Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The Tooth Fairy has been visiting our house lately, and the kids are laughing all the way to the piggy bank. Malika and Noah are all grown up now and they carved these two pumpkins.  But gosh, they do LOOK familiar! Their smiles have enough gaps to serve as models for pumpkin carvers, but they don’t care about that. They’re getting richer by the tooth. I heard one mother telling about her son a while back that he wanted to pretend to put a tooth under the pillow every night, so their family could have lots of money. She had to laugh and explain in child language that life isn’t that easy. At first Noah and Mollie looked at a loose tooth as a red badge of courage. They would work them for days, sometimes weeks, like they were playing an eight pound lake trout in the Boundary Waters. They would twist and wiggle, push and pull at the tooth, until nothing but a thread seemed to be holding it. Then Mom and Dad would be invited to try. That’s a rare pri...

David Heiller The wind was blowing hard out of the northwest last Friday afternoon, carrying snow like little bullets against our faces. Already, about 16 inches of snow lay on the ground. Malika and I were playing in it, after nearly going crazy with cabin fever for much of the day. First I made a snow angel, which Mollie promptly trudged through with a wild, cabin fever laugh. Then I dove through the air and landed on my back in a big drift. Noah Mollie went off to make more snow angels. I lay there, out of the wind, feeling the snow tickle my face, feeling the soft bed of snow underneath, feeling quite comfortable. Then a memory flashed into my mind. No, something more powerful than a memory, a sensation that made my face quiver first with fear, then with anger. It had happened in November of 1973. I had been backpacking in Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. A blizzard had caught me there, unprepared and alone, 20-plus miles f...

David Heiller Warning: The following column contain graphic (but not salacious) material. And if that doesn’t get you reading it, nothing will! Winter must be coming, because our house is filling up with mice and flies. It happens every year at this time. I can understand the mice. They feel temperature changes, so they head for a warmer home, which happens to be my home. But flies? Are flies that smart? I don’t like living with either one. I love my wife and two kids and two dogs and one cat. But mice and flies are not welcome. Cindy alerted me to this fall’s mouse invasion about a month ago, when she found shredded toilet paper in the bottom of the bathroom vanity, where she stores things like toilet paper. She figured mice were using it for something other than its intended purpose. She figured they were using it to make a nest. You know what that means. More mice! A battle plan was needed, so she called on me. I’m Chief Mouse Catcher in our house. I’ve been refining ...

David Heiller                                                                                                                                                                                      “How did you sleep?” Cindy asked when I woke up on Tuesday morning. “Great,” I replied. “I slept the sleep of a Vikings victory.” And it was true. Monday nights I don’t often sleep well, as I ponder what the heck to put in the Askov American for that week. But the Vikings had won, and I had drifted off to sleep with scenes of the, win pl...

David Heiller Lorely walked from her bed to the kitchen table, and sat down. It didn’t take long before Collin was there to give her a big hug. Grandma O and the doll house she  assembled for Malika one Christmas.  Lorely’s face held pure joy mixed with a little  bliss. A hug from   a six-year-old grandson first thing Sunday morning must feel pretty good for grandma. Lorely didn’t sit there long, maybe 15 minutes. She was in a lot of pain. She has had cancer for more than three years, and it seems to be getting worse fast. She can barely walk or catch her breath. She is most comfortable lying in bed. She hardly eats. She’s staying with us so that Cindy, her daughter, can take care of her. Some of her grandchildren know the score. I realized that when I saw our son, Noah, sitting on the bed next to Lorely a couple weeks ago, telling about his day, asking about his grandfather and the Good Old Days. He wouldn’t normally do that. But he’s doing it now. Ou...

David Heiller There are certain moments that I will never forget. It’s funny how they mostly involve death. Like when Tom Pringle came into the fifth grade classroom on November 22, 1963, and told us that President Kennedy had been shot. Or when Reverend Graupman sat down at our kitchen table on July 18, 1969, and told us that Lynette had drowned. October 25 will be one of those days, the time when Cindy called and said that Paul Wellstone had died. The gray day outside suddenly got a foothold on my heart. I turned on the radio. The announcer said that Paul’s wife had died too, and his daughter and everyone on the plane, and the light faltered even more. Paul Wellstone: Man of the people. My friend Dean Dronen from Sandstone called a little later. I could tell he needed to talk to someone. So did I. He told me how much he thought of Wellstone, what a friend he was to veterans. Dean is the veterans’ service officer in Pine County. Wellstone could not have received a hig...