Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The bees were first to welcome me home from vacation last week. They were buzzing so loudly on Thursday morning that I could hear them from 30 yards away. The air around one hive was a blizzard of bees. They were swarming; half the hive was following the queen in search of a new home. Jeez, leave for a week and a queen gets upset at you. The nerve! One angry chap even stung me by my left eye, which swelled shut long enough for Cindy to take this photo. The standing head for David's column looked a little different that week. An hour later, I returned to the hive. All was quiet again. I walked through the field and spotted a ball of bees hanging from the limb of a willow tree. That’s where the queen had landed to get her bearings. What a sight. There’s nothing as exciting as watching a swarm of bees, 40,000 strong, the size of your thigh, all huddled on top of one another, shimmering, humming, moving as one. (It’s also exciting to a penny-pinching German ...

David Heiller “Where the @#%* is the car?’’ A young woman growled that question as we made our way through the crowd at Pettibone Park on the Fourth of July. She had a couple kids in tow. My daughter, Malika, and I hurried past her. “Did you hear that?” Malika asked? “How could she talk like that in front of her kids?” I shook my head in the darkness. We had just watched some spectacular fireworks, but hearing that little cherry bomb of a verbal one took a little of the fun away. That lady had said a very serious swear word, at least in my mind. You can probably guess the word. It’s definitely not one you would expect to hear a mother use around her kids, But it seems like that is changing, that people are swearing more in public. I mentioned that to Malika. She told me about a group of people she had served at her job as a bartender a few days earlier. A group of people who swore like the proverbial longshoremen and they had their kids in tow. She was shocked and a...