The memory my grandfather shared

was meant to be lighthearted.

When he was ten, he said, he’d sit

 

in the Detroiter his father, the senior

William Henry Hochstettler,

had used to move the family

 

from Rossville, Indiana,

to Bluffton, Ohio, in 1917.

He keenly recalled how the car,

 

retired on blocks in a shed,

served him as a “toy trip-maker.”

Perhaps it was his Amish blood,

 

or maybe just being from the Midwest,

but a reflective sadness always seemed

to run through his words, suggesting

 

something more to the story—

that despite all the fun he had

turning the wheel back and forth

 

with his skinny Swiss-German arms,

looking around at pretend traffic

and imagining himself somewhere grand,

 

he knew the day would end with

the kind of glum introspection that walks

alone across an Allen County farm at dusk.