Missed anyone’s birthday lately? ~ August 3, 2000

David Heiller

“Happy birthday Cindy.” Hazel Serritslev said that to my wife on Tuesday morning when we got to work.

At the office of the Askov American,
where birthdays were never an after-thought.

Good old Hazel doesn’t forget birthdays. She even bakes a cake for everyone at work when their birthdays roll around, which happens once a year, so I’m told.

I’m not as good as Hazel at remembering birthdays.

In fact, when Hazel said “Happy birthday, Cindy,” a moment of pure surprise hit me, and it really did feel like a ton of bricks.

I had totally forgotten this momentous occasion for my wife, Cynthia Anna Olson Heiller.

Before I had a chance to say anything, Cindy walked to the front of the office, where Cindy Jensen greeted her with another “Happy birthday.”

I expect if I had turned on WCCO radio, I would have heard the announcer wishing Cindy a happy birthday.

1960... I loved that cool cake my grandma made for me.

I apologized to Cindy, but she answered truthfully, “Don’t worry about it. I’m used to it.” I hate to admit it, because I consider myself an organized person. But when it comes to remembering birthdays, I’m a failure. If I’m lucky, it will come to me a day or two in advance, usually with the help of someone saying something like, “What are you doing for Cindy’s birthday?”

Then I can clear my throat and say, “Well, we’ll probably take in a movie, or maybe go for a bike ride,” all the while breathing a big sigh of relief that I’ll remember this time.

A friend of mine told me on Tuesday (after she asked what I was doing for Cindy’s birthday) that I should write it on the calendar. That’s not a bad idea. I write haircut appointments and doctor visits on the calendar. Why not birthdays?

It isn’t just Cindy, by the way. It’s Noah and Mollie and Mom and Sharon and Glenn and Kathy and Mary and Jeanne and Danny and on and on. In fact, I sometimes don’t remember my own birthday.

Maybe a shock collar type of device would work too, like you put on a Doberman pinscher. It could go on the wrist like a watch. You could program birthdays into it, then have it send about 200 volts into you a week before the event. Unless you shut it off first. That might help you remember.

I’m saying “you” here because I’m sure that, other people have this problem too, right? In fact, if you have this same problem, please write to me. I’d like to share your stupidity—I mean forgetfulness—with the 2,000 readers of the Askov American. We could even start a support group. Individuals Devoting Intimacy On Their Spouses. If the acronym fits, wear it.

Move over, Barbie: Kirsten’s here ~ July 29, 1993

David Heiller

You can’t help but feel sorry for Barbie. The blonde one there in the rocking chair next to me. She’s lying face down like she’s crying. If she’s not, she should be.

Kirsten Larson has taken away her little girl.

Kirsten is new to our family. She has flaxen hair that came in a Swedish braid. Her eyes match my daughter's eyes: a light blue. (In fact some people think she bears a striking resemblance to me.) She has leather shoes, nice socks with no holes, pantalettes, a dress with an apron, and a bonnet.

Kirsten is famous. She has had books written about her. The first one is Meet Kirsten. It tells of her family’s trip to their new home in America in 1854, of their struggles as immigrants on a farm in Minnesota. Mollie has the book.

Malika and her Kirsten doll

My daughter, Mollie, put Kirsten in her back-pack on Sunday night, July 18, and we rode our bikes to the local ice cream store. As we were standing in line, a tiny little girl came up and stared wide-eyed at Kirsten, who was poking her head out of the pack.

They were eye level. I’m sure the little girl thought Kirsten was a real baby.

She’s not. She is a doll, complete with pioneer accessories and a family history. Mollie saved her allowance and birthday and Christmas money for 10 months to buy her.

My grumpy reaction at first was that Kirsten was too expensive and too commercial. After all, a real-life Kirsten didn't have an $80 doll in 1854. She had a rag doll at best, and they both had to walk barefoot through the snow, uphill both ways.

My wife pointed out that Kirsten is an educational, high quality toy. And even I have to admit that. When I pick Kirsten up, she feels almost like a real baby. Maybe I’ll end up playing with dolls yet.

And Mollie loves her. They can play together for hours on end. That’s almost as much fun for me watch as it is for Mollie.

This past Sunday night, Mollie packed for a weekend camping trip that we’re taking in a couple of weeks. For Mollie, at least half the fun of vacations is packing. I tried to talk her out of  packing two weeks in advance, but failed, as usual.

After half an hour she showed me what she had done. Along with her own suitcase and sleeping bag, she had packed a small bag for Kirsten, including a tiny doll.

A doll for a doll. You can’t get any more real than that.

Meanwhile, the Barbies, all five of them, have fallen on lonely days. They lay around face down on the rocking chair, or stuffed in a plastic bucket in the closet. Their hour-glass figures don’t measure up anymore. Kirsten looks like she’s been drinking milk and eating butter. The Barbies look like they throw up after every meal.

So I guess I’ll take Kirsten after all. I know Mollie has.

Thank you, Good Samaritans ~ July 17, 2003

David Heiller 

The Good Samaritans came through again: It happened last Friday afternoon.

Our daughter, Malika, was on her way to a wedding in Redwood Falls. About half way there, she had a fender bender. It wasn’t a bad one, but it did something to the car she was driving so that she could not shift out of drive.

She was an adult, but
when things go really wrong:
this is who she is in your heart.

It’s an automatic transmission, so Mollie was fine as long as she didn’t shut the engine off.

So she pulled off the road and shut the engine off.

She claims I told her to do that. Maybe I did. When she called Cindy and me, we might have panicked a bit. We were traveling ourselves, and felt very helpless trying to talk our daughter through the situation while we were in our own vehicle.

So Mollie was stuck on the side of Highway 2, somewhere east of Cass Lake, in a car that wouldn’t start.

I called Sebald Motors, thinking they might have a solution for me. They’ve saved me more than once. But about all Rich Thomsen could do was diagnose the problem over the phone. “Sounds like a shift cable,” he said.

We don’t have AAA, so that tow-truck option was out. We didn’t have a phone book for the Cass Lake area. It appeared that Mollie was on her own in the middle of nowhere, and that was scary.

Enter the Good Samaritans.

A middle-aged couple that was heading the other direction stopped. Mollie told them what had happened. So they turned around and drove her into Cass Lake—10 or 15 miles, Mollie said. The man found a garage with a tow truck and arranged for a tow. Then they were back on their way. They were going to a wedding.

Mollie filled us in on all this as it was happening in a couple short phone calls. As she did, relief washed over me like a cool wave on a hot day, and I thought to myself, “I knew that would happen.”

I had for a few tense minutes forgotten about the goodness of my fellow man and woman.

They did what you or I probably would have done, what we have done in the past and will probably end up doing a time or two in the future, if we are lucky.

Yes, it’s good to be on both the giving and receiving end of that line.

Parents: Moms, Dads always
want to be there for their kids.
But sometimes we can only be
grateful for the ones who are willing
to be there when we can't be.

The tow truck took Mollie and the car to Bemidji, to a Ford dealership, where it turned out that Rich was right, it needed a new shift cable. Another Samaritan appeared there, a receptionist who drove Mollie to a store and restaurant where she could pass the time.

Then there was the Samaritan at the motel who let Mollie watch TV in the lobby until Cindy could arrive with a ride home.

I don’t know the names of any of the Good Samaritans that helped our daughter. But they proved that some things haven’t changed for about 2,000 years.

We live in bad times right now. Soldiers are dying in a senseless war every day. People are losing their jobs. We are fearful of the next shoe that will drop.

But people are good, and that is a priceless thing to keep in mind. The people who helped Mollie brought that fundamental truth back to Cindy and me.

For their help, and for their reminder, I give them my thanks.

Nap time ~ June 27, 2002

David Heiller

No, I’m not writing an article about my cute little kids. I’ll leave that to Julie. (I like your columns, Julie!)

This is much more controversial. Something befitting a cigar-chomping editor who keeps a bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer.

That leaves me out, too.

This camping stuff is exhausting business.

I want to talk about the delicate subject of naps.

I am sold on naps, and it’s time to proclaim my faith, publicly, without shame or fear of ridicule.

For some reason, our society has given naps a bum rap. Don’t believe me? The next time you see someone who is dog-tired in the middle of the day suggest that he or she go take a nap.

He’ll either look at you like you’re crazy. Hey, it ain’t macho to take a little-bitty nap.

Or he’ll smile self-consciously and say, “Yeah right,” as he pours himself another cup of coffee.

I must admit I still have a little of that latter chap in me. But more and more I am losing that worry about what people might think.

"Taking a 20" with Rosie standing guard.

I call it “Taking a 20.” It sounds better than “Taking a nap,” because, yes, the word nap does carry a bit of Sesame Street with it.

“Take a 20,” now that has a ring to it!

It refers to 20 minutes. That’s all it takes to refresh me. It’s a miracle in a way.

Many afternoons, usually at about 2 p.m., I get groggy. I type more slowly. Words don’t come out quite the way I want them to. I even start to walk funny. I’ve been that way for as long as I can recall.

Sleep reading. Is this what
happens if you don't "take a 20"?

This trait really hit home after I had eye surgery on June 5. Every afternoon, fatigue would hit me like a hammer. My eye was telling my body I needed to rest, and I figured I had better heed that advice. Doctors orders, you know. So whether at work or at home, I would lie down. Twenty minutes later, I would wake up feeling like a new person. It was a good reminder of something I’ve known for a long time—that naps really make a positive difference in my day.

And 20 minutes is all it takes. I lie down, look at my watch, and tell myself I’m going to wake up in 20 minutes, and I do just that, almost to the minute. The body has a built-in clock.

Often I don’t even sleep in my naps. I can feel my body start to drift and relax, like I’m doing a back float in water. That’s all it takes.

A lot of people are discovering the benefits of naps. Some progressive companies are even endorsing nap times, and providing places for employees to do it.

The National Sleep Foundation estimates that drowsy workers cost U.S. employers an estimated $18 billion in lost productivity every year. (I just looked that up on the internet.)

We LOVE to take
photos of sleeping people.

There’s even a book on the subject, by William and Camille Anthony, called The Art of Napping at Work. This past spring they promoted the Monday after the Daylight Savings; Time change as the first National Workplace Napping Day, touting a 20-minute workplace nap for “the amazing effect it has on productivity, alertness and well being.” (Another bit of internet trivia.)

In our case, we have a cot in our darkroom that works great.

Some countries have a built in nap time in their day. When I taught school in Morocco from 1977 to 1979, every day from 12 to 2, students and teachers would leave the school and go home, eat lunch, and take a nap. It really made a lot of sense for getting through the rest the day.

So there, I’ve said it. Naps are good. If you a nap-taker, you know what I mean. If you aren’t give it a try. Take a 20.

The Reno Bottoms comes through ~ July 14, 2004

David Heiller

We pushed off the grassy bank and into the dark waters of the Reno Bottoms on Saturday morning, heading for parts unknown.

A good canoe trip is like that, and there are definitely parts unknown in the bottoms. We had a couple fishing poles and a couple hours. Is there anything in life sweeter than that?

My nephew, Alex, sat in the middle, behind his girlfriend, Laura. I was in the stern.

View of the river on the way down to the spillway, 
which begins the Reno Bottoms adventure.

As we worked our way along the eastern shore of Running Slough, the feeling of freedom that comes from being in a canoe hit me. No worries about getting hung up. When that happens, and it did many times that day, you paddle over and retrieve your lure. It almost always comes free from the right angle. No worries about making the perfect cast either. It’s hard not to make the perfect cast when you can paddle to the perfect spot.

Alex did just that, and had a nice tussle for about 30 seconds before bringing in a large-mouth bass.

“Must be over two pounds,” he said as Laura did an appropriate amount of oohing and ahhing.

“No way,” I said. My pride was at stake.

We settled at two pounds, where it will remain until someone else catches it and proves us wrong.

We paddled south, past an island, then along the right hand shore. It was swept clean by the river, except for one gnarled tree. Was that the same one where Danny and I used to catch bull-heads in 1967? Probably not, but it brought back some fond memories, which I shared, though sparingly, lest I bore these two youngsters.

“Look, there’s an eagle,” Alex said, pointing to the left. “Behind the trees?”

I caught a glimpse of movement, a flash of white. I’m always a little late spotting birds, and Alex is always a little early. But it was still fun to share excitement, which was bubbling just below the surface of us all.

I spotted an orange bobber hanging from a stick in the water and retrieved it. It was in good working order. “A sign of good luck,” I said, which is not true, but it sounds good in a canoe in the Reno Bottoms. It prompted another story, about the time I found a spinner in Glacier Lake, then caught a 22-inch rainbow trout with it before losing the lure a few casts later.

The channel took us further and further south. Two deer took off ahead of us on the right shore. Herons flew up at almost every bend. We must have seen 50 on the trip. Sometimes they scolded us in a prehistoric voice.

The water was low. We could usually stick our paddles down and hit the bottom. You could see by the debris on shore that the water had been at least three feet higher only a few weeks earlier, a testament to our very wet summer.

A flash of silver caught my eye in a tree branch. We paddled over, and I retrieved a Wally Diver, a great little trolling lure. My dull old rainbow trout story had new life. I put the lure on my line.

Ducklings led the parade

As we came around another of the endless bends, a flock of young ducks joined us. More accurately, we joined them. The mother and father flew off in a huff, but the ducklings, which numbered at least 10, weren’t quite ready for that. They didn’t know what to think of us, and paddled ahead like the color guard in a parade. Maybe that’s what mesmerized us, watching those ducks, and the eagles that Alex kept spotting and I kept missing, and the herons, and the ever-changing maple trees and beaver dams and jumping fish. Because at some point, maybe two hours in, we realized that turning around was not an option, that we should just keep paddling, hook up with Pickerel Slough below the second spillway, go north, and paddle home on the big river.

And that’s what we did. I made the announcement, in the form of a request, but Alex and Laura trusted me, mostly. An expression of doubt in the plan would have been as shocking as seeing a moose step out of the woods in front of us.

The ducklings left us at about hour number three. We had slowly gained on them, and we were wondering what their next move would be. It came like a burst of fireworks, when they all churned their tiny legs at the same time and exploded down the channel ahead of us, going in all directions. I didn’t know something that little could move that fast. They formed their flotilla again, a long way ahead of us, and finally gave us the slip in a side channel.

The river above the Reno bottoms

I kept casting with my new lure, and finally had a strike. What a fish: a channel cat at least nine inches long! It caused us all to smile. Not the stuff that legends are made of.

We hit the channel from the second spillway and started paddling north, against the current. We passed a couple fishing boats. “You guys are going in the wrong direction;” one guy said.

Alex started to worry. “Maybe we should ask directions?”

“You never ask directions when you are fishing,” I said, then added a bit later, “I think it’s just around that next bend?”

I should not have said that, because the destination is never around the next bend, especially in the Reno Bottoms, which seems to have more bends than an old garden hose.

So we paddled hard, and didn’t say much. Every good trip requires a struggle, and that was ours, wondering when (and for Alex if) we would ever get to the spillway.

Then there it was, the roar of water, the spill-way, and a couple fishing boats to boot.

It was a good feeling, hitting the shore, stretching our legs, and feeling that we had reached our goal.

The last leg home was all downhill. Seeing the huge river to the north, and the big hills on both sides, lifted our spirits after the closeness of the slough. We started talking again, and we paddled with the energy that comes when the end is in sight. Half an hour later we were back where we started, ending a good trip, and on the receiving end of an unexpected gift from the good old Reno Bottoms.

It’s just a snake… isn’t it? ~ July 7, 1984

David Heiller

Snakes. Just the word sends a shiver up most people’s backbone.

I don’t mean that everybody is afraid of snakes. Most people aren’t afraid of snakes, once they spot them and get over the initial shiver. It’s that first sighting, when you see the grass move and the snake slither, that makes everybody jump.

This first heart-pounding surprise is what gives snakes a bad name. Take a group of kids, and put a snake in their midst, and that snake’s future will be gravely in doubt. I remember when I as about 12, some younger kids caught a big water snake by the river, carried it up to Main Street, and proudly killed it for all the town to see. I saw it, and yelled at them. “Why did you have to kill the snake?” They looked at me like I was crazy. “It’s just a snake,” they mumbled.

Of course, the other strike which snakes have against them is that some are dangerous. Marlin Perkins will testify to that—remember that Wild Kingdom episode when a python nearly squeezed him to death in an African swamp?

(I presume there were some people off-camera watching very closely, waiting for a signal to come to the rescue. Plus he had good insurance from Mutual of Omaha.)

Grandma Schnick

    There aren’t many pythons in Minnesota, but there are rattlesnakes. In southeastern Minnesota, where I spent my first 17 years, rattlesnakes were killed every summer. For all the running I and my cousins did in the hills and woods, it’s surprising we never stumbled upon one. The only one I saw in the wild happened to meet me right in town, in July, 1969. I had just finished mowing the parsonage lawn, and was heading home, when I nearly stepped on a large timber rattler. It was a mottled brown, about 18 inches long, just lying there uncoiled. I thought about letting the snake go on its way, but the sound of kids playing a block away ended that idea. A well-aimed shovel put the snake in the dump, and gave me a trophy of nine rattles.

My Grandma Schnick has always warned about snakes. She will be the first to admit that snakes are her least favorite creature on earth. Anytime anyone goes hiking in the woods, she says, “Now you just take a stick with you, for snakes.” Then she usually follows that advice with the most recent rattlesnake story to drive home her point.

Grandma and my mother came up for a visit last week. It was a pleasant three-day stay. On Saturday, we went to the Duluth Zoo, and happened to see two snake exhibits. One of them had about 10 snakes in a large cage. The snakes were lying on top of each other. You could see Grandma shiver, even on the other side of the thick glass walls.

Oh, the outhouse!

    When we got back home from the zoo, I started working in the kitchen, while Grandma went to use the outhouse (we have no indoor bathroom). After just a short time, I heard a fast pounding on the door. There stood Grandma. “David, grab a stick, there’s a snake in the outhouse,” she said in a very urgent tone of voice.

I carried the broom which I was holding and pounded down to the outhouse. I had no intention of hurting the garter snake, and Grandma knew it. Still, I peeked into the small room, spotted a rusty old coffee can, and jumped back, heart pounding.

“Did you see it? Is it there?” Grandma asked.

“No, it’s just a coffee can,” I answered, sheepishly.

Of course, the snake had long gone. Still it was a snake, and it reminded me of all this. I must admit that I still like to carry a stick with, me when I walk in the woods. Even though there aren’t any poisonous snakes around here. Are there?