Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller My son came home from school two weeks ago with a trombone. I felt like the man who watched his mother-in. law drive off a cliff in his new Cadillac. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand, Cindy and I want our children to take up an instrument. It’s good to learn tο read music. It’s a good school activity. He’ll get in with a good bunch of kids. Music is just plain good. Malika sent me this photo as a homemade postcard.  (A trick she learned from her Daddy.)  She and David loved to perform  together both in public and  in the kitchen. They didn't play  together nearly  enough, though . But a trombone? By an 11-year-old? In a small house, where lives a man who can hear stairs creak at 50 paces? We tested it out on Friday night. I was playing the banjo in the kitchen, which is the best room i n the world for any musical inst rument. Noah and our daughter, Malika, were playing with puzzles in the living ro...

David Heiller Grandma and Malika at the cabin. (1990) Cindy’s mother, Lorely, was diagnosed with cancer on Saturday, October 15. Lorely spent ten rough days in the hospital, and will spend many more days at home, recovering and taking chemotherapy. Cindy has been gone nearly all of the time since the cancer was discovered. I’m realizing in a hurry how hard it is to be a single parent. Lorely’s illness is making me appreciate both Lorely and Cindy more than I ever have. Many thoughts have crossed my mind about Lorely since the illness was discovered. She has so many good qualities, like her love for her family and her generosity. She had strength enough to raise three children as a single parent without child support payments or extra finan­cial help. I have great respect for that. People usually don’t think about qualities like this in a parent until the parent is facing illness or death, which is a little late. Sometimes too late. But that’s not clear in Lorely’s ...

David Heiller We lost a friend on Saturday, a century old friend that we have known for the past six years. When we moved to our homestead in May, 1981, this friend welcomed us. He stood erect to the southwest of the house, leaning over the house towering above us, a full 70 feet. He made us feel at home, just as he made the family of orioles feel at home in their swaying nest our first two summers here. Orioles love elm trees. After the elm was felled, it started snowing.   Noah grabbed an  umbrella  and played  jack-in-the-box in the hollow stump.  The hollow stump held  flowers for many  years  before that too, had to be removed. But the next year, 1984, the orioles did not return. Our elm tree showed us why. A few of the outer limbs had turned brown in June, their leaves shriveling too early in the summer. The orioles weren’t taking any chances. Dutch elm disease had arrived. Still, for the next two summers, the elm...

David Heiller Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death... Macbeth spoke those words at the end of a bitter life of power and betrayal. And now they are coming back to haunt me through the words of my four-year-old daughter. Mollie hasn’t started reading Shakespeare yet. She’s not even reading Olga Da Polga, although she listens to Cindy read it every night at bedtime. But on the subject of “tomorrow”, she can keep up with Bill Shakespeare just fine, thank you. It usually starts the previous night, when we are saying goodnight, lying in her bed. Mollie starts by seeking promises. “Can I wear my heart dress tomorrow?” she’ll ask. “Uh-huh,” I’ll answer in a dull voice. Mollie has a way of wearing your voice down to a dull edge by seven in the evening. If it is real dull, she’ll move boldly on: “Can I go to Day Care tomorrow?” Uh-huh. “Can I stay at Bobby-Jo’s house ...

David Heiller Chicago slipped by the train window last Friday. Corn fields turned to suburbs, then tenement houses and warehouses topped with razor wire. Then tall buildings that blotted out the sky. At the Chicago Art Institute. We got off the train and hailed a taxi for the Chicago Art Institute, Cindy, and my sister Kathy and me. The cabbie, a guy about my age, figured me for a tourist right away. I don’t know how he saw that so quickly. Perhaps my mouth hung ajar a bit too widely, trying to take in a city I’ve read about my whole life but never quite managed to visit. “We’ve been planning this trip for 25 years;” I said. “We had to sell our house and newspaper first.” That got a laugh, although I’m not sure why. It was true! Nine dollars later he dropped us off at the steps of a huge building guarded by huge lions on a huge boulevard lined with huge buildings. I guess that sums up Chicago for me. It not only has broad shoulders, it has huge broad shoulders. ...

David Heiller It happened so fast that I can’t say for sure how it occurred. Maddie had just pulled in a nice walleye, and she gave me the honor of taking it off her lure. She could have done it herself, but I had offered and she had accepted. I took out my trusty Leatherman, opened the pliers, and was pulling at the hook when the walleye gave a mighty shrug and the next thing I knew, a hook was seriously stuck in the little finger of my right hand. Grace and Maddie in the front of David's canoe The fish was still flopping on one end of the Zip lure, and Maddie was pulling the line tight enough to land a 20-pound northern — or in this case a 230-pound German — on the other. Those, two actions drove the hook in one side of my finger and out the other. I hollered something that can’t be repeated here, and the walleye flopped off and Maddie loosened her line, and I sat looking at a big problem. Everything had been perfect up to that point. We were on a seclu...