Remote Control

If this blog story were simply a television show, the three introductory words “Ten Years Ago” would slowly bleed onto the screen for viewers. In a far away Amish Country in rural Lancaster County Pennsylvania, I had a paranormal experience.

On a guided tour of a working Amish farm, our loquacious bearded guide explained this throwback culture in living color. The Amish worked off the land and their great green rolling pastures magnified the way things must have looked most places one century ago. The Amish customarily shun modern conveniences but somehow thrive with their self-reliant horse and buggy ways. During the tour, my mind fixated on the Amish’s choice to live like shut-ins from the outside world and not own television sets. I experienced a déjà vu feeling that I could not pinpoint, distinct and indescript at the same time. Even though the tour consisted of the entire workings of the Amish community, I could not escape their communal rejection of the television. A future intersection of three things kept repeatedly circling my thoughts – Amish, TV, and my life. Since the Amish barred television sets and I held no association with the Amish, I dismissed this awkward feeling not long after my dirty shoes left the splendor in the grass farm.

Fast forward a decade of time. After I sold a New York Giants bookmarker on Ebay, I emailed the seller indicating her package was about to be mailed. The signature post-script to every sent email is my Freudian Slips blog address. This Ebay customer took the initiative to visit my active blog. As if appearing for her eyes only, the customer read the then lead story of transferring my home movies on VHS tape to DVD. She promptly emailed me to ask if she could pay me to do the same service for a bunch of her video cassette tapes. A week after I signed on to the project, a package arrived in the mail. A wrinkle in time followed.

Sorting through the package, the VHS tapes contained labels of news broadcasts and televisions specials. I plugged in my first tape only to arrive at a Good Morning America piece on a tragedy that happened in the Amish Country on October 2, 2006. A clinically depressed gunman takes a roomful of schoolchildren hostage in a rural Amish school. In unspeakable fashion, he shoots ten innocent girls. He murdered five of them before he fatally shot himself.

As if the tragedy is too horrific to process, its connection goes undetected. Reminiscent of my former vacation in that region, the same countryside and the unmistakable colonial Amish attire starts to register. I time travel to the Amish farmhouse and the guided tour where I experienced the déjà vu complete with narrative. The ghoulishly similar narrative on the television broadcast hurdled me to that same eerie feeling of déjà vu, distinct and now descript.

Janice Ballenger, who hired me to burn the DVD’s, appears on the taped television program wearing the hat of Deputy Coroner in Lancaster County, Pa. I recalled Janice’s promise to the families of the victims. She wants to show the Amish families affected by the tragedy, the television coverage on a single DVD. Employing my modern technological conveniences of a VHS/DVD up/converter playing on my high definition television, I complete the discs which will eventually become property of Amish families. Burning the discs made me wince. At long last, the unlikely trilogy of the Amish, television, and my life came to fruition. Words bleed onto this page. Five school children just had to die in the meantime.