| Trip to the All-American Family Restaurant |
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| Written by Zach Teutsch | |||||
| Friday, 17 March 2006 | |||||
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Hippie Jews on the Road We needed to hit the road. We were leaving Jews in the Woods, a crew of hippie Jewish twenty-somethings who gather twice a year in the middle of nowhere. After goodbye hugs, seven of us piled into the minivan and headed out into rolling yellow pastures that in just a few months would be gorgeous living green. Oops — wrong yellow rolling pastures. We doubled back and tried a different road. We passed some fences made of untreated logs of various sorts, and found the right pastures. We got on Route 209, and it was time for Tefillat haderech, the Traveler’s prayer. After uttering the incantation, we were safe from brigands and bandits. We zipped along on the highway with the protection from speeding tickets that only Tefillat haderech and a minivan can provide, and we started to sing as usual: This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine… Or zarua latzadik, ulyishrei lev simchah, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. A couple hours of zipping zoomed by, and we were making very good time. So good, in fact, that we got to stop for lunch. We chose the All-American Family Restaurant in Meyerstown, PA, a trucker pit stop. We got a table in the back corner and the seven of us crammed into a booth—ten pounds of potatoes in a five pound sack. We were clearly the most exotic people that had passed through in a long time. I checked out their buffet, which our waitress told us had a “little bit of everything.” It did indeed have a little bit of several things: beef rollups, pork somethings, pork something-elses, Scrapple, and some sort of beef and macaroni. On my way back from checking the buffet I caught a snippet of a conversation from some truckers, or perhaps trucker-looking-locals: “I think they call that thing a yah-mer-kuh,” one said. “Really, yahr-muhl-kuh, huh?” said the other. While at the trucker stop, we became intrigued with the complimentary copies of the New Testament. We sang some gospel, and other people chimed in at various points. The rest of our voyage home lasted close to ten more hours, and was full of track-backs, missions, mistakes, messianists and marauding. When my friend and I facilitated the Jews in the Woods community gathering, we developed a mantra to keep us sane: Logistically, expect everything to go wrong. Mystically, expect everything to go right. So it was with this trip. Sure it took us 12 hours to cover 280 miles, but we expected that, and it freed us to see the sparks in every pasture, trucker stop, small town, and roaring city we passed through.
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