When I finally came home a couple of weeks ago after a summer of working 60-plus hours a week, I wanted nothing more than to lie around my backyard, reading trashy magazines and catching up on all the summer sun I’d missed out on at my office job. The first morning back, I emerged from my bed around noon, ready to get down to the serious business of lounging. I opened the curtain to check the cloud cover, and was startled to see a bearded man dressed in old-fashioned work pants, a white shirt, black suspenders, and a natty black cap cheerily perched atop a ladder outside the window. There went my lounging plans, literally, out the window.
The man I was so surprised by was a housepainter who, every summer for the past ten or so years, has made the hour-and-a-half trek from Amish country to our suburb to paint our home and many of the others in the neighborhood. I’m not sure who “discovered” the Amish as housepainters, but it quickly became very trendy to hire them—not only are their rates fairly cheap, but I also suspect many of the suburban women felt it lent an air of rustic authenticity to their property.
The Amish, of course, are famously austere. Their religion forbids them from using electricity or any sort of modern convenience in their homes. Our painters have to hire a driver to take them to their jobs, and they routinely smell to high heaven of kerosene, which is used to fire up their stoves back home. They have a special dispensation from the United States government allowing them to stop attending school after the eighth grade, so in years past our painter has brought his teenage sons to help with the work. This time, though, our paint job coincided with their harvest, and so the young and strong stayed back in Amish country to reap the crop yield.
In short, everything the Amish stand for is diametrically opposed to what I’d had planned for the week. There was no way I was going to lazily lie around poolside, reading Cosmo and generally embodying everything that’s gone wrong with American culture while these men who’d risen before the crack of dawn to milk their cows slaved away in ninety degree heat. So, shamefaced, I took my schlubby lounging inside. But as the week wore on, I realized that perhaps even the Amish weren’t as impervious to the seduction of modernity as one might think.
Our Amish have always been on the edgy side of their sect—they used to borrow our microwave and radio and played really awkward-looking basketball on their lunch-break, shouting what I can only imagine was trash-talk at one another in High German—but this year did seem a bit beyond the pale. Our painter, for instance, had begun expressing approval with a James Dean-like smoldering utterance of “Cool.” The big tip-off was when, to celebrate a birthday, they took the afternoon off for a nice round of golf and lunch at Ruby Tuesday’s. Now, if I were to risk being shunned by my ultra-religious community for dabbling in sinful American culture, I’d want to do it for something a little better than the least thrilling sport around and a meal at a chain restaurant, but to each his own.
One day, the painter brought his teenage sons to swim in our pool. Since they didn’t really actually know how to swim, they grabbed every single flotation device we had in the garage, bobbing around with goggles and an Aqua-jogger cinched around their midsections, and played surfer with a boogie board and even a floral plastic chair cushion they’d mistaken for a float. Next, my mom told me that she’d gone down to our basement to find them perusing Sports Illustrated, shooting pool, and watching the soaps while they waited to be paid. I began to feel a little bit better about my lifestyle.
My mother’s theory on our Amish is that they’ve been shunned—she thought the clincher was that they had begun using an electric heat gun in their work. She was genuinely worried about this possibility, since she’s grown attached to them over the years. They bring her fresh produce from the farm, and, she says, they are among the most “clean, honest, and sober” men she’s ever met (I think she’s got a little crush. Must be the sideburns).
I think, though, that they’ve just gotten progressively more bold in their tiny little rebellions, away from the watching eyes of their neighbors. Nothing they’ve done has really taken anything away from their convictions in the big picture—they still go home every night to light their kerosene stoves and retire at sunset. They are a reminder of what we once were and might have been, had the famed Protestant work ethic focused its energies a little differently. Maybe that’s why Midwesterners are so embracing of this strange and gentle sect living in our midst, and why they are so tolerant of us, the secular Americans who fly in the face of their every precept.
Perhaps we both secretly think our particular way of living could do with just a bit of leavening from the other end of the spectrum. Rather than lounging around poolside, I organized, did crosswords, ran, saw old friends—the Amish guilted me into being at least marginally more productive. But still, if I’d sat around with a sunhat and a copy of Us Weekly, I don’t know if they’d have judged—they might have come by and asked me, in accented tones and pulling at their grizzled beards, what that crazy K-Fed is up to now.
