Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller I’ll always want to live in Minnesota, Dad,” Malika said as we walked through the airport parking lot in search of our car last Friday. An early morning birding trip. We had just returned from a week in Texas, and if anything will make you appreciate home, it’s a week of Texas in June. Not that Mollie, Noah, Cindy, and I didn’t enjoy the vacation. We had a lot of fun. But I still found myself agreeing with her. We stayed in Port Aransas, which is off the coast of Corpus Christi. There we discovered the two essentials of Texas survival. 1.   Sunglasses. The sun is so bright in the middle of the day, that even with sunglasses, it is hard to see. The middle of the day for me lasted from about 10 am. to 6 p.m. One morning when we left our hotel room for an outing, I walked around the corner of the dark stairway and into the parking lot, and I was temporarily blinded. It was like walking into a wall of light. I shut my eyes and staggered toward the ca...

David Heiller ( Editor's note: this column has been slightly edited, removing the initial and final lines of this family story, due to dated references. So, we begin with the real reason for the column: a good old cautionary tale about growing up in the 1960s.) Joe Camel is just a cartoon. He will never overpower Mom and Dad and your older sister when it comes to teaching a lesson or two about smoking. That opinion is based on the first time I had a cigarette, about 30 years ago. There were about eight of us, ranging in age from about 12 to seven. Randy was the youngest, and his parents also owned the root beer stand in town. We had a hide-out in some sumac trees above the root beer stand. There were trails under their dense branches to a clearing that no one could see in the middle. We hung out there, played hide and seek, or just laid around in-between swimming in the river, riding our bikes, playing softball. One afternoon we convinced Randy go to the root beer stand a...

David Heiller  It’s hard NOT to have baseball fever these days, the way the Twins are playing. The Twins have won 15 straight as I write this on Sunday evening. Even fair-weather fans are paying attention, except for a few purists like Steve Popowitz. I saw him on Friday and told him I was going to stay home and work and listen to the Twins game on the radio that night. Steve gave me a blank look, as if there might possibly be more exciting things to do on a Friday night. “How are they doing?” he still as­ked politely. Steve does not like baseball, but at least he has good manners. He knows I’m a fan. “Great,” I answered. “They won their 12th straight last night!” I had been to that game, and was still a foot off the ground. “Now, is that good?” Steve asked again, in complete sincerity. “Baseball teams don’t always win 12 straight?” “The best they’ve ever done,” I answered with a smile. I remembered that Steve fell asleep in the seventh game of the 1987 World Series...

David Heiller  A friend of mine made a good point at a graduation open house a couple weeks ago. I had asked him how his remodeling project was coming. “Slow,” he said with a bit of embarrassment. He said he had been taking his kids fishing in his free time. “But the kids aren’t going to remember me for remodeling the house,” he said. I thought about that comment and agreed. My friend was doing the right thing by taking his kids fishing. He was feeling a bit guilty about it, because he is a hard worker. The thought of fishing when he should be working on his house was alien to him. But his kids are getting older, as is he. He can see they won’t be around a whole lot longer. Maybe 10 years. That’s not long, the way time flies for most people. So make hay—or go fishing—while the sun shines, he was saying. David and his teenagers in our woods His words reminded me of something Harmon Killebrew supposedly said. His wife was complaining about how playing bas...

David Heiller Ron called me Thursday to see if I could stop on Friday morning first thing to get a load of manure. I had planned to pick it up Friday after work, but he had some farm chores then. “Sure,” I said. “You’ll have a truck full of manure all day,” Ron said. Beauty gets help from a little manure. My bleeding heart in Denham. “That’s all right. It’s a status symbol in Caledonia,” I replied. So before work on Friday, I arrived at my usual spot down the road from Ron’s farm, and he did his usual quick work with the loader. I watched as he dropped two buckets into the old truck. It was good looking manure, full of red worms, not too ripe. Almost garden ready, but it was definitely manure. My truck sagged and settled under the weight, but I had a sense that it didn’t mind a bit. What higher honor for a truck? “Thank you,” I told Ron. That’s all the payment he ever wants. Then it was off to work. The manure got a few looks over the course of the...