One final lesson from Grandma ~ February 2, 1989

David Heiller

Grandma Schnick taught us many things.

Grandma taught us to love Colby cheese, long-horn style, cheese that broke like a jigsaw puzzle in little hands. She taught us to love hot dish and hominy and soft ice cream from her old refrigerator, and Jello with apricots on Sunday when company came, “Eyeball Jello” we called it, and chicken which we had to eat all the meat off the bone the way Grandma said Grandpa always did.

Stella Schnick a.k.a Grandma Schnick
September 3, 1895- March 8, 1989

Grandma taught us to play cribbage, and though she always pegged a double-run-of-eight every hand, she let us win often enough to keep playing.

She taught us to watch baseball games on her Zenith TV while she chattered on the couch in the background and we groaned at Sandy Koufax throwing a 2-0 shutout in the seventh game of the ‘65 Series.

She taught us Mother Goose, reading while we sat on her lap in the rocking chair from a thick book without covers which she kept on the bottom of her treadle sewing machine.

Grandma Schnick and Noah

Grandma taught us to say things like “For Heaven’s sake,” and “For goodness sake,” and “For pity sake,” when our friends were saying other phrases like, well, yes, we said them too.

She taught us to take care of tools, to put hammers and saws back in their places, to keep a whetstone handy to touch up the scythe like she said Grandpa used to do.

Grandma taught us to give a slice of bread and an egg to the bums who slept in the fire hall across the street at night and called on our house, an easy mark, in the morning.

She taught us to watch Jeopardy, and Hollywood Squares, and to listen to Paul Harvey every noon on the radio after the whistle rang.

Grandma taught us to say “Thank you” and “Please” and to talk to old people, because she always told us when some young person would not stop and talk to her, and when they would, until we knew which was the proper thing to do, until we knew the difference between a polite person and a “whippersnapper.”

She taught us to listen for her come creaking down the 17 steps from her home upstairs, then hit the porch with her click-clack-clickety-clack hard heels across the cement porch, sparks a-flying, or so we’d imagine.

Grandma taught us how a mother helps her daughter without a husband raise eight kids, ages one to 10.

She taught us what a grandmother was all about.

She taught us as children, and as adults, and she taught our children too. For 93 years, she taught.

She taught us each something different, yet she taught us one thing the same: she taught us how to love, and so how to live. Now, as we kneel one by one like pilgrims at her side and hold her thin hand, and stare at her china face and see her eyes glisten and her mouth smile slightly for one last hug and kiss, Grandma has taught us one final thing: how to say goodbye.

Thank you, Grandma, for that.

Clock radio confounds Dad ~ February 7, 1985

David Heiller

Have you noticed how complicated life is getting? I’m not exactly an old timer, but even in my 31 years, things have gotten pretty sticky. A good example is soda pop. Just 20 years ago, you had a choice of cola, root beer, orange, maybe Seven-Up. Sugar free? Yes, if you could stand the after-taste of an industrial drain pipe.

Noah with his 'I'm pretty clever' look.

Now, there are regular flavors covering all colors of the rainbow, with sugar-free that tastes as good as regular, plus decaffeinated, and sugar-free decaffeinated.

Radios are another good example. When I was a kid, we had one radio in the house. It sat on the buffet in the living room, with an orange face lit from within by a small light bulb. Two knobs handled the works, the left one for turning it on and controlling the volume, the right for tuning.
Saturday nights my oldest brother would bring it into the our bedroom and set in on the dresser next to the bed. He ruled over it with an iron hand tuning the dial to 1410 to listen to Lindsey Shannon play the top 25 hits. I never heard the number one song at midnight. Sleep would usually come at number 10. Then I’d have to ask one of my brothers the next morning which song was number one. Was it Duke of Earl, Town Without Pity, or Pied Purple People Eater?

That radio was a simple affair, perhaps matching the memories of a man looking back at his childhood. Our bedroom radio of today, however, is another, animal altogether. It is probably the closest thing to a computer I will ever own.

The radio has 12 knobs, buttons, and switches. It sets on my wife’s side of the bed. She too rules it with an iron hand, for the simple reason that I do not know how to operate the darn thing.

In fact, my 19-month-old son understands the radio better than I do. One afternoon last week, when Noah and I were lying on the bed, he started pushing buttons on the radio. Music began to play.

“Deet,” he said with a smile of mastery. Neat.

"Here, Daddy, do you want to
play with my firetruck?"

He started pushing more buttons. The music stopped.

“Deet,” he repeated, smiling. Neat.

He pushed more buttons, working his way down the row of knobs and switches. Music resumed. Noah smiled.

“Deet!” Neat.

That was enough for me. “Let’s go downstairs and play with your cars and trucks,” I suggested. He slid off the bed, while I turned to shut off the radio. I tried the manual on-off. No luck. How about the selector switch, with choice of buzzer, radio, and off? No luck.

The volume, no that wouldn’t work. The radio switch from a.m. to f.m.? Huh-­uh. The side button that controls the clock face from bright light to low light? No help there.

I kept pressing. Doze, sleep, time-set fast, time-set slow, alarm set. Nothing would shut it off. “Deet,” I said and followed Noah downstairs; the radio still playing.

My wife and son can have the radio. I’ll stick to toy cars and trucks.

Snowshoes make winter easier to take ~ January 16, 1997

David Heiller

While filing out of church last Sunday, I ran into Bill Hall of Moose Lake.

Bill and his wife, Lou, used to own Moose Lake Florists. They sold it last year. They are retired. So I figured they must be going to head south soon.

I asked Bill about that as we slowly walked out of church. He answered that he hasn’t had enough of winter yet to head south.

Not enough winter? Some people would disagree.

I sensed that the notion of going south for the winter didn’t appeal to Bill. He explained it to me. There’s a reason people who live in the north live longer than people from the south, he said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Going through four seasons is good for a person, he answered. There’s something about those extreme seasonal changes that is healthy.

That’s especially true if you are active, I said. If you snowshoe or ski or split wood in the winter, it should make you a healthier person.

My snowshoes, on Malika's feet.
~ Thanks to Malika for the photo.

We shook the pastor’s hand and went our separate ways. But Bill’s brief comment got me to thinking.

You can sit in your house and watch TV all winter, but you’re missing the point if you do that, if you don’t experience the change of seasons. If you don’t experience the season.

Oh-oh. I’m feeling preachy. I feel the Sermon of the Snowshoe comin’ on. Brothers and sisters! Listen and be saved from the dreary wintah! You don’t need a trailer park in Arizonah when you have a state park in Minnesotah!

“Yah sure,” you say. “Throw another log in the woodstove, Gladys, it’s chilly in this old farm house. And listen to what that crazy Heiller is writing about now. He LIKES winter.”

So call me crazy. Add my wife to the list too, and about 400,000 other people.

An Autumn view of our woods from across the field.

Snowshoes help. This is turning out to be the perfect winter for snowshoeing. Cindy and I have been doing a lot of it on our property this winter.

The snow is so deep that you need snowshoes to go anywhere besides the outhouse. And who wants to go there in the winter? I’m not that crazy.

We take a loppers and a folding camp saw with us and cut the branches and brush that try to tangle us up. Now we have all kinds of trails through the woods.

At first it was hard making the trails. Even with snowshoes, we’d sink in a foot. That’s tough walking. When you’re breaking trail, you have an extra five pounds on each foot.

But the wind has packed the snow down. Now it is much easier. And once the trails are made, you don’t sink at all. It’s like having little highways in the woods.

Even when it’s way below zero, snowshoeing has been fun. You just have to keep moving. And I always take a bottle of water with me. Α cold drink of water in the woods is really refreshing. It gives me a lift.

Snowshoes give me a fresh perspective on our woods. I can go places that are too wet and buggy the rest of the year. It’s interesting to look at the trees. I’ve seen them in the fall and spring but they look different now. A few are bent and broken. Most stand strong and silent. They all seem to take the worst Mother Nature can offer without a shrug. It’s their lot in life. They can’t head south. Maybe Bill Hall knows something that the trees know.

Cindy and I look at animal tracks. Some are easy to identify, like rabbits and squirrels and mice. But some are a mystery.

We went out on Sunday afternoon, January 6, after about 18 inches of new snow had fallen. We came upon fresh tracks, maybe two hours old, of a very big animal walking through our woods.

In some places, it walked through the deep snow. In other places, it took three-foot-long leaps. It veered off in one spot to sniff under some branches. Cindy and I both think it was a timber wolf. (There was no belly drag, despite of how deep the prints went.~chg) We saw two near our house about six years ago, so it’s not out of the question.

Those tracks have added to the wonder of our woods. I’d be honored to have a timber wolf as a neighbor, honored and a little nervous.

Winter has a lot of things like that to offer. Snowshoes make it easier for me to accept that offer, and even give a word of thanks.

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.

The 13 steps of the 'Terrible Twos' ~ January 21, 1988

David Heiller

There are 13 steps to our upstairs. I actually counted them for the first time tonight, after six and a half years of living here.

The reason I counted them is that I just walked down them for the fifth time in the last hour. I’ve been trying to match wits with a two-year-old girl.

“Not another column about that kid of yours?” you moan. Yes, one more. But it’s not really about Malika. It’s about universal, ever changing growth and development, the human psychological phenomenon of putting a two-year-old to bed.

Sleeping beauties, but not that night, I guess.

I had put the kids to bed about 7:30 this Monday evening. They lay with me in Noah’s bed for a minute, then I separated them into their own rooms. There’s no door between their rooms, so I put a gate in place. It’s a gate that is made to keep toddlers out of rooms they shouldn’t be in.

The design is perfect except for the barbed wire they forgot to string across the top. Toddlers look upon such gates the way mountain climbers look at the north face of the Eiger. The way Dutch Jones looks at a bear. The way Marvin Johnson looks at a post office.

I trudged down those 13 steps, after leaving the lights on in both kids’ rooms. They had their books, and I thought maybe Malika would read herself to sleep. Soon the floor was creaking above me. Malika was in our bedroom, in our bed. I walked upstairs and put her back in her bed, with a warning that the light would go out if she got out of her bed again.

Things seemed to be fine for a minute, so I went outside to bring in a load of firewood. As I dumped the wood in the box, I could sense another person downstairs. I peeked into the living room. Malika stood behind the rocking chair, looking at me.

“I had to get my kiki,” she explained, showing me her blanket.

I herded her toward the stairs.

Sleep reading.

“I have to go poop, Dad” she said as we passed the bathroom.

“You just went poop,” I said. That was true enough, just a half hour earlier.

“I have to go poop, Dad,” she insisted.

“All right,^” I said. ^“But hurry up.” I was angry by now. My right ear ached from an infection. I still had my hat and gloves on from the wood hauling, and here I was standing in the bathroom with a two-year-old who claimed to have to empty her bowels for the second time in 30 minutes.

“Dog-gone it, Malika,” I started, as she stared at me from her perch. ^“Now hurry up. First you have to go potty, then you have to go again, and now you just sit there. I have a sore ear, and I^’ve got work to do tonight, and I’m angry with you, so go potty.”

“What, Dad?” she asked.

My speech has been wasted. I was glad there was no adult in the house to hear it.

“I said go potty,” I repeated.

^“Pee or poop, Dad?” she asked.

“I don’t care, you’re the one that has to go, not me,” I yelled.

Malika climbed off the potty, with nothing to show for her effort except an irate father.

Ms. Malika, full of the dickens.
Light of her daddy's eyes.

I left her upstairs, where she navigated her Matterhorn gate two times into Noah’s room. Noah hid under the covers. Even he had had enough. Finally I gave her a swat on the butt, turned off the lights, and headed down the 13 steps.

Malika started crying. ^“Lay with me owie minute,” she said between sobs. “Lay with me owie minute.”

“All right, I^’ll lay with you one minute.” I walked back upstairs. Malika hugged her blanket, and hugged me, as I lay down and ran my fingers through her hair. It was 8:30 now. She had finally run out of steam, and I took my last trip down the 13 steps for the night.

I remember when Noah was Mollie’s age, how he wouldn’t listen or behave. Nearly every parent can recount their Waterloos of the Terrible Twos. But Noah changed, in spite of all our attempts at early bedtime and his multiple trips to the potty. He just plain changed, through no effort on our part or his. Now, at age four and a half, for the most part he listens and understands and behaves.

Sometimes, when young parents belly-ache about things their kids do, older people get a wistful look in their eyes. “They’ll be grown up before you know it,” they say. I think I know how they feel. Being a parent is an on-going experience, just like growing up. Once a kid is grown, they’re grown. Having kids is hard work, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun too. Which is why I write columns like this.

Malika will change too. Once she leaves these Terrible Twos, she’ll leave them for good, since we won’t be having any more children. They’ll even be gone from this column, faithful readers.

Then those 13 steps won’t mean as much as they did tonight.

I can’t wait.

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.

Skiing beats cartoons any day ~ January 16, 1992

David Heiller

“Come on, kids, we’re going skiing.”

I made that statement on Saturday morning, and it didn’t sit well with Noah, Malika, and Jake. They had watched three hours of cartoons. Their eyes were glazed over. They were hypnotized by laugh tracks and sound effects and chocolate covered cereal commercials that are SO nutritious. Hey, that’s what the announcer said.

Their grumbling didn’t last long. Off went Bugs Bunny. Out went the kids. On went the skis. And along came the old man with a collie and two oranges and a bottle of apple juice.

Take it from the old man: what a day for skiing it was! Temperature in the twenties. Sun shining. Three inches of new snow over an old ski trail. You folks who have gone south for the winter don’t know what you are missing. You kids who are still watching cartoons don’t either.

Skiing, and turning around, and talking lead to this.
She doesn't seem too mind much though, does she?

Jake and Noah led the way. They quickly disappeared. That’s not hard with Mollie and me in the rear. Six-year-old girls like to talk while they ski. They talk about friends and school and Barbies and grandmas. They turn around when they talk. They fall when they turn around. You end up travelling about one-quarter mile an hour.

That’s all right though. Getting out is what’s important. That’s what I keep telling myself when I want to zoom past her and the boys in those long, easy strides of the good old days.

We finally caught Noah and Jake at the deer stand. We ate the two oranges. There’s nothing sweeter than an orange on a ski trip. We drank apple juice. Mollie wanted to drink the orange juice in the plastic milk bottle in the deer stand. It was frozen. I explained that it wasn’t juice at all, that when deer hunters have to go potty, they don’t like to leave the stand and, well, you know.

The kids understood all right. In fact, it started quite a lively conversation, which I will NOT repeat. Such things sure fascinate eight-year-old boys.

Let's go!

Jake and I skied on. He moved along steadily. I kept up with him, but barely. It won’t be long until he is faster than me. I’d never admit that to him, or to Noah, who claims every so often that he will someday run faster than me.

“You’ll never be faster than me,” I say as if there is no room for argument. One of these days he and his friend Jake will prove me wrong. Even Malika will quit her chattering, face forward, and glide away from me.

I won’t mind a bit if we are skiing on a day like that one last Saturday morning.

I’ll even put up with the arguing that came when Malika kicked snow down on Noah from the deer stand. I’ll contend with helping a six-year-old girl go the bathroom on a ski trail wearing a snowsuit. (I’m glad I’m a boy for that reason alone.)

Days like last Saturday make me thankful for snow and skis and kids and good health. It makes me thankful for people like Sam Cook, who wrote a column filled with insight in the Duluth New-Tribune on January 10.

Sam’s thoughts and experiences often hit home with me, and that one was no exception. He wrote:

It is possible to buy your child Nintendo games and still take him or her fishing. It’s possible to plop your kids in front of a rented video for a couple hours and still go hunting on the weekend.

But my guess is the more we expose our kids to Nintendos and movies and malls, the less likely it is they’re going to climb up on our laps and ask us if they can come with us fishing on the weekend.

Or skiing. Forgive me for preaching, but Sam Cook is right. It’s sometimes much easier to leave the cartoons on. I’m sometimes guilty of that. But then we miss ski trips and oranges and juice bottles and all those other things that make life fun for children and us parents.