It was a classic smear job all the way ~ December 12, 1985

David Heiller

There comes a time in every child’s life when they cease being babies, and become something more. It is a metamorphosis from a helpless bundle of pink skin into a human being.

Mothers may not know what I mean, because they spend more time with their babies, and probably never think of them as helpless bundles of pink skin. But to dads, who roll around on the floor with them perhaps for only a few minutes a day, the metamorphosis hits all of a sudden, and sometimes it hits hard.

Malika with her bearded and bespectacled daddy. She's thinking about, the last time she got hold of that beard, or the next time she scores his glasses. 

That’s what happened at our house last weekend. Cindy had been telling me how our six-month-old daughter had been going through a growth spurt, guzzling more milk per hour than a young Holstein. Cindy had pointed out that Mollie was sitting up by herself now, and laughing at her big brother, and babbling in her crib when she woke up at 6:30 in the morning. She was even taking an interest in the mashed bananas that her mother pried down her throat.

I had noticed these changes. I had also seen how Mollie was very interested in my beard now, grabbing tiny fistfuls, doing chin-ups with my face. Noah had done the same thing two years earlier, so I should have been warned about the next step, the change that takes a baby out of the helpless stage and puts them on the same plane with an Amazonian warrior.

Never underestimate a budding grown-up,
even when they are six months old.

It started innocently enough. Mama was in town shopping. I was lying on the living room floor, with my head about a foot from Mollie. Noah sat nearby, playing with some cars, but watching us out of the corner of his eye. He must have sensed what was coming, just as his beard-pulling genes were passed on to Mollie. Mollie jerked her arms back as her eyes moved from a toy in her hand to me. Her gaze settled on my face, and her eyes focused on mine with the intensity of a fox. Her left arm shot out, with no baby jerking and twitching this time. It was an adult movement, a steady, resolute motion that held no hesitation and would not be stopped. Her fingers uncurled from their fist, and re-clenched around the left temple of my wire rimmed glasses. Vice-Grips could not have been tighter. Then with a quick backward pull, she flipped the glasses off my nose and ears, and held them high.

The inevitable followed, as I lay in shock. She took the left lens of the glasses and put it in her mouth, gumming and slobbering so that it would be smeared as only six-month-olds can gum and slobber and smear. Then, and only then, did she relax and smile and shake the glasses in wild glee.

I reached over and grabbed my wire-rimmed glasses. I had bought the frame in college 10 years ago, and I didn’t want to lose them now. Mollie let me have them. Her goal had been accomplished. Her first glasses execution had been a success. And Dad was on notice that his helpless bundle of pink skin was not helpless anymore.

A perfect little adventure ~ January 18, 2006

David Heiller

Α couple images will stay with me for a while from last Saturday. The first clicked at about 4:30 p.m. We were walking across Duane’s field, the five of us, when the sun dropped below its skirt of clouds. The soft light of late afternoon instantly spread a golden glow on everything, the grass, the plowed field, the faces of the four people walking over them. It didn’t hurt that those humans were walking with a purpose. There was a glint of adventure in their eyes.

Alex and Laura, Malika and David, and I hiked cross-country to Freeburg to hear Bob and Gail perform at Little Miami.
It was a fine little adventure.

It wasn’t a huge adventure, mind you. We were hiking from our house to Freeburg, a whopping four miles at best. Little Miami awaited us there, good food, good music, perhaps a cheering crowd. Well, two out of three at least. But it put a spring in our step.

The sun left us about the time we hit the state land and its plantations of pine trees. We pawed through them and descended through the woods above Elsheimer Valley. I don’t know if that’s its official name, but every adventure needs an Elsheimer Valley or two. The walk through those woods was darn near magnificent, in the subtle ways that our woods have around here. I half expected to be going through logging slash. Sometimes it seems like you can’t step on state land without running into the after effects of logging. Not that I have anything against that. But it’s still hard to beat a mature hardwood forest and its big oak trees.

Outcroppings of limestone rocks dotted our trip down the big hill. We bounced from one to another, probing with a stick here, testing a boulder there. Rattlesnake country, I thought more than once.

Then it was the floor of the valley, big open spaces, leaves flattened by snow but the snow now gone. Perfect hiking.

Not for everyone though. Malika, my daughter, started complaining about blisters on her heels. “Do you have two pairs of socks on?” I asked. That’s always been my remedy for blisters, something I learned when I was about her age. She answered in the negative, and not to worry either, Dad.

We followed a dry creek bed south to the end of the woods, then through a prickly border of wild plums to farm fields. I had received permission to cross the property, which made our climb over the fences just fine. It’s not a good feeling to climb over a fence without permission. I peeled two oranges. We drank water. Time to celebrate.

We came to Elsheimer’s Road and walked along it. It was good that we hit the road when we did, because the sun had set and it was getting hard to see. A couple dogs barked as we approached the farm of Mark and Pat Lange. One came up to the road and gave us a friendly greeting.

Malika’s blisters were getting worse. We stopped by an overturned boat and sat down. I took off one of my pairs of socks and gave them to her. “It’s kind of late now, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It’s never too late,” I insisted. “They could get a lot worse” She didn’t seem entirely convinced of that, probably because I wasn’t either. But she put them on.

We crossed the bridge over Crooked Creek and found the snowmobile trail. Its sign was barely visible in the gloaming. Still we left the road and went west on the beaten-down path, although it hasn’t received much of a beating this wimpy winter.

Then the other image of the night popped out. “Here comes the moon;” Alex said. He always notices little things like bald eagles and full moons. Sure enough, it rose right above a rounded bluff, like a Roman candle in slow motion. We stopped for a few minutes. “You can see it move,” Alex added. Right again. It was a reassuring sight, and a beautiful one.

We kept walking, and the trail kept getting brighter. Soon we could see our shadows. A full moon in January is no small thing.

That lasted for about 10 minutes, then the clouds smothered the moon. The darkness slowed us a bit. We weren’t quite sure where the trail was, or where Freeburg was, or the Bruening homes that marked our way. A little worry crept over us, just enough for an adventure of this magnitude. But it didn’t matter, and we all knew it. We just had to keep walking and we’d find our way. It’s hard to get lost in the Crooked Creek Valley. You go one way, you come to the river. You go the other, you come to Freeburg.

We finally climbed over one last fence and at 6:10 p.m. we stood on County Road 249. “How much further is it?” Cindy asked. She was worried about her daughter and not herself.

“About a mile,” I replied. That last mile went quickly, and 20 minutes later, we came over the rise to the friendly lights of Little Miami.

The others went into the restaurant first, while I changed shoes at the car that we had left there earlier. Then I walked into the bar with a feeling unlike any I’ve had there before. I was cold and tired, yet proud in a small way of what we had just done. It made the food and fellowship and music seem even better than normal. A good little adventure will do that.

Ice fishing is fun, and maybe you’ll even catch fish ~ January 23, 1986

David Heiller

Warm weather in January brings out the ice fisherman in many people, including me. I’m not a hardcore ice fisherman. I don’t have an ice house, or fancy auger. I don’t take trips to Mille Lacs. I don’t even chew snοose.

Still every year about this time, Ι get the urge to follow a primitive ritual and sit on a slab of ice and stare at two holes with bobbers that don’t move.

My wife sensed it coming last weekend. She announced on Saturday night: “I’ll let you go ice fishing tomorrow if you let me sleep-in in the morning.” Even the thought of getting up with our two kids at 6 a.m. didn't quench the ice fishing thirst.

“You got a, deal,” I replied.

Sunday morning I called Stanley Bonk (in a tired voice) in Willow River, to ask him where a novice might have a little luck fishing this time of year. He said that it was slow all around. “How about Long Lake?” I asked. “Νaw, it’s slow there too,” he answered.

Not to be discouraged, I called Calvin Petry at Petry’s Baits in Finlayson. Owners of bait shops walk a thin line. They can’t lie, yet they have to look on the bright side, stress the positive: “It ain’t too bad,” Calvin said. “Matter of fact, I’m weighing a 20 pound northern from Upper Pine Lake right now.”

“I’m more interested in crappies,” I replied.

Calvin told me of a lake west of Finlayson with reports of crappie action. He described how to get there, where to fish, so with a “dozen” crappie minnows—actually about 50 by Petry’s count—I followed his lead and headed out.

Cindy remained skeptical as I left. “Dave, we’ve been married for five and a half years, and you’ve never brought home a fish from ice fishing.”

“Well, maybe I should go more often,” I reminded her. “Besides, I have a feeling today will be different. I’ve got a hot tip from Petry’s.” The thought crossed my mind that other people might have that same hot tip, but I didn’t express that out loud.

“How many other people have that hot tip?” Cindy asked.

“I used to catch lot of fish through the ice before I was married,” I answered, trying to make a point.

“Then let’s make a deal,” she countered. “You’re responsible for supper tonight.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“No, you’re confident, so bring home some fish for your supper.”

She sent me out of the house with that speech of inspiration, and four hot molasses cookies.

When I got to the lake, there were only five other people there. I made my way to a group of three, standing next to a snowmobile. The ice was riddled with their stains, and a bucket full of crappies. I pretended not to notice. “Catchin’ any?” I asked.

“Νaw,” one answered.

“Been here long?

“Yeah,” another answered.

“Any other good spots on the lake?”

“Over there,” the third answered, pointing to a spot as far away from them as possible.

This is not our photo,
but this is how David fished.
(I was at home with kids.)

I took the hint and ambled away, buckets and auger in tow. Another man, this one with a small white dog, greeted me. Anyone who takes his dog ice fishing can’t be all bad. Sure enough, he had a normal vocabulary, and was friendly to boot. He showed me where to fish for northern, which he was after with a tip-up.

“There are only two or three good spots for crappies really. It’s too shallow here. One’s where those three guys are, but the best is right over there. Just walk that way, you’ll see the holes.”

So I took his advice, and settled down over a couple of Saturday holes by myself. For the first half hour, the bobbers hypnotized me with their stillness, staring me down in their holes. But sure enough, my instinct came through. My left bobber sank to the bottom of the hole, and I pulled the first of eight large crappies from the lake. I lost at least three others, so there is good reason to return to that lake.

When I got home, I kept silent about my modest luck. Cindy didn’t ask. She knew by my silence that I had caught something. So I opened the bucket, and showed the fish to my two-and-a-half year-old son.

“Look at the ice fish, Mama,” he said, and I agreed.

Summer, songs, and saunas ~ January 22, 1987

David Heiller

Let the December winds bellow and blow,

I’m as warm as a July tomato,

There’s peaches on the shelf, potatoes in the bin,

Supper’s ready, everybody come on in

And taste a little of the summer,

My grandma put it all in a jar.

Processing summer to put in jars.

I thought of that song by Greg Brown as I carried four jars of tomatoes in from the freezer. Cindy had promised a spaghetti supper if I would get the tomatoes from the garage. I carried the four cold jars through the January wind in my bare hands, and summer seemed very far away.

The smell of tomato sauce filled the house as Cindy added her spices. Along with the basil and oregano, she added a sprinkle of sunshine, the buzz of a bee and shadow of a barn swallow. After a plate of homemade spaghetti, summer doesn’t seem so distant.

After dinner, I lit the wood stove in the sauna for our weekly bath. By 5:30, the temperature had reached 110 degrees. That’s a good temperature for people who don’t live within 10 miles of Finlayson, where they have an ordinance that all saunas must be at least 200 degrees.

Mollie, our 19-month-old daughter, held on tight as Ι wrapped a bath towel around her and jogged the 20 yards to the sauna.

“Gumpya bumpa allushnee yα-goya,” she chattered in the January wind. Translated: “What the heck are you doing, Dad, trying to freeze my you-know-what?”

Once inside the sauna, she loosened her grip and slid to the floor, squealing in naked delight. She climbed into her bathtub on the low bench, knee high off the floor.

Noah and Momma followed us, in a cloud of steam as I swung open the door for him. Noah made his complaints clearer than his sister. “Oh, Daddy, that was so cold, Ι don’t like that so cold, because it blows my hair and it’s cold.”

“But it’s warm in here, right?” Cindy asked, taking off his robe.

Saunas on cold cold days were always more fun for the 
kids when they had a friend along.

“Yes, but I don’t like that cold and wind,” he repeated, as he climbed to the high bench and into his bathtub. Noah is three and a half years old, and he likes to preface hid statements with “Yes—but,” especially when we try to change the subject.

Cindy and I discussed sauna strategy. “Should we wash Mollie’s hair now?” she asked as I washed the kids with a soapy washcloth. “We can wash it now, before she gets too hot and crabby and we have to take her in.”

“Yes, but if we wash it now, she’ll be crabby and want to go in right away,” I said. I’m a pretty good “yes—but” man myself.

So we let the kids splash a little longer. Noah, on the top bench, found α delightful game, pouring water from his bathtub down onto Mollie’s head.

Mollie hates to get her hair washed by Mom and Dad, much less the older brother. She started yelling. Cindy saw a perfect transition.

“Would you like your hair washed?” she asked. Mollie had already started crawling up into Momma’s lap, but that question stopped her in mid-crawl

“Now,” she answered. I repeated the question, hoping that we had misheard her answer.

Hair washing got easier of
 course, as she got a little older.

“Now.” That was “no.”

By this time, Cindy had tightened her grip on the kid, holding her face up on her lap. Ι grabbed the cup from Noah and poured water on Malika’s head. “Ah done,” Mollie said. “Ah done.”

I scrubbed away, while Mollie repeated her wishful I “Ah done” in between cries and yells. “OK, all done,” I said when we finished.

“Ah done,” Mollie got in the last word.

Noah grabbed the cup back from me, and began pouring water on Malika again. Cindy took the cup from him and poured water on his head. Noah yelled, much louder than Mollie. He can’t stand hair washing, either, much less a cup of plain water for no good reason.

“Well, now you know why Malika doesn’t like it,” Cindy said.

“Yes, but I was just pouring it in her tub,” he said. “Boloney,” Cindy answered. Mollie stood up from her tub. “Ah done,” she announced.

“You want to go in the house?”

“Nah,” she answered.

“Are you sure?”

“Nah,” she repeated. That was yes.

I dried her off, then slipped on my robe, and pulled the towel around her. We plunged through the steam into cold wind. Now the temperature seemed like Miami. Malika didn’t complain.

I fell down on the living room carpet. Sunday night exhaustion, after a sauna, on a cold January night on warm living room floor. There’s nothing quite like it, especially when your daughter curls up on your chest.

Ι reached over and turned the radio on. Greg Brown was singing a song that made the night complete.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb-0ZCqga48

Let the December winds bellow and blow

I’m as warm as a July tomato,

There’s peaches on the shelf, potatoes in the bin

Supper’s ready, everybody come on in

Ί And taste a little of the summer,

My Grandma put it all in jars.

Ice fishing can be nice fishing ~ January 9, 1992

David Heiller

Is there a better sight than to see a bobber sink into a hole in the ice on a warm December day during Christmas vacation?

Let me know, because I can’t think of one.

That’s the first thing we saw, me and Noah and his friend, Joe, out on Fox Lake on Dec. 29. I didn’t even have Noah’s hole scooped out, and there went Joe’s bobber, sinking slowly from sight.

“Set the hook and back away from the hole,” I yelled at Joe, who calmly did just that. A nice crappie soon flopped onto the ice.

Joe, fishing in warmer weather.

We all laughed and talked at the same time. We had been fishing all of 15 seconds, and already we had a keeper. We smiled lustful smiles. We thought we’d have our limits in half an hour, the fish were that hungry. You never know what’s under the ice.

That jinxed us. The fish weren’t THAΤ hungry. Over the next two hours, we ended up with a total of 14 keepers. All but one were caught by Noah and Joe. That was fine with me. I spent most of my time putting minnows on hooks and trying to keep my hands warm. Murphy’s Law 27-G states: When you fish with kids, winter or summer, you don’t catch a lot of fish.

You lower your expectations and have fun watching the kids have fun. You don’t catch fish. At least that was my excuse that day.

Ice fishing is not high science. Eight-year-olds can out fish grown men with the right hole and the right hook and the fight depth and the fight luck. Who knows why?

Sometimes you even get a helping hand. An older guy, Leonard Kiminski, walked over to us soon after we had settled in that afternoon. He told us that he and his friend, John Bentz, were just a few fish shy of their crappie limit, which is 15 each.

Noah and Joey playing in the snow 
with Malika and Queen Ida.

“Fish at about nine feet,” he said. We were at about 12 feet, a foot off the bottom, which conventional wisdom says is proper.

Leonard didn’t have to tell us where the fish were hiding. Not all ice fishermen would do that. Quite the contrary. But Leonard did.

Leonard also nonchalantly remarked that he had caught a nice-sized crappie too. “Come over and take a look,” he said.

The boys were over there in a matter of seconds, and they came running back for me. It was indeed a beauty, about 14 inches long, weighing well over a pound, I guessed.

“And it was the first one we caught today,” Bentz said, with a lustful gleam in his eye that looked pretty familiar.

Not all ice fishing trips are as nice as that one was. Sometimes you stand in the sleet with a raw wind blowing up your shirt. Sometimes the guys next to you only offer four letter words instead of advice. Sometimes you get skunked and cold and wonder why you even bothered.

But even on days like that, you breathe some fresh air and get some exercise and feel a bit better for getting your carcass off the couch for a spell. Who cares who won that football game?

And you never know what’s under the ice.

Pick your Wicker Basket battles ~ January 7, 2004

David Heiller

Blue Corn. Grape Harvest. Barn. Blue Hour. Harvest Gold.

It sounds like a poet describing a Van Gogh painting.

Wicker Basket. Mannered Gold. Venture Violet. Surf Green.

Or maybe an Amish farmer after his first trip to Bissen’s Tavern.

But it’s none of the above. The answer is C, as in Cindy, at a paint store.

This is our electrician wiring a light 
in the entryway. But mostly it is a picture of 
the color of the entryway/kitchen.
It still pleases me.

Yes, those All-American images are colors of paint that are starting to adorn the walls of our new home, and picked out mostly by my fine wife, Cindy.

Tim Serres, our plumber, summed it up best when he took a look at the bedroom that our daughter, Malika, is claiming. “So who’s the Vikings fan?” he asked. Tim, like all good plumbers, has a way of cutting to the chase.

Sorry Tim, that’s not good old Viking purple. That’s Venture Violet, a color that Malika picked out. She takes after her mother.

And that blue in the downstairs bedroom isn’t blue after all. It’s “Wicker Basket” (upper case letters, please).

AND that bedroom color, it’s definitely a shade of red, but guys don’t name paint colors, so it isn’t called “dark red,” it’s called “Grape Harvest” I’m going to spend the next 30 years (hopefully) looking at Grape Harvest” when I wake up.

It may sound like I’m complaining, but I’m not. I got used to Grape Harvest after about a day. And I’ll be ΟΚ with the rest of Cindy’s rainbow when all is said and done, because I trust Cίndy. She is good at decorating, and I have learned to let the Wookie win when it comes to things like that.

But guys are different than gals, if I may make a sweeping generalization, and building a house brings that to diamond sharpness.

Our builder, John Holzworth, reminded me of it the other day. We were standing in the purple glow of Malika’s bedroom, talking about the house.

“I could live in a house this size,” John said, meaning not the size of our entire house, but the size of the bedroom. “I’m never in the house. I’m always in the shop”

If you’ve ever been in John’s shop, you know why that’s the case. Good old Janny Janikowski would have drooled over John’s shop. It’s better equipped than many a high school, and his refrigerator could lure a few customers from the above-mentioned Bissens.

But his point was still sound: guys don’t need all that space, just like they don’t need four different shades of blue.

But guys have learned something since their Neanderthal days. Pick your battles. When Josephine Neanderthal wanted a bigger cave, her knuckle-dragging significant other moved to France and found her one. And when she got tired of the bare walls, she took out her paints and drew some funny looking bison and antelope and men with spears on the walls and ceilings.

I can hear their conversation.

“Hmm, good picture woman”

“T’anks:”

“How you make that color?”

“Mix clay, oil, sumac.”

“What call it?”

“That Harvest Grape:”

“Hmm. And how you make that one?”

“Mix sand, fat, berry. Me call it Wicker Basket.”

“Ugh. Me going out to workshop”

The missing links of Christmas ~ December 30, 1993

David Heiller

Something was missing that I couldn’t put my finger on. Α good Christmas had just passed, but something was missing.

Illness and cold weather sure weren’t absent. My brother-in-law had missed three days of work before driving seven hours to our house. He arrived sick and exhausted, and had no appetite.

His daughter ran a 103 degree fever on Saturday afternoon and had to go to the emergency room. Then Cindy got sick to her stomach that night. You know what that means.

Mother Nature topped this off with 28 degrees below zero a few hours later. We felt like prisoners in a holiday hospital.

Our typical Christmas involves a lot of this,
not so for the Christmas of 1993.

Yes, there had been presents and church and games of 500 and good feelings all around. But something was missing, and I didn’t find it until Sunday afternoon.

That’s when my sister-in-law Therese and I went skiing. The temperature rose to nine below zero, the warmest it would get. So we took off down the snowmobile trail toward Birch Creek on our cross country skis.

Oh, it was cold at first. We skied downhill, which created a wind-chill, and every exposed bit of flesh froze. Eyelashes coated with ice. Beards turned white—mine did, that is. Therese just had a frozen face.

Therese said she didn’t know how long she could make it. Her shoes were too small, and she had on her city gloves. I skied on ahead of her. I knew she would soon forget about the cold, and she did, and so did Ι.

Therese caught up to me at the Methodist cemetery. We skied together and talked as best we could. Our lips couldn’t move like normal, yet it was pleasant. I think we both needed to be out of the sick house. We needed to feel the fresh air, and burn a few Chrίstmas cookies off our waist line.

After we turned around, Therese pulled ahead of me. I tried to keep up, and I couldn’t. She had me beat by 50 yards by the time we reached the car. That was all right.

I wheezed and coughed all the way home. Therese, who is 11 years younger than me, joked that I should quit smoking. I don’t smoke. But that was all right too.

Because when I stepped out of the car, I felt like skiing another two miles. The cold weather seemed like an invigorating friend, not an icy prison guard. The household didn’t seem so sick inside either.

I lit a sauna. After the stove pipe turned cherry red, Cindy and I went in. I washed her back. We talked about our Christmas. Saunas are good for that. They are a nice way to end a hectic holiday.

It was a hot sauna. I ran outside and rolled in the fresh snow for at least three seconds. That isn’t bad considering the temperature had dropped a few more degrees.

(If you think skiing at nine below is cold, try rolling in the snow in nothing but your birthday suit.)

Looking back, I see now that two things had been missing at Christmas.

One: good health. You can’t take that for granted. This Christmas reminded me of that.

Two: enjoying nature. Sounds like a cliché, but if it is, it’s a darned good one. Going outside, taking a hike, going skiing, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, ice fishing, taking a sauna. These go hand in hand with a Christmas get-together. You don’t realize how important they are until you are either too cold or too sick, or both, to do them.

Rolling in the snow is optional.

Christmas collateral for Collin ~ December 28, 1995

David Heiller

  One of the first things my nephew, Collin, asked when he awoke at our house last Saturday morning was if he could ride on my tractor. He remembered doing that last Christmas, which isn’t bad for a three year old.

So he climbed up onto my lap on the Oliver 66, and we went careening down County Road 168, Collin steering and me trying not to smile too much.

Then a little later, he asked if he could use the outhouse. We have an indoor bathroom, but I still like the outhouse. Maybe Collin’s way of saying thank you for the tractor ride was to pay his respects to my outhouse.

Collin, mid-leap

So I smiled again and we put on boots and coats and walked between snowbanks to the outhouse. It’s a two-holer, which fascinated Collin. He couldn’t make up his mind, which for some people could be a disaster, myself included. He had to open each cover to make an inspection of the contents. Then he chose the one on the left.

Before he sat down, I asked him if he wanted to use the potty chair. It has hung on a nail in our outhouse ever since Malika outgrew it seven years ago. A morning glory vine was entwined around it.

It’s a pretty classy potty chair, made of wood, with wooden arms and even two straps with which to secure the child. I’ve never figured out the purpose of those straps. Maybe it was a way to punish little junior in the good old days. “Eat your supper or I’ll strap you into the potty chair!”

For Collin, it was love at first sight. I untangled the vines, and set it on the toilet seat, and Collin pulled himself up and eased himself down and didn’t even complain when his rear end came in contact with some very chilly wood.

He said he wanted to take the potty chair home, and I said fine, knowing how much his mom and dad would like that, so he carried it into the house. “Maybe we can stain it and make it look pretty,” I told him.

“What’s stain?” he asked.

“It’s like painting,” I answered. Collin said he liked to paint. So I placed the potty chair over the wood stove, where Collin would be able to admire it all weekend and dream of staining.

The tractor and the potty chair became important collateral with Collin for the next two days. You need collateral for kids like Collin, who has an uncanny sense of stubbornness. He’s like a pair of Wells-Lamont gloves: stubbb-born! For example, he usually just plain refuses to eat at meal time. His lower lip puffs out, and he gets the saddest look, like a prisoner heading into the gas chamber, a prisoner who hasn’t eaten his last supper.

More than once, I coaxed Collin into eating by reminding him about future tractor rides. If that didn’t work, I mentioned how fun it was going to be to stain the potty chair, if he cleaned his plate.

Most of the time it worked. But not with the pajamas on Sunday night. We were getting ready to open presents, and Collin’s parents told him to put on his pajamas. He insisted that his mother help him. But his mother told him that she was busy, and that Dad would help.

That meant it was Wells-Lamont time for Collin. Out came the lip and the hang-dog look of utter despair. He wanted his mother to help him put on his pajamas! Dad wasn’t good enough, Cindy wasn’t good enough, Malika wasn’t good enough. Even the tractor and potty chair didn’t budge him.

Fine, he was told calmly, then he just wouldn’t get to open his presents.

It didn’t take Collin long to figure out that those presents were the heaviest collateral he had faced in his three years of life. Forget the tractor and the potty chair. This was Collateral with a capital C.: a pile of booty three feet high that he had been shaking and squeezing for the past 36 hours.

Truly and truly, Collin and David were "Brothers for life". I think they still are.

So he sheepishly asked if his Uncle David could help him with his pajamas, and I carefully considered the question and answered yes, and tried not to grin again.

Then Christmas hit full force, with presents unwrapped and toys revealed and wrapping paper everywhere, and a general blur of holiday cheer and non-stop eating and groaning and trips to the outhouse which finally cleared Sunday evening, when Collin asked if he could stain the potty chair.

So I took out two brushes, and he spread newspapers on the kitchen table, and we stained the potty chair, Collin and I. That sealed our bond. Once you stain a potty chair with somebody, you are brothers for life.

Collin proved that point a little later, after he had taken a bath, and Mr. Wells-Lamont didn’t want his dad to help him put on his pajamas. He had to have Uncle David, and this time I did so with a smile, although I forgot to pull on his underpants, which he gently pointed out. 

Hey, nobody’s perfect.