010.

Most of this comes from my personal files and journal of 2009. The section on John Updike is from “John Updike: A Good Neighbor,” which appeared in The Mennonite (April 21, 2009, 30). “Forty Years of ‘Peacenjustice’” appeared  webhttp://www.themennonite.org/issues/12-21/articles/WEB_EXCLUSIVE_Forty_years_of_Peace_and_Justice   Blogger Tim Nafziger wrote a  response: “Miller’s Misnomer.”  Gloria’s departure from Connellsville High School was noted in the Connellsville Daily Courier (June 9, 2009, A6).  

2008 Leaving Mennonite Publishing

2008  Leaving Mennonite Publishing. Leadership Retreats. Frederick Arnold, Protestant Church Owned Publishers (PCPA), Mattie’s 90^th birthday, Billy Graham, political melodrama, visiting Puerto Rico, Rodriguez family.

At the beginning of each year, our executive director Ron Rempel led a Mennonite Publishing Network (MPN) leadership retreat to plan for the coming year.  In 2008, January 15-18, I traveled to Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, with Frederick Arnold (pseudonym); I think we picked up Terry Graber from Kansas at the Buffalo Airport. I hoped I would never have to spend several hours in the same car with Arnold, and when I returned I wrote that one of my annual goals was to get along with Arnold. To no avail; the next year 2009 I got sick of the idea of needing to travel with Arnold and did not attend at all, so you can see where this narrative is heading.

But let’s start with the positive attributes Frederick Arnold brought to Scottdale and Mennonite Publishing when he arrived in 2007 as our director of finance and operations. He and his wife brought our church a large family of six children mainly college-age. They were Anabaptists by conviction, Arnold having grown up in a military family in the Pittsburgh area. The Arnolds joined the Bruderhof with whom they had lived for a number of years and then expelled overnight.

Arnold was high tech savvy and good on software programs and soon was able to arrange our financial figures in many categories; he wanted to bring us totally into the digital age. At the same time he brought a more-with-less alternative and sustainable approach. He biked to work and was collecting barrels of old oil and trying to recycle it in the basement of the Publishing House. There were plastic tubes and barrels all around, and I remember the staff around the coffee table speculating that he may blow up the place.

In truth, I think he did want to blow up the place in a manner of speaking, and I did not want to be around when it happened. My 2008 journal is filled with notes that I hoped to leave MPN, mainly because of the personality of Frederick Arnold. He may have left the Bruderhof, but the Bruderhof’s cultish mentality did not leave him. He reminded me of hearing Christoph Arnold on the KDKA radio in the late 90s when he raved at America (as in Amerika) and gave an enthusiastic endorsement of Mumia Abu-Jamal in a nearby Greene County prison, convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer.

I knew enough of exiled Bruderhof families that I should not have held that against someone, but his publishing learnings were largely from the Bruderhof and the Plough label.  He brought Bruderhof aesthetics, secrecy, and a balding head, often giving me the creepy feeling of an Anabaptist Vladimir Lenin. Even his dexterity with numbers could be used in assigning whatever overhead figures to whatever project, a long established art among Scottdale publishing financiers. His family set up a church co-op which seemed out of a playbook from several decades ago, as though we were not living in an age of Fresh Foods, Trader Joes, community supported agriculture (CSA), and Farm Markets.

But a pause, dear reader, I’m going off the memoir guidebook which should mainly be about me. Maybe the problem was closer to home, not Arnold but Miller. If he was a the son of the Bruderhof maybe I was still a wannabe Amish bishop. We both needed more space. In an earlier life, I would have tried harder to get along with an Arnold, but I was also tired of Mennonite publishing. Many of the projects, I had worked on for the past decade were completed, and the new project of doing a 21^st century living sustainable book in the spirit of Living More with Less was not going well. The main commissioned author Mark Beach had moved to Switzerland and the co-author Mary Beth Lind seemed to have West Virginia localism on her mind. The Yoder-themed Polyglossia books were moving along, but could be carried out without me. The awareness of Yoder's personal failings were still a few years distant. 

Our publisher Ron Rempel wanted to consolidate trade books and congregational publishing into one unit, and that would work better with a new editorial director. He had a good successor in the wings with Amy Gingerich. The digital revolution had changed much of publishing, and although I worked along with it, my default inclination was paper and book. I remember when the Christian publishers at ECPA used to speculate that book lovers and buyers would become specialty or niche markets on a level with antiquarians, bluegrass or opera lovers. I also felt that my leaving would make it easier for the company to move away from Scottdale which it needed to do. And who would come along and move Mennonite publishing’s 616 Walnut Avenue address to Harrisonburg, Virginia in 2011?  That’s right, Fredrick Arnold, so he did a lot of things right and necessary, even if I did not recognize it at the time.

A trip to the Protestant Church-owned Publishers (PCPA) Annual meeting at Nashville reminded me of how far denominational publishing had moved since my beginnings. In 1971, my first PCPA meeting was at the Greenbrier Hotel with Mervin Miller and Ben Cutrell, both now gone, in the leadership. Cutrell brought in Norman Cousins of Saturday Review as a speaker, the ultimate middle-brow voice of humane letters. This was during the Cold War and we did not know that the Greenbrier Hotel had a bunker for the United States’ House and Senate members in case of a nuclear attack. Almost four decades later, out numbers greatly reduced by denominational demise, we met in Nashville for a lean day and a half meeting hosted at the United Methodist Publishing House and staying at an economy chain hotel.

In June we had a 90^th birthday celebration for my mother Mattie; there was a lot of music, food, grandkids, great-grandkids, relatives and scrap books. All of Mom’s living brothers and sisters attended: Clara, Melvin, Abe, Katie and Mary. The music was memorable, especially the grandchildren singing Andrew’s compositions; I especially remember those renditions done by the Roth and Kratzer girls. Oddly enough, I remember as much about the tedious planning as the event itself. It exposed our social fault lines or loyalties with Paul and Miriam in one corner and Rhoda and Ruth on the other, and the rest trying to find our way in between. A cluster of cultural, political, and religious commitments would reveal itself in debates of program, invite list, length, and venue.

At its best we had diversity and strong commitments which generally resolved themselves, mainly because our mother Mattie was at the center. As an old debater, I should have enjoyed this, but it was tedious, and usually we avoided these planning debates by simply assigning one brother or sister family on a rotating basis to be in charge of an event such as Christmas. If you didn’t like something, you could wait your turn and then institute the change.

After the 90^th birthday event, Mattie, Rhoda, and Ruth headed out for North Carolina and the sites of the Billy Graham enterprise. Mom was about the same age as the evangelist Graham and his wife Ruth and considered herself a friend and a peer. She watched his programs weekly on TV, read books by or about the family, talking about the Grahams as if they were next of kin. Her love made it easy to buy birthday and Christmas gifts for Mattie; I would give her a Graham book or biography, always appreciated.

I’m not sure when my mother got this fixation with Graham, but I remember when it came to an abrupt end. Mattie became politicized in 2008 when the presidential candidate Barack Obama and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin ran for office on opposing sides. Graham’s son Franklin supported Palin, and that move ended my mother’s support of the Grahams; she was literally crying real tears over Barack Obama. I was totally flummoxed by my mother’s late-in-life political melodrama. Earlier she had shown no interest in national politics. I suspect Mattie’s conversion was largely the influence of Roy, Ruth and Rhoda who had enthusiastically taken up various left-wing political causes with Barach Obama the political messiah. Our mother did not want to be left behind.  

During the summer of 2008 we did our own version of a 40^th anniversary vacation pilgrimage to Puerto Rico. We visited Puerto Rico a number of times since that first time in 1968, but this time seemed to have some closure. Marjorie Schantz Martin, our old nurse friend had died, the Colons (Amalio and Elba) were long since gone, and on November 10, 2007, I attended the funeral of Lester T. Hershey, longtime missionary to Puerto Rico, now living in Pinto, Maryland. Gloria and I stayed at the Melia Hotel on the northern shore near Luquillo beach, getting exercise and sunshine. I read Michael Ignatieff”s A Life of Isaiah Berlin, whose Tolstoy-based essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” influenced me since the early seventies.

On Sunday we got up early and drove out to the middle of the island to the La Plata church where we heard an inspiring sermon by Samuel Lassus on being carried on eagle’s wings. Who should we meet but Marjorie Schantz’s old friends Fidel and Patricia Santiago and their son Rolando, now the Mennonite Central Committee USA director. Also we met Axia (I don’t recall her last name) but she was a good friend to our daughter Elizabeth when she helped out at the Betania School one summer.

In the afternoon we went to Botijas and visited our old schools at Orocovis and Bauta Arriba. The Rodriguez (Alicia and Gamaliel) extended family entertained us for lunch; Alicia had a good husband and family, as well as a good business of selling birthday and anniversary cakes all over the barrio, a legacy of Gloria’s voluntary service days when she was the community cake baker. Aside from the cake business, and more important, the Rodriguez family also gave our voluntary service unit the credit for bringing the Christian gospel and health to the barrio.

Actually, the barrio did look good with brightly painted buildings, new houses, good roads and small-scale agriculture. There was a recreation building where the ball field used to be and an attractive little Mennonite church building. Still, I had the feeling that the spiritual as well as material progress may have been as much in spite of us as because of us. They were all very sympathetic upon hearing of Jakob’s death, and Gamaliel sent us a two-page letter afterwards giving a biblical explanation of why we might meet the Hebrew King Saul in heaven not in hell. Que Dios bendiga.  

Most of this chapter comes from memory and from my journal and files of the year 2008.  

2007 Scottdale Mennonite

2007  Scottdale Mennonite church merger, Charles Shenk and pastors, showing up, the old Kingview, Lawrence O. Gainey,  Gene Herr,  a spa weekend, natural cures, The Met’s “War and Peace.”

During my life-time, the two Mennonite congregations and Mennonite publishing (MPH) were closely related at Scottdale, and when the 2002 publishing melt-down occurred with down-sizing, the churches, especially the pastors and elders, also felt the pain. Members had lost their jobs and the retirees some benefits. Meanwhile, retired workers moved to other states and regions, reducing church attendance.

At the Kingview congregation attendance sometimes dipped to 50 which became problematic for congregational singing and offering programs such as Sunday school, and the Scottdale congregation had similar issues. One of the most frequent questions I had during those years was how is it going in the local church? My answer was always, surprisingly well. By 2007, the two congregations had merged into one Scottdale Mennonite Church, and had moved to becoming a community-based rather than an MPH institutional-based congregation.

I’ll explain. The biggest surprise was the fairly easy church merger, given that small congregations which refuse to merge are the norm here in Western Pennsylvania whether many little Methodist meetings in the Scottdale area or Mennonite congregations in Johnstown. Although a few members wanted to keep small separate congregations and move to lay and volunteer leadership, very soon a consensus developed to join the two congregations, the only question being which meetinghouse and choosing the leadership. We alternated in meeting at one location and then the other for several years, and decided to meet at the Scottdale what was often called Market Street.

This decision was probably based on the Scottdale congregation bringing slightly more members to the vote than Kingview, but a decision had to be made and we only lost a few members in the process. The biggest loss during the merger was my friend Winifred Erb Paul, an elderly and strong-willed grandmother who became alienated during the process, hence we also lost her long-suffering husband Milford and her children.     

In any case, by 2007 there was one Scottdale congregation, good pastoral leadership with Conrad and Donna Mast, a regular Sunday morning attendance of about 100, strong congregational singing and regular Sunday school, worship and outreach. In a Christian confessional sense, one gives all the gratefulness to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. In a historical sense, one gives much of the credit to the leadership during our publishing crisis, decline and final closing. During the crisis Charles Shenk, former director of the Provident bookstores and business leader in Scottdale, was the pastor of the Scottdale Church and helped the members, standing alongside them with their pain, conflict and suffering, but never entering into a cause of pretending to fix the publishing disaster and losses.

Shenk’s business background gave him credibility in helping congregational members understand that Mennonite Publishing House would need to make painful but appropriate economic decisions. Whether he agreed with MPH decisions or not, he wisely did not use his office to interfere with MPH decisions. He did what all good pastors do, he tried to be a pastor to all his members, both the healthy and the wounded.

Charlie Shenk made another contribution; he was retiring as pastor at Scottdale Mennonite, hence easing any debate of choosing the pastor(s) for the combined congregations. The Kingview pastors Donna and Conrad Mast were chosen, and led the merged congregation toward becoming a more community and regionally-oriented church, no longer institutionally tied to MPH. Conrad had grown up in a congregation in Springfield, Ohio, which had such a mission ethos, and Donna was good as a counselor. Gloria was a member of the church council during these merger talks and her conciliatory attitude was helpful for the merged council to succeed.    

My own role was to stay out of the way because of the publishing pains of 2002 and 2003; I could not be in leadership without being a polarizing figure. I resigned all my congregational positions, except as sexton at the Alte Menist cemetery, thinking the dead would not hold anything against me. Even on the cemetery committee, I remember asking the church office not to list me, so for a few years it was James Lederach, Maynard Brubaker, and “others.” 

By 2005, I accepted taking the junior high Sunday school class which no one wanted to do. But this assignment became an unusual blessing with bright kids such as Grace Weaver and the Don (may he rest in peace) and Jane Rittenhouse daughter Christa. The latter had lost her father, and even though we seldom mentioned it, I always felt we were in a small guild of the surviving wounded that year. It was actually an enjoyable class junior high boys and girls. 

By 2006, I was asked to join the Scottdale Mennonite Church Council for a three-year term, somewhat to my surprise. Time does heal. I had one other project during these years which was to promote an adult Bible study class so that my friend James Lederach could lead and use his scholastic talents. This project ended in failure, however, and Lederach eventually stopped attending our church altogether. I think the main reason I wanted the church to succeed was that I owed so much to it for my family, heritage and even vocation; in short, I’m a confessing Christian and a Mennonite and that means the discipline of church community.

And as a youth, I learned that sometimes the church member’s greatest contribution can be to live Christian, at least try to, for six days and simply show up on Sundays. My goal was now to be a traditional member such as I had seen among the farmers and entrepreneurs in the Pleasant View congregation in Holmes County, Ohio. I always admired these sober-looking men and women who worked hard during the week and then on Sunday came to meeting where they sat (generally on the same bench), sang in tune, said little, and slept often. Meanwhile, a new generation came to Scottdale Mennonite such as the Catholic Saint Vincent professor Chris McMahon who gave stimulating Sunday school Bible lectures which many enjoyed. And women such as Jane Rittenhouse became active as elders, and some young families from the community came.   

The Kingview outreach had been multi-faceted. I went to the Graft-Jacquillard Funeral Home to visit the family of Lawrence O. Gainey who died at age 77 on September 4, 2007. Lawrence Gainey was one of my ties to the old (pre-1970s) Kingview as a mission outreach with Gene Herr as pastor. For years, I would go to Wise’s Restaurant and find Gainey sitting at the bar. Gainey was thin, handsome, and friendly, and invariably, would ask me how Gene Herr (1932-2012) was doing. I had never even met Herr, but no matter to Gainey. Herr had been the high-octane Mennonite denominational youth minister who left town three decades ago. Herr also had a strong faith at work outreach with local people, and he and Gainey had become close friends and stayed in touch.

I believe the only time Gainey attended Kingview was one time when Ivan Moon invited Morning Star, the African-American church, to our men’s prayer breakfast. Gainey had a pension from the Korean War and often had a young child, a nephew or neighborhood kid under his care. Around this time, I met Gene for the first time when he and Mary Herr did a  end-of-career pilgrimage with a Scottdale reception; parents who were young people decades ago showed up with their kids and grandkids; it was quite a tribute to Gene’s ministry.   

For Gloria’s birthday that year, we took a Nemacolin Woodlands weekend for a Thermal Mineral Kur, advertised as the European Spa Experience. It was my first and last visit to this kind of spa. The masseuse whom I somehow imagined might be some German fraulein turned out to be a portly woman from West Virginia, a female Joe Hardy. My greatest desire was to leave about half way through the ordeal. But I didn’t because during the mineral waters, algae, mud, oils, and herbs, and detoxifying, I had heard too much of my masseuse’s sad life story. I had pity on her and even admired her for trying to make a living and support her children.

I’m still quite positive about natural cures like summer swimming in Liz and Ralph Hernley's pond with turtles or Paul Conrad for company. Gloria and I one time visited in the waters at Berkley Springs to good effect, I believe. And I visited a hot springs in Israel (by the Lake Tiberius), and in Peru I had a hot spring on the way up to Machu Picchu. Our son Jakob on the last day of his life had visited the waters and rocks of Youghiogheny River in Connellsville, a bittersweet memory. My biggest natural cures came in my youth, of course, from the waters of the Doughty Creek where our father Andrew took us sometimes, and many warm summer afternoons in the Salt Creek near Holmesville.  

By winter, I was reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace again, and the day after Christmas, Gloria and I went to the Sergei Prokofiev “War and Peace” at the Metropolitan Opera.  Samuel Ramey sang the bass role of the Field Marshall Kutuzov, and Elizabeth and her friend Rachel Smith went along too. Our kids were making major decisions that year; while in New York, Elizabeth was pondering whether to take a long-term Mennonite Central Committee assignment or continue teaching at Mt. Lebanon. Meanwhile, Hannah and Anson and the grandkids moved to Wooster, Ohio.

This chapter comes from my memory and personal files and journal from the period. 

2006 Life Goes On

2006  Life Goes On. Littleton, New Hampshire, Robert Frost, August Wilson's death, Anson and Hannah to Roanoke, Virginia, dizzy spells, holidays with one missing, Super Bowl and Pittsburgh sports, Gloria, breast cancer, female solidarity, Roy’s Honduras project, Bluffton Mennonites Writing conference, Aaron Thomas Miedel born August 9, 2006.

After Jakob’s death, life goes on, and one must tend to the living. I remember that from my brother Paul’s prayer at Jakob’s burial, I suppose a kind of admonition to the living.  Hannah and Anson were moving, I went with Roy to Honduras, Gloria had a bout with breast cancer, grandson Aaron was born, and the Steelers won the Super Bowl.

After Hannah and Anson’s residency was finished in Philadelphia, they headed for Littleton, New Hampshire, where Hannah did a short-term medical assignment in the summer and fall of 2005. Anson was waiting for the appropriate ophthalmology practice to join. Gloria and I went up to see them in October with snow already on the ground and pines and hemlocks all around. One evening we drove up near the Canadian border to see a moose lumbering across an open field. Lumbering is the right verb because we passed traditional lumbering villages and the paper mills still around, but it had the feeling of southwestern Pennsylvania steel towns, the industry had left and only large buildings were still standing.

That Fall was my first travel in this rural New England country-side of fresh snow, small farms, black bears, white clapboard houses, and a Sunday Methodist worship. One afternoon we went to a farmer’s market, most memorable for a North Country folk singer entertaining anyone who would listen.

Another day we went to nearby Franconia to Robert Frost’s farm and home where he lived off and on from 1915 to 1938. It is now turned into a museum and writing school with a walking tour of some of the familiar poems he wrote there such as “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and “Road not Taken.” What was not lost on me was that Frost’s immediate family was plagued by mental illness and death; a son had also ended his life in his 30s.

While we were there, August Wilson died on October 2, 2005, and I remember seeing it on the front page of the Boston Globe and thinking the greatest dramatist since William Shakespeare had died. I loved his plays, and in June of 2006 we saw his penultimate play “Gem of the Ocean” at the Pittsburgh Theater; two years later on October 9, 2008, we went to “Radio Golf.” Both were set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the first in 1904; the latter in 1997; the century and Wilson’s cycle were complete. 

By November Hannah and Anson and Sadie were loading their belongings and moving to Roanoke, Virginia. On the day of the moving I got up and felt dizzy. I tried to stand and walk but felt dizzy so finally I went back to bed. I could not help with the moving which I had regularly done over the years for our children. A good part of my identity is tied to my physical abilities and usefulness, and now I was useless in bed.  After that, for a number of months when I would get up in the mornings or at night, I would get dizzy spells. Our family physicians, my brother Roy and daughter Hannah, were always available but never intrusive.   

Sometimes, in the office, I would get dizzy, and I would lay my head down on the desk for a half hour and then go back to work; other times I would go home. Finally in the summer of 2006, I took a dazed spell on the tennis courts and passed out, and Hannah demanded that I go in to William Weisel, my doctor, for tests, thinking that I was having mini- strokes. I did all this and also took some pills which were prescribed. Then after a year, my dizzy spells went away. I thought it may have been the stress of Jakob’s death and our losses.

After the Roanoke, Virginia, move Hannah was with Carilion Family Medicine in Vinton (“Dr. Miedel is fluent in Spanish”) which turned out to be a good fit. Anson and the Roanoke Eye Care and Surgery group were not; he chose not to join the firm. They had a good church relationship at a university fellowship not far from Virginia Tech with an outstanding pastor Les Horning and his wife Crystal who had done a children’s book for us at Herald Press. On September 24, 2006, the Christiansburg Mennonite Fellowship had a dedication service for our grandchildren Sarah Elizabeth (Sadie) and Aaron Thomas. My mother and the children’s great-grandmother Mattie attended; she flew down for the weekend from the Canton-Akron Airport; I think it was about the last of Mattie’s long-distance trips to our family.

Over the holidays, our immediate family often reflected on the one missing (it would be a re-occurring conversation), but the conversation never went much beyond the immediate family. It may have been that we felt no one would quite understand, that Jakob's life was too complex in his goodness and losses for anyone else to appreciate. I remember several years later, the church asked me to share about our tragedy, but I demurred. It may have been in part that I did  not want his life to be defined mainly by his death. But a decade later, if I were to share, I might reflect on our adjusting to a new reality which we intellectually knew but emotionally did not recognize; I'm indebted to daughters Hannah and Elizabeth for saying this so well. 

Our family and I'm including the extended Andrew and Mattie Miller family always felt we were exceptional (yes, I know every family has and should have an element of this). But now emotionally we knew were were prone all the frailties, terrors, and paradoxes of the human condition. We confessed to being descendants of sturdy Anabaptism in following Jesus, but we also needed the mercy and grace of that same Jesus to carry us through life's tragedies. The theologian Stephen F. Dintamin once wrote an important essay about this theme back in the nineties.   

And then the Steelers. After a bad start, they made a run in the post season, ending in the Super Bowl winning over the Seattle Seahawks on February 5, 2006. It had all the familiar Steeler elements as Jerome Bettis, the affable power back for many seasons, had a homecoming to Detroit where his mother still lived. The wide receiver Randle El threw a trick pass for a touchdown, and Heinz Ward was smiling and consistently making catches and fierce blocks. We were part of a Scottdale Mennonite party at the home of Janice and Daniel Walter near Greensburg. During the Steeler run, I would think of Jakob because of his entertaining commentary and generally inaccurate predictions or descriptions.

The same was true of Pitt Basketball, and Elizabeth got tickets for several games that year (2005-2006) with Aaron Gray, Ronald Ramon, Lavon Kendall and Sam Young (the latter two being pianists). We often went to a game around the holidays when the students were away and good tickets quite accessible on Thanksgiving weekend against Florida State and during Christmas holidays against Dayton. During that summer baseball on June 16, 2006, Michael and Ruth Yoder joined us for  a Pittsburgh and Minnesota game. And there was an annual Indians baseball game as my brother David who had season tickets through Walnut Hills Retirement Community. On my birthday in September, David invited the brothers along;. David often invited family members to join him for games.   

Human mortality and health remained with us during the year when in July Gloria submitted to a routine mammogram, and a spot was discovered on her breast which turned out to be cancerous. I’ll never forget the Sunday Gloria stood up in sharing time in church and asked for prayer. Gloria seldom participated at sharing time, but when the worship was over she was surrounded by a dozen women, a cohort her age standing around her in support. It was as though they all knew what the danger was; they looked like a female herd surrounding a wounded one in total solidarity. Do not enter, their formation seemed to say, in no uncertain terms. We knew, of course, that cancerous cells were not ultimately repelled by female solidarity, but the image and strength of these church women stayed with me for a long time.

On September 7, Gloria checked into the Mount Pleasant Frick Hospital early in the morning, and there was good support as Hannah came up to be with her; Elizabeth came out, I think, and one of our pastors Donna Mast was also there most of the day. By the end of the day, the surgeon thought the cells were removed, and reported that the cancerous cells appeared not to have spread to her arm pits and other parts of the body. I remember when she came home and was sitting on the sofa with Hannah on the one side and little Sadie on the other, both with their arms around here in total solidarity.

It was a year after Jakob’s burial. In some ways Gloria had been the biggest silent sufferer in his death. Meanwhile, she had missed only two days of school teaching during the entire ordeal, and afterwards made monthly trips to the Arnold Palmer Medical Oncology for chemotherapy treatments. By the next spring Gloria was ready to run again in the Susan G. Komen 5-K, and the rest of our family ran too, even extended family came. Her sisters Carla Stutzman and Bonnie and families came down in solidarity. And while Michael and Ruth Yoder lived in Pittsburgh, each Spring Paul and Carol and children with their fleet sons-in-law came down and ran in solidarity with Gloria. A decade later, as  I post this, she is still running every day and playing tennis several times a week.  

Meanwhile, in February I got a call from brother Roy telling me he was getting together a team to go to Honduras to build an addition onto a church several hours from San Pedro Sula. The trip was about half family reunion with sister Rhoda and her son Jonathan along with Ruth’s daughter Sarah Roth and Roy’s daughter Susan. So Millers and the rest were Holmes County friends Roy had recruited. Roy had learned some basic Spanish and loved the rural peasants; this indigenous approach was to eat with local people and have the work all done with nationals and with local hand tools. In addition, there were side excursions to visiting a coffee plant and hiking up a mountain almost at the border with El Salvador. In the evenings, Roy would lead a de-briefing circle where people could express their feelings regarding Honduras living, both the beauty and the poverty. Honduras was economically the poorest country in Central America.

What became clear on the plane and at the airport was that Honduras was visitor and charity friendly (a veritable cottage industry for bilingual Hondurans). Well-meaning American church and civic groups had ready access for short-term volunteer experiences. Aside from these ad hoc groups on the ground one would see vehicles marked “World Vision” or garbage trucks “given by the people of Japan.” I could not help but see a re-creation of my father Andrew Miller (albeit with greater resources and a medical degree) now expanding his Thelma Stoutenheimer’s Southern Ohio mission to Olvidio Flores’ Honduran mission. In fact, it had all the paternalistic elements of hugging the women and children who were grateful to Roy’s generosity which he was trying to pass along to his daughter Susan.

One could only marvel at the apparent confidence Roy had on responding to Honduran poverty and developmental, while NGOs, governments, universities and charities have spent centuries trying to approach the same issues. Our own daughter Elizabeth had a University of Pittsburgh master’s degree in international development, along with several years of international living and service. Still, charity is primarily an amateur project (best done out of love, as the Gospels taught), and I admired Roy and these North Americans for their efforts. Roy’s home community felt the same way about it, and on November 9, 2006, the Holmes County Chamber of Commerce awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award at Walnut Creek’s Carlisle Inn. That same evening, nephew Kent Miller and the Rhodie family also won an award for management of the Comfort Inns at Millersburg and Berlin.

That fall October 28, 2006, I attended a conference at Bluffton University in Ohio called “Mennonites Writing: Beyond Borders” with the intent of giving definition of my marginality to the guild. I presented the paper with the title: “Confessions of Poorly Echoing the Vanished Mennonite Bishop and Offending the Mennonite Artists and their Liberal Friends.” The reflection was a tribute to traditional authority figures and the benign bishops I grew up with among the Holmes County Amish and Mennonites (think Jacob Mast, Harry Stutzman and Roman Stutzman) and a rejoinder to the poets Jeff Gundy and Julia Kasdorf who had accused me of trying to re-institute what they considered the mid-century legalism of the old Mennonites.

I had the impression that the audience in the room was entertained if not in agreement with my stories and views. It was one of the best things I had written in this context since Ben’s Wayne. For the uninitiated, I’m sure these intramural and often sectarian debates the Mennonites were having about their identity were probably a mixture of quaintness, irritation, and even nonsense. Still, that’s the the beauty of being a part of a sectarian group, even a disintegrating one; we find some strength, hope and even humor in our debates.  

By the end of the year, it was our turn to host the whole extended Andrew and Mattie Miller family who came down at Christmas 2006, staying at Laurelville. We spent an evening of doing charades of family history and singing songs and hymns. Around the circle and often on my lap was a little baby boy Aaron Thomas Miedel who was born on August 9, 2006, early in the morning in Roanoke, Virginia.

Aaron’s birth was announced to us by a young raccoon that appeared outside our bedroom door at about three o’clock when I woke up. I later found out that the raccoon appeared about the same time Aaron was born and considered him my messenger, and especially Aaron as only a little lower than the angels. In any case, I thought it quite fitting. His mother Hannah’s birth had been announced by angelic Grey Squirrels in Bowling Green, Ohio (1975). As with all of Hannah’s babies, Aaron was a good natured little boy.  

 Most of this comes from my memory and my personal journals and files of 2006. Stephen F. Dintamin's essay "The Pastoral Significance of the Anabaptist Vision" was widely printed in Mennonite journals but can be accessed at Goshen College's Mennonite Historical Library website: https://www.goshen.edu/mhl/Refocusing/DINTAMAN.htm  
My experience in Honduras appeared in “A Week Among the Hondurans,” The Independent-Observer (March 23, 2006, 9). “Confessions of Poorly Echoing the Vanished Mennonite Bishop and Offending the Mennonite Artists and their Liberal Friends,” unpublished paper given at Mennonites Writing: Beyond Borders Conference, Bluffton University, Bluffton, Ohio, October 28, 2006.