Minnesota weather—June frost and relative humility ~ June 5, 1986

David Heiller

Minnesotans are a humble folk. We aren’t known for our decisiveness, our positive thinking. Ask someone how they’re doing, and they’ll likely reply, “Not too bad,” or “I can’t complain,” “Pretty good, I guess.”

Even my three-year-old son realizes his humble fate. He thinks we live in Maybe-Soda, and Grandma Olson lives in Maybe-Applis. It’s a state-wide shyness flowing from Lake Wobegon to Lake City, from Worthington to Warroad. Steve Cannon of WCCO is perhaps the only person in the state with relative humility, and that’s just during the weather report.

 Noah thinks we live in Maybe-Soda,
 and Grandma Olson lives in Maybe-Applis.

I had some personal insight into al this on Sunday. Last week’s weather had broken all kinds of records. Duluth had 86 degrees on May 28, International Falls: 91. We were somewhere in between. The warm weather held through Friday, as we got our garden ready for spring planting. I even took a day off for the ritual. Cindy, my wife, drove with confidence to a greenhouse and bought 24 tomato sets, 12 peppers, and some odds and ends for the weekend planting.

The last of the garden beds were finished by Sunday. Cindy and Noah went to church in the morning, while Malika and I stayed home and fertilized the soil with bone meal and blood meal. Sunday afternoon, under 60 degree, partly cloudy skies, we planted tomatoes and peppers and flowers and Brussels sprouts. The clouds broke, sunlight blessed our hard work, and a lady on the radio said temperatures would be in the 70s on Monday.

After the kids were tucked away Sunday evening, I returned to the garden. Two robins chirped to each other in the spruce trees. A pair of goldfinches sat atop the end spruce, the bright gold male a step higher on the branches than his mate. Two cedar waxwings perched quietly in the dead branches of the elm tree next to the house. The wrens nesting in their home on the clothes line pole stayed inside, the mother warming her tiny eggs.

God was in his heaven, all was right with the world. It was enough to make a Minnesotan downright confident and happy, even a newspaper editor. I brought a paper bag full of old newspapers to the tomato beds, and started to spread them next to the plants. The first batch held shoppers. I placed them with a vengeance on the ground, thinking they would finally be put to a good use. Then I opened up a Pine County Courier, and laid Richard Coffey next to a plant. I felt like reading his column first, but knew he would understand, and his wife Jeanne would be proud to have him play such an active role in weed control.

But I soon ran out of other newspapers and even the Omni-present shopper. I went to the garage for a bag of Askov Americans. I had been saving them to submit to the National Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest, which is why they were still in the garage. Relative humility.

I spread them around the tomatoes. Joel Mortensen crowded one plant. “That one will have a strong taste,” I thought. One of my outhouse columns nestled another. Good fertilizer there.

Soon the tomatoes were nicely mulched. I sprinkled hay on all the crooked headlines and blurred photos, and walked into the house feeling very content. Humble, as only a person who can put a year’s worth of work on his tomatoes feels, but content.

The story should end there, but remember, folks, this is Minnesota. Our one-year-old daughter woke up with a cry at 1 a.m. She may have sensed the danger and warned us. As I stumbled in parent stupor for baby aspirin, I glanced at the outdoor thermometer. Suddenly the stupor disappeared. Thirty-five degrees and falling.

I hurried outside, grabbed the flashlight from the car. I carried sheets from the garage, plastic, blankets, anything I could find, and spread it all over the tomatoes and peppers. I knew I couldn’t sleep till they were all covered.

Cindy called me at work Monday morning. I knew before she said a word the bad news, like a phone call in the middle of the night when a relative is sick.

“The tomatoes, David, all but three have died.”

“Which three didn’t?” I asked. I hope they had been mulched with the American.

“The first three,” she answered.

I started to swear on the phone, then stopped. My Minnesota Confidence had glowed for a day. What the heck. It’s not so bad. We’ll buy more tomatoes. I can’t complain.

You’ll swoon over Texas in June ~ June 29, 2000

David Heiller

I’ll always want to live in Minnesota, Dad,”

Malika said as we walked through the airport parking lot in search of our car last Friday.

An early morning birding trip.

We had just returned from a week in Texas, and if anything will make you appreciate home, it’s a week of Texas in June.

Not that Mollie, Noah, Cindy, and I didn’t enjoy the vacation. We had a lot of fun. But I still found myself agreeing with her.

We stayed in Port Aransas, which is off the coast of Corpus Christi. There we discovered the two essentials of Texas survival.

1.  Sunglasses. The sun is so bright in the middle of the day, that even with sunglasses, it is hard to see. The middle of the day for me lasted from about 10 am. to 6 p.m.

One morning when we left our hotel room for an outing, I walked around the corner of the dark stairway and into the parking lot, and I was temporarily blinded. It was like walking into a wall of light. I shut my eyes and staggered toward the car, holding a cup of pop. I didn’t see the edge of the curb and I stumbled over it and almost fell. The pop shot out of the cup like Old Faithful, directly into my left ear. I stopped and squinted in all directions to see if anyone had seen me. Luckily no one was around.

2.  Air conditioning. You can’t survive without an air conditioner in your car and home. One night the weatherman on a Corpus Christi TV station said something like, “The wind is going to blow all night, so open your windows and have a good night’s sleep.” Then he paused for just an instant, as if he remembered where he was, and added, “But don’t shut off your air conditioner.”

So we slept with the bedroom windows closed. That didn’t feel right to me. I felt trapped by the heat. But if we didn’t want to suffocate, the windows had to be closed.

Cindy heard an interesting comment from a lady there, who said, “In Minnesota, you hibernate in the winter. In Texas, we hibernate in the summer.” That’s a healthy way to look at it.

Before I go on, I can hear you readers saying “Duh. What do you expect from southern Texas in June?”

You are right. So I won’t complain anymore. We went to Texas to attend the wedding of my nephew. That was great. I got to visit with my brother and sisters and niece and Mom.

What makes Texas OK even in June is the ocean. A steady south wind blew over the Gulf of Mexico. It blew day and night and created big waves, which rolled in endless succession onto the beach, and if there is anything more fun than swimming in the ocean in five foot waves, I’d like to hear about it.

Sunglasses, the ocean and a sweetheart.

The water was full of seaweed, which washed up on shore, but even that was tolerable, so strong was the lure of that endless ho­rizon. Every morning the Port Aransas maintenance crews would bulldoze all the seaweed into a huge pile, load it into dump trucks, and haul it away. It made me wonder, “Which is worse, plowing snow or plowing seaweed?”

The ocean has many different creatures. We saw a lot of them in a fantastic aquarium in Corpus Christi. The fish make the lakes of Minnesota look pretty bland.

Next to the aquarium in the USS Lexington, a retired aircraft carrier. My son, Noah, and I took a tour of it one day. It was amazing to ponder just what this ship has been through, in World War Two, Korea, Vietnam. The flight deck had a lot of old and new planes on display. We walked through the pilot house, the mess hall, the engine room, up stairs, down stairs, all around the ship, and I bet we didn’t see one fourth of it. I don’t have room to tell everything we saw, but it was impressive. The people who put that floating museum together really did a good job, and it fits there on the Gulf of Mexico.

We came home from our vacation feeling refreshed, and in that sense it didn’t matter if he were in Texas or Timbuktu. Our staff put out the paper just fine without us, thank you. it’s just good to get away. It’s good to be home too.

A cure for youthful smoking ~ July, 20, 1995

David Heiller

(Editor's note: this column has been slightly edited, removing the initial and final lines of this family story, due to dated references.
So, we begin with the real reason for the column: a good old cautionary tale about growing up in the 1960s.)

Joe Camel is just a cartoon. He will never overpower Mom and Dad and your older sister when it comes to teaching a lesson or two about smoking.

That opinion is based on the first time I had a cigarette, about 30 years ago. There were about eight of us, ranging in age from about 12 to seven. Randy was the youngest, and his parents also owned the root beer stand in town.

We had a hide-out in some sumac trees above the root beer stand. There were trails under their dense branches to a clearing that no one could see in the middle. We hung out there, played hide and seek, or just laid around in-between swimming in the river, riding our bikes, playing softball.

One afternoon we convinced Randy go to the root beer stand and steal a pack of cigarettes. Stealing was not right, and we all knew it, even Randy. But he was a loyal lieutenant and wanted to be accepted by the big kids, so he went off and did it. I felt bad about that, but I didn’t stop him.

He returned with a box of Old Golds. The older kids, like my brother Danny, divided the booty like gold. I got one cigarette.

What a feeling, holding it in my fingers, looking at the filter with Old Gold printed in gold letters. Then lighting it, breathing in, then blowing out a cloud of smoke! Talk about forbidden pleasure.

I didn’t inhale. I didn’t know how, and somewhere I had been told that it was dangerous to inhale. Still, I watched in envy as the older boys drew the smoke into their chests, then blasted it out their nostrils. I couldn’t figure out how they did that. It sure looked cool. Dangerous and cool.

The first pack went quickly, so we dispatched Randy for another one. We waited. And waited. Ten minutes, then 20. Knots boiled up in our stomachs.

Someone went to investigate, and quickly returned with the stunning news that Randy had been caught stealing the cigarettes, and that we all had to go to the root beer stand!

Oh man we were scared. We never thought we’d get caught smoking. And poor Randy had been caught stealing on top of that.

I can’t remember what Randy and Stanley’s mother told us when we got to the root beer stand. My attention was focused on my sister Kathy, who was there working the 3 p.m.-7 p.m. shift as a car hop. She had a triumphant smile on her face.

Kathy said we had better get home and tell Mom, because when she got off work, SHE was going to tell.

That was one of the longest afternoons of my life. Danny and I sulked home. We laid in our beds. We ate supper in silence. But we didn’t tell Mom.

We were playing catch when Kathy came home. She went in the house, then Mom called out, “Boys.” She only called us “boys” when we were in big trouble.

I was expecting a spanking, although I don’t know why. Mom never spanked us. When you live in a family of eight kids, parents don’t have to use corporal punishment. There’s always an older brother or sister to gladly to that job.

Instead Mom lectured us. I don’t remember exactly what she told us. Probably how disappointed she was. Whatever she said, it worked. That was my first and last cigarette for many years. Danny’s too.

Everyone in our gang had various punishments. Randy and his two brothers, Stanley and Billy, had the worst. Their dad bought some cigars, and he made the kids sit at the kitchen table and smoke them.

“We got a little sick on that,” Stanley said from his home in Madison, Wisconsin, on July 17. “We got a little green. I’ll never forget it.”

And neither will I. 

A fever to cure all ills ~ June 20, 1991

David Heiller

 It’s hard NOT to have baseball fever these days, the way the Twins are playing. The Twins have won 15 straight as I write this on Sunday evening.

Even fair-weather fans are paying attention, except for a few purists like Steve Popowitz. I saw him on Friday and told him I was going to stay home and work and listen to the Twins game on the radio that night.

Steve gave me a blank look, as if there might possibly be more exciting things to do on a Friday night. “How are they doing?” he still as­ked politely. Steve does not like baseball, but at least he has good manners. He knows I’m a fan.

“Great,” I answered. “They won their 12th straight last night!” I had been to that game, and was still a foot off the ground.

“Now, is that good?” Steve asked again, in complete sincerity. “Baseball teams don’t always win 12 straight?”

“The best they’ve ever done,” I answered with a smile. I remembered that Steve fell asleep in the seventh game of the 1987 World Series, and figured it was time to change the subject.

But the subject around our house these days is baseball. The game is always on the radio. George Will states in his excellent book, Men at Work, that baseball is one sport which is ar­guably better to listen to than see in person.

Noah's Kirby Puckett
baseball card.
Check out those biceps!

That’s partly because you can visualize the ac­tion so well. You can see Puckett fielding the hit on one hop, taking a step on the run and rifling the ball home IN THE AIR, see Brian Harper catch the ball as the runner barrels into him like a man diving head-first into a pile of scrap metal. You can see Harper hold up the ball with a big grin, and see the runner limp to the dugout as 30,000 fans come to their feet to cheer the most exciting play in baseball, throwing out a runner at home.

With the radio and a good imagination, you can see that while you are playing catch with your kids, or working in the garden, or changing the oil in your car, or whatever you like to do. I can work non-stop, no matter how tired I am, with a ball game on the radio.

It’s fun to TALK baseball too. At that game last Thursday, my brother Glenn and I talked about the Twins till the fourth inning. We hadn’t seen each other for three months, yet we just talked baseball. Not about our kids or our wives or gardens or work or politics. I feel a bit guilty when that happens, like I’m irresponsible or childish or drunk. Shouldn’t we discuss per­sonal things, or important topics? My wife laughs about it. “I love watching you talk baseball,” she’ll say with a gentle smile. Then I don’t feel guilty anymore.

She also knows that Glenn is a bigger baseball fan than I am, mainly because he’s had 10 more years to work at it. Heck, he can tell you the starting line-up of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves, who he followed faithfully on the radio as a 14-year-old kid.

As we left the Dome after they won last Thursday, Glenn said, ^“Boy, the Twins are really a Juggernaut.” Anyone who can use the word “Juggernaut” in a sentence is a bigger baseball fan than me. Whenever Cindy gets fed up with me listening to a Twins game, I tell her, “It could be worse, I could be Glenn,” and she changes the subject.

(By the way, “Juggernaut” is defined by the Random House College Dictionary as “Any large, overpowering destructive force or object, as a giant battleship, a powerful football team, etc.” That fits the Twins, all right.)

The kids have a bit of baseball fever too. Mol­lie has learned the Twins theme song, just like Noah did when he was six. It must be part of cognitive development, learning your baseball team’s theme song. She still has a few glitches on it though:

“We’re going to win Twins, we’re going to score. We’re going to win Twins, knock that baseball sore. Let’s hear it now for the Twins that came to play. Cheer for the Minnesota Twins today.”

And Noah has Kirby Puckett’s biceps to pon­der. Eight-year-old boys love biceps. He’ll wake up in the morning and have me feel his biceps. “Nice little bicycle tire,” I’ll say. Then at noon he’ll have me feel them again, and tell me that they’ve gotten bigger during the day, to which I agree.

Mollie and I gave Noah a set of 1991 Twins baseball cards for his birthday last week. Noah looked through them, then stopped at Kirby Puckett’s. “Wow, look at those biceps!” Noah said with laughing wonder in his voice. Noah likes Kirby anyway. Who doesn’t? But to see those arms sealed Noah’s adoration.

I had to agree. His arms were the size of 20-pound hams. I guess that’s how he throws out those runners at home.

Harmon Killebrew at bat. 

Then I remembered thinking that same thing about Harmon Killebrew when I was eight, looking at those slabs of muscle. Back then, baseball players didn’t pose with their biceps bulging. It was not the era of showing flesh, like today. You could catch a peek of Killebrew’s biceps, but mostly you just knew they were there by that classic swing of his, as he followed through on one of his 573 homeruns, head down, wrists extended, arm and back muscles bulging like a bull. That was good enough for us.

Yup, baseball fever is here all right. Enjoy it while you have it. It’s the one sickness that’s good for you.

Go fishing while the sun shines~ June 19, 1997

David Heiller 

A friend of mine made a good point at a graduation open house a couple weeks ago.

I had asked him how his remodeling project was coming.

“Slow,” he said with a bit of embarrassment. He said he had been taking his kids fishing in his free time.

“But the kids aren’t going to remember me for remodeling the house,” he said.

I thought about that comment and agreed. My friend was doing the right thing by taking his kids fishing. He was feeling a bit guilty about it, because he is a hard worker. The thought of fishing when he should be working on his house was alien to him.

But his kids are getting older, as is he. He can see they won’t be around a whole lot longer. Maybe 10 years. That’s not long, the way time flies for most people.

So make hay—or go fishing—while the sun shines, he was saying.

David and his teenagers in our woods

His words reminded me of something Harmon Killebrew supposedly said. His wife was complaining about how playing baseball with the kids was wrecking their yard.

“I’m not raising a yard, I’m raising a family,” the Killer responded. Touche!

I think of words like those, and those of my friend, when my kids ask me to play basketball or softball with them. I usually—not always, but almost—stop what I’m doing and honor their request.

With my 14-year-old son, it’s basketball on the trampoline these days. It’s a fun game, lots of jumping and dunking. Noah beats me almost every time.

It’s a humbling experience, seeing your off-spring surpass you in physical ability. But it’s still very worthwhile. It gives us something in common.

Playing sports with Noah keeps things in perspective. Things can get tense between us. He’s a teenager! We don’t like the same music or the same clothes or the same haircuts. But we can still play a game of basketball together, and slap each other on the back when it’s over.

With my 12-year-old daughter, it’s softball. We like to go to Mikey’s field in Denham. It’s a gem of a spot, especially on a warm June evening with your daughter.

We went there on June 11, just Mollie and me. I pitched to her, and she hit pretty much every ball I pitched. Good solid hits.

She asked me to pitch faster. I did. She kept hitting ball after ball.

Malika "gets it!"

I was amazed. This was the girl who could barely hit the ball last year, and now she couldn’t miss?

After about five minutes, I stopped and went up to her. I told her she was making good contact. Now she had to put some power behind it. I demonstrated a few swings, extending my arms Killebrew style. “Put your shoulder into it,” I said.

Wow. It was like turning up the volume on a radio. She stung the ball. It shot off her bat, hit after hit. She was in a groove.

Mollie had a proud grin on her face. She couldn’t believe how well she was doing any more than I could. It was like she had suddenly caught on; she finally “got it.”

Then she thanked me for playing with her, for teaching her.

She said I was the best dad in the world.

The moment froze in time. I’ll always remember it. The setting sun. The lush grass. The beautiful diamond. My daughter and me, playing ball. That’s what life is all about.

I said that I was just doing what any dad was doing. “A dad who doesn’t play ball with his kids ought to be divorced,” I told her.

And I meant it. I’m going to make sure my kids never divorce me.

A truck full of black gold ~ June 7, 2006

David Heiller

Ron called me Thursday to see if I could stop on Friday morning first thing to get a load of manure.

I had planned to pick it up Friday after work, but he had some farm chores then.

“Sure,” I said.

“You’ll have a truck full of manure all day,” Ron said.

Beauty gets help from a little manure.
My bleeding heart in Denham.

“That’s all right. It’s a status symbol in Caledonia,” I replied.

So before work on Friday, I arrived at my usual spot down the road from Ron’s farm, and he did his usual quick work with the loader. I watched as he dropped two buckets into the old truck.

It was good looking manure, full of red worms, not too ripe. Almost garden ready, but it was definitely manure.

My truck sagged and settled under the weight, but I had a sense that it didn’t mind a bit. What higher honor for a truck?

“Thank you,” I told Ron. That’s all the payment he ever wants. Then it was off to work.

The manure got a few looks over the course of the day. Gary and Bob at B&M service sized it up and decided maybe they shouldn’t put the truck on the hoist to get at the leaky rear brake line. “Bring it back when the manure’s gone,” Gary said. I drove off, leaving a little reminder of my visit.

At noon I drove it to Good Times for the weekly Rotary meeting. It may have been the first time in the history of Caledonia Rotary that a member drove a truck full of manure to a meeting. I was proud of that. Ann Thompson sniffed it out and asked if I could drop some off at her house. “Sorry,” I said with a smile that matched her own.

The courthouse, police station, and high school all were blessed with my truck full of black gold that afternoon. The state patrol caught a glimpse of it too as I checked out an accident on Schauble Hill after work.

It was kind of a fun distraction, and it got a few laughs at work too. “Is that what I smell?” Dawn asked when she came in from a sales call. She’s always teasing. But she didn’t seem to mind either.

That’s the thing in Caledonia and probably anywhere in rural America. A load of manure is not a bad thing. In fact, just the opposite is true.

Granted, there are certain stages of manure that would not be welcome on a reporter’s Friday beat. It’s like a farmer that forgets to change his chore boots before going to church! That’s not the kind of pew you want.

But the faint whiff of the barn on a person of a truck is just fine with me. I’m thankful we live in a healthy farming community, and I’ll take little reminders like that with no problem:

I unloaded the manure Saturday morning. It was good to shovel it onto the ground. I was thankful Ron had loaded it, but at some point you’ve got to add some sweat of your own to gel manure to work just right. A stiff back makes a person a little more grateful too.

Malika with Mackenzie and Riley by our pergola.
Good things happen when you add a little manure.

My new manure pile will sit for a couple weeks, then I’ll probably mix it with some black dirt, and throw in some sand from the dredge pile in Brownsville. The result will be a rich soil to add to the garden. Cindy wants some for her flowers, and the vegetable garden has a bed with soil that is thin, as Mike Carpenter world say. The cucumbers and zucchini and melons there could use a little of Ron’s black gold.

Black Gold. Caledonia M. That’s my kind of currency. A little investment that will yield some big dividends in a couple months.

The cukes and zukes and zinnias and azaleas will emerge all the stronger thanks to Ron’s generosity and that load of manure. That’s something to be thankful for.