Who Let The Cat Out?

Some weeks ago my wife and I spent a long weekend in Berlin, Ohio. Berlin is the hub of the largest community of Amish in the USA. Their life is heavily influenced by their fundamentalist religious beliefs which leads them to shun modern ways for the most part, preferring life as it existed a century or more ago. We've shopped furniture in Shipshewanna, Indiana and visited Pennsylvania Dutch country near Lancaster, Pennsylvania--two other Amish enclaves. But this was our first time in Berlin.

As you can see from the photograph( though you have to either enlarge or look hard), the folks in Berlin decorated the streets for our arrival. Not! Who knows what motives lurked behind the toilet paper streamers. But I thought I would try to find out.

Somwhere among the storefronts above is the Boyd & Wurthmann Restaurant. "Where the locals eat." We stopped there for breakfast. Hopefully, it would not be as adventurous eating as the restaurant where we stopped the previous night when I was enticed to try a "mustard egg." It sounded intriguing, but all it turned out to be was a hard-boiled egg pickled in mustard. And it tasted pretty much as the name would indicate.

Anyway, Wendy and I took a table among the locals for breakfast. The young Amish waitresses all wore their customary plain long dresses and bonnets. They were friendly but kept up a busy pace.

"So what's the big event?" I asked our waitress as she stopped by to refill our coffee. "Why is the street all decorated?"

She laughed. "I don't know. It was like that when I came to work this morning. Somebody got excited and let the cat out I guess," she said, then moved on before I could ask a follow-up.

Somebody got excited and let the cat out? Did I hear that right? Is this an Amish idiom that I'm not familiar with? I wondered why somebody excited and out of control would decide the prank of all pranks to pull would be to let the cat out. Or maybe she meant that toilet papering the downtown was just the kind of mayhem a bunch of cats in Berlin would commit if their collective owners let them out on a Friday night.

I do remember that our cat would sometimes partially unravel a roll of toilet paper in my boyhood home. But we never woke up to find streams of toilet paper hanging from the light fixtures in the morning.

Maybe there's an Amish blogger I could ask. Not likely. Since the Amish ride buggies to work, light their homes by lantern and candlelight, and often plow their fields with the old-fashioned horse-drawn plow, the chances of there being an Amish blogger is slim at best.

Oh, well. Never mind. But I will tell you one thing. The peanut butter at that restaurant was the most delicious I've ever had. Wendy suspects they mixed marshmallow cream in with the peanut butter, but there was no label to tell us.

Guess I should have asked about that instead.