THE AMISH ANSWER

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Clearly, everything wasn't going to be quite as different as I'd anticipated. And somehow that was reassuring. It made this whole new world I had just entered seem less strange.

Indeed, that was one of the main lessons I learned on my visit: Amish people are, well, just people. That may not sound like much of a discovery, but the more I'd read about them, the more I'd learned how different they are from most Americans-how they have deliberately set themselves apart, based on biblical dictums to not be "part of this world," but rather to be a "peculiar people." Once among them, though, I was struck as much by what we shared as by what we didn't.

Hannah greeted me, wearing a plain, blue dress, white devotional cap— and Sears' Velcro sneakers!

Their kids sure acted like mine. When I dropped a bit of meat at the dinner table, 10-year-old Samuel (a cherub-faced scamp) was as quick to crack, "A swing and a miss!" as my own nine-year-old son could ever be. Cute, wire-thin, eight-year-old Katie was as willing to debate who should feed the pet fox as my Jesse is to haggle over feeding our dog. Solemn Marsha, the 13-year-old, could demonstrate the moodiness of adolescent angst as well as any teenager I know. Lovely Ruth, the 18-year-old, though normally calm and peaceful, would argue forcefully with her mom over the best choice of glasses for serving milkshakes at her volleyball party. (A riddle: How does an Amish family fix chocolate milkshakes? By mixing vanilla ice cream, milk and Nestle's Quik . . . with a hand eggbeater!) And the oldest offspring, 20-year-old Jonathan, had a strong hankering to play softball on the first day of haying. (That's how I got the job of loading the wagon.)

The parents, too, were "just plain folk." Hannah had a reputation for spunkiness. Indeed, Amos said that's what first caught his eye: She stuck her tongue out at him. (Hannah: "What was I supposed to do? A bunch of boys I don't know riding by in a car. I was 13!") Amos, meanwhile, showed a particular fondness for food. However, he denied that his love for farm cooking contributed to a slight midriff bulge. "Our good well water has too many calories," he claimed.

The Yoders are all fine, warm people, and I came to value their friendship. The only reason I've perhaps "told stories on them" here in print is to emphasize Amish humanness. Remember such qualities, because, by necessity, the rest of this piece will focus mainly on the differences between their culture and mainstream American society.

Ironically, I was poignantly reminded of those differences the last night of my visit. As a thank—you treat, I took the family out to dinner, escorting them in my Avis sedan to a burger joint in a nearby town. As soon as I entered that restaurant with an Amish family, I felt an electricity of separateness-like a black man on the white side of Selma. Nothing overt, just a feeling in the air. We all pigged out on such delicacies as peanut butter milkshakes and bacon double cheeseburgers (and even ordered a couple of take-out custards for the grandparents back home). Then the waitress brought the check. Or, rather, checks: She gave one to Amos and a separate one to me.

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