It was a modern miracle ~ March 24, 1991

by David Heiller

Malika and Laura at play!

It was a modern miracle.

It happened Saturday.

I didn’t know a Saturday could start that way.

My daughter and her friend got up early to play.

And that’s what the two girls did all day.

First they played Monopoly.

They counted out the money,

And didn’t get sore like when I lose to my honey.

They sat in the living room and shook the dice,

And laughed at Chance, thought Boardwalk was nice.

Laura played Yahtzee and she beat us bad,

Me and my honey, but we didn’t get mad.

We looked at each other,

and whispered secretly,

“I can’t believe they’re not watching TV.”

Next came the Barbies.

I thought it was great.

Though I couldn’t follow much because I’m not eight.

They scolded and folded their dolls and dresses.

I could just picture the upstairs messes.

Kids and mud and water.

But I do remember what Laura said to me:

“Hey, we haven’t watched any TV

Today,” she said, and her grin was wide.

And her voice held a bit of child-sized pride.

I just nodded, but I was proud too.

No TV is not easy to do.

No cartoons to hypnotize them,

No commercials. (I despise them!)

No lying on the couch all morning

Till they get the boot with an angry warning:

“You kids don’t know how to play!”

Or some dumb thing like that I’ll say.

Old fogies seem to think that’s true

Sometimes I worry about it too.

But take two friends, and with a little luck

And a mid-March day and mud and muck

And dolls and dresses and before you’re through

You’ll see a modern miracle too.

I’m dreaming of a neat office ~ March 11, 1999

David Heiller

My office at home tends to be a catch-all for things that are in transition. It has piled up with a lot of stuff lately.

Our short-lived rocker. The cardboard
 electric was quite good enough.

I don’t want to call it junk, because it’s not junk, yet. It’s still at the stuff stage.

There’s the electric guitar that I got my son for Christmas two years ago. It was a gamble, and I lost. He has played it twice, maybe. But until he feels the urge to take after Jonny Lang, or until I feel the urge to take after him, it has found a home in my office.

Or the box of Dickens Village boxes that we inherited from Cindy’s mom, Lorely. You know your office is cluttered when it contains a box of boxes. The village has found a temporary home in our living room on the piano. We left it up after Christmas in honor of Lorely. The village contains a house with a light that goes off and on by its own accord. We think that Lorely is living in it, and sometimes she stays home and sometimes she goes out, which is certainly her right.

The box of boxes for the Dickens Village pieces have to be saved for when—or should I say IF—we ever take the Dickens Village down. So it sits in my office.

A small portion of my mother's 
Dickens Village. Putting it up was a ritual to
remember her for a number of years.

There’s the Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner, which comes in handy for sucking up the dead flies that drift down at all hours. And my guitar case, and old photos in frames, and old calendars, and an old computer, and a pail of crayons, and a folding chair, and a fire extinguisher that I should hang on the wall one of these days.

And there are—or were—the papers, the receipts and brochures, the old bills and bank statements, the piles of papers that started out on top of the filing cabinet and then spilled onto the floor.

I’m not a good filer. If something needs to be filed, it should be filed right away, but that never seems to happen. It starts as a small pile, but gradually builds into a volcano that spews in all directions.

Dr. Donna Cronin is like that. She says she has a PHD: Pile Higher Deeper.

I was at a friend’s house the other day, standing in his office, and it made me feel better to see that it was cluttered too. It looked a lot like my office, except instead of Twins pennants on the wall he had a poster of different kinds of lettuce.

David laying out the paper in Askov. So much stuff.
(not to be confused with junk)

He said it used to be his office, but it has become more of his wife’s office now. His words carried a wistful tone, and I could sense that he wasn’t real happy about the change, although I would be willing to bet some serious money—if I had any—that his old office didn’t look any neater than his shared space.

I might be wrong. But it’s one thing to have an office full of your own clutter, and quite another thing to have to put up with some else’s stuff. The same goes for the garage, or your bedroom dresser, or any territory that you claim as your own.

In his office in Caledonia.
 Malika said that this photo shows why he
is so smart: his brain is clearly plugged in.

I’m on a mission to clean up the office, and I’ve made some progress, thanks to a newly reorganized filing cabinet. All those papers I mentioned earlier have been filed or thrown away. So far I have tossed out two 50-pound bags that had been emptied of dog food and filled with papers.

I condensed some of the files too. For example, I had one file labeled brochures, and one labeled pamphlets, and one labeled warranties and they all held basically the same thing! Which was anything that looked like a brochure, warranty, or pamphlet.

Why did Ι need to save a brochure on canning vegetables? Or a pamphlet for a blender that broke five years ago? Or the owner’s manual οn bicycle that we bought for our 15-year-old son when he was four?

So I reduced three filing cabinet drawers of, papers to one drawer, which left two drawers free to hold some of the stuff on the floor. So now the office floor only has four boxes of stuff on it. And they will disappear soon! I’m going to find a different home for them. In the kids’ rooms.

Then my office will be neat and orderly, like my life, and the dog will bring me my pipe and slippers, and I’ll sit in my smoking jacket in the evening, reading William Butler Yeats while Cindy bakes bread and nurses the baby in rocking chair, a fire glowing in the hearth nearby.

And if you believe that, I’ve got some land to sell you in Birch Creek Township.

Sometimes you have to trade in your letters ~ March 21, 2002

David Heiller

Cindy and I were playing Scrabble on March 16. She was beating me (as usual) by a score of 203 to 114. I took my turn and got up to 138.

Then Cindy skipped a turn and traded in her letters for new ones.

I made another decent play and got up to 166.

So now the score was 166 to 203. Look out, Cindy!

But wait.

Cindy played the word “cleansed.”
It was a Scrabble, which is worth 50 extra points. Plus it started on a triple word and ended on a triple word, which means you multiply the value of the word by nine. So she added 168 points to her score and that, as they say, was all she wrote. She ended up beating me by 235 points. Her margin of victory was more than my total score!

There is a Scrabble lesson here: Sometimes you have to cash in your letters and miss a turn in order to improve your chances of success. It’s hard to do, because you give your opponent a chance to catch up. But it often leads to better things, which Cindy illustrated rather brilliantly.

It applies to other things as well.

I am sure that David was coming up with a good play here.

Robert Pirsing had a variation on this lesson in his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. When he was working on his motorcycle and not making any progress, he would get frustrated and try to force things. Often he would break something or make it worse. He learned to walk away and do something else when he hit a roadblock. He found that when he came back, he could fix the problem. He saw it differently, and he had a different attitude. I’ve taken that advice to heart many times and find it is true also.

When all else fails, get out your banjo.

It’s true in my profession. Every beginning journalism student or writer of any kind is told, or soon learns on his own, that the best, thing you can do after you write something, letting it sit for a while, then go back and read it with a fresh mind. You’ll often see ways it can be improved.

For my hobby of playing music, it holds true also. I heard a banjo player at a workshop once tell the students that there are times when he doesn’t play the banjo, because it just doesn’t, feel right, it doesn’t go well, it doesn’t work. I have learned to recognize those times and do something else. It was good to hear a professional say that, because I find that I sometimes get frustrated with my playing, and I’ve learned to put my instrument down and do something else at times like that, rather than force it.

Don’t force the issue, unless you have to.

That’s my point. As Cindy showed me last week, a little patience can pay big dividends. I bet it holds true in your profession. Maybe that’s why God invented coffee-breaks.

Those invincible days of yore ~ March 29, 2006

David Heiller

Editor's note: This column was written after he presented the readers of the Caledonia Argus the long article he wrote for Backpacker Magazine.

I’m back to the present and the land of the living, after a four-week hiatus down memory lane.

A lot of people commented on my adventure in the mountains 33 years ago, which I reprinted in this space.

Some final thoughts: I was having lunch last week with a couple of colleagues. One man asked me how I could not have known about the possibility of bad weather, a snow storm.

David and the kids on our 1998 backpacking trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.

I stammered a bit; and the other man, a backpacker himself, said it simply: “We’re flatlanders.”

That was part of it. It’s one thing to be in a snowstorm in Houston County. Granted, it’s not flat here by North Dakota definitions. But there aren’t many snow storms in which a healthy 20-year-old man could not wade and tromp through to get help in rural Caledonia.

The mountains were another world. I had climbed 6,500 feet in elevation and hiked 30 miles. Some of that was very steep. It was physically impossible for a person to walk through that country after three feet of snow without snowshoes, which I didn’t have.

“And I was 20,” I said. “I was invincible.” Remember those days? It was a long time ago, but there was a time when I felt there was no physical task, within reason, that I couldn’t accomplish. I bet a lot of people feel the same way.

“Why didn’t you just turn around and go back the way you came?” my colleague asked. There again, I had to admit that I could not physically do it. The trail was obliterated and steep. The best way out was the other side of the mountain.

David, in the hospital after his rescue.

The other comment I have received was how lucky I was to survive. That’s true. The luck extended beyond Yosemite National Park. I had hitchhiked from Brownsville to Oregon, then down the West Coast to San Francisco, then east to Yosemite, That’s not exactly a safe thing to do either.

In fact, that was the fear that crept into the hearts of my mother and other family members. They hadn’t heard from me in a month. I had written to Mom from the park the day before my final adventure, telling her I would soon be hitchhiking to Phoenix to spend Thanksgiving with my brother Glenn and his family. When Thanksgiving came and went, she feared the worst.

I’ll never forget the phone call I made home from the hospital bed after I was rescued. She probably remembers it too, although we don’t talk about it. We’re good Germans!

I’ll never forget my mountain experience either. “You definitely cheated death.” my brother, Danny, wrote to me recently. That’s not something you take lightly.

Rosie wins the battle ~ March 10, 2005

David Heiller

Rosie was onto something, that was obvious. I could hear her growling and yipping in the “West Wing” of the barn on Saturday afternoon. I tuned it out for about an hour, but finally my curiosity got to me. I put down my hammer and went to investigate.

After a bit of searching, I located her burrowing into a stack of hay bales, sniffing, and whining. It wasn’t easy to see her, wedged between the hay and the wall. There isn’t much to see to begin with, Rosie being a miniature dachshund and all. I grabbed her by the collar and pulled her up. She turned her growl in my direction. That’s when I heard a snarl in return, somewhere in the pile of bales.

I can handle snarls from animals I know. But snarling visitors, whoever they may be, are not welcome in the Heiller barn. So I set Rosie back down.

Rosie and the possum

This time she tore into the hay like a tornado. The other critter had had enough of Rosie too, and they met in their hidden arena, their howls and growls mixed together in a frightening din. I was instantly worried. I didn’t want to lose Rosie, and I had no idea what she had unearthed.

Then a streak of gray tore out of the hay and across the floor. I jumped back. A possum! “Go get it Rosie!” I yelled. My killer instincts were kicking in too..

David with Rosie after The Great Possum Battle.

Rosie tried, but she was a couple seconds late in pursuit, and that possum was quick. It disappeared in the clutter of the barn. Rosie circled all around, behind the garbage cans, under the boat, around two different woodpiles. There are a lot of hiding places in a barn. I grabbed a hoe to lend any assistance possible. But the possum was gone.

I returned to my job, then went into the house to get ready for church. I came back out, carrying my camera in the hopes of getting a picture of a deer or turkey on the way to town. But first I had to gather up Rosie and put her in her kennel.

Rosie was again on the scent of the possum. This time she was growling at a pile of foam panels. I started moving the panels, and heard the growl of the possum. Rosie roared into action again, and a rolling ball of black and gray fur emerged at my feet.

It was a horrible and yet fascinating sight. Rosie curls up on the couch with us most nights, but what I was witnessing was a compact killing machine that moved faster than my eye could follow.

I was very glad that I was not a possum.

It was over quite quickly, maybe 10 seconds, although it seemed longer than that. The possum lay motionless, its mouth stretched into a horrible grin of death. Always the newspaper-man, I took a picture of Rosie putting the finishing touches on the battle, and include it as state’s evidence with this column.

I picked up Rosie. She gave me a look that said, “What are you doing?” Yet she didn’t object too loudly. She seemed to be in a state of shock over what had just happened. I guess I was too.

Rosie watching over David during a nap. I am sure she was ready to protect him from any 'possums that might be ready to invade.

I put Rosie in her kennel, then headed out to church. But first I went to pick up the dead possum and put it in the trash. It was gone! It had lived up to its reputation and had played possum. I read later that possums become temporarily paralyzed and fall into a state of coma when they are confronted with danger. Rosie’s instincts probably knew that better than mine.

It wasn’t such a bad ending though. I had to admire that possum. It had fooled me, if not Rosie. That pea-brained possum has probably high-tailed it to Walter Kueblers by now. If it is dumb enough to hang around the Heiller barn; it will face the wrath of Rosie. And you should never bet against a gal named Rosie.