I'm on vacation.
Every time I go to Florida to visit the parents, I'm surprised by how fully I had forgotten what inspired me to move far, far away in the first place. It's sort of like what I've heard about childbirth: Your sense memory dictates that you block out the memory of the horror of it all, lest you would never be willing to repeat it, and the species would, at least, fall into disrepair.
On my arrival, we went straight from the airport to their weekly bowling... thing. Picking me up at the airport had caused them to be too late to bowl with their church group, and this meant I already had to come back from a fairly serious social deficit.
But we arrived on time to join the group in heading out for dinner. (4pm. Yes. 4pm.) The group decided on an Amish buffet. Even though I cautioned them that any Amish in Sarasota had surely been run off their Amish communities probably for not cooking as well as they're supposed to.
Fortunately I was wrong. Which is proabably why none of them laughed or even seemed to consider the possibility I was joking. Instead, I'm pretty sure that these Amish people were sent away for doing fabulous things with a relatively liberal food like poached salmon. I have never had such incredible salmon before.
They also make their own ice cream. Kahlua Krunch among them. What the Amish are doing with Kahlua, I cannot imagine. I'm also fairly sure it's not very Amish to spell Krunch with a "K". But these are Sarasota Amish, after all. The radical anarchists of the Amish. These Amish have their own website. Apparently this is okay, but driving cars is still totally a sin. (Which may mean, since I also have no car, plus I have a much crappier web presence, I'm technically a better Amish gal than this group.) I noticed one woman even had her hemline two to three inches above her ankle. So there ya go. Hell in a handbasket. (A handmade Pennsylvania Dutch handbasket, but to hell with it, none the less.)
I also tried to point this out to the church group guy sitting across from me who looked at me as though I were speaking Swedish. Or some other devil-loving language. He was wearing a baseball cap that said "FBI". And in small print beneath it, it read "Fully Baptized In Jesus". Now I'm not one to quibble, but shouldn't it be "FBJ" then? Or "FBIJ" at the very least? Isn't there something keenly wrong about leaving Jesus entirely out of your clever, Jesus-themed hat abbreviation? I mean, it's a hat for Jesus, isn't it? Let's give Jesus his due then. I don't think it makes Jesus very happy if the best amusing Jesus-themed hat abbreviation you can come up with is FBI, and Jesus doesn't even get the same billing as a preposition. In fact, I'll met that makes Jessus pretty mad.
That said, I'm totally going to get myself a had that says "NCIS". (Neat Christians in Sarasota!)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
I wish I had grown up around radical anarchist Amish instead of the "normal" Amish that were in my hometown.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's been entirely way too long since your last post... No more vacations for you!
In my hometown, I fear my family was the closest thing to Amish at which the locals may have gaped. Except we watched lots of television and ate processed foods. But we went to church a lot. And we didn't socialize much. And being prone to depression, we all wore a lot of dark colors. And my brothers grew unbecoming beards.
ReplyDelete