Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

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...

David Heiller Cindy called me at 4:30 last Wednesday afternoon, September 22. “Let’s go for a walk at Banning,” she said. It had been a busy day at work for us, and a busy night was planned, with one of us to pick up our son from football practice and the other to attend a confirmation meeting with our daughter. But we needed that walk at Banning State Park. We only had an hour to spare. How could we not afford to spare it on a fall walk? A walk in the woods is ALWAYS a good plan. “Sounds great,” I told Cindy, and in half an hour we were there, Cindy and Mollie and me, on the familiar trail heading toward the Kettle River. The air had that fall hue to it, of sunlight filtered through red and orange and yellow. A couple of hard frosts had knocked back the bugs. A few leaves lay on the trail, but not so thick that we kicked them up. The trees hadn’t dropped a lot of leaves. That’s happening right now. We walked hand in hand in hand, three abreast, on the wide trail. M...

David Heiller There’s nothing quite as exciting as the first day of school what with butterflies, teddy bears, turtles, and all. First day of first and second grade.  Almost bravado. First those butterflies, the kind that you feel in your mid-section when you do something new, something a little scary and a little exciting too. They swarmed inside of us two years ago, on Noah’s first day in kindergarten, and again last year when he started going full-time and Malika hit kindergarten. Now this year it’s Mollie’s turn for first grade, and we are again nervous. Every year it’s a milestone, carried by a flock of butterflies. We parents feel the butterflies as we answer the questions of our young. “Did you ever think you would learn to write cursive, Dad?” Noah asked on Sunday night. That’s a weighty question for a second grader. “No, I never thought I would,” I answered, quite honestly. “I remember thinking it was another language, that it wasn’t even English.” Suddenl...

David Heiller It had to end this way, I thought as I drove into t he yard last Friday night. My daughter and her two friends stood in the yard, holding sleeping bags and heading toward the garage. The “garage” never, ever held a vehicle.  It  wasn’t useful that way, it was an old shed that  someone  decades earlier had built to house a car,  but they really didn’t know what they were doing. Or is it the shop? The building is going through an identity crisis. This story started about six months ago with a home improvement project. First we had our kitchen redone, complete with new cupboards. The old cupboards would work great in the garage, I thought. We’ve never had a car in the garage anyway. I could make a shop out of the garage. Pulling cupboards out of the kitchen to make way  for new ones meant that David would be able to  use them to organize a shop! Or did it? A shop. Two words that can make a middle-aged ma...