Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller This is a true story about babysitting. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Babysitters. They come in all shapes, sizes, sexes, ages, and abilities, and we’ve run the gamut over the past eight years. Some have been good with the kids and do some of the “extras” too, like picking up the house and keeping the dishes washed. Others have been good housekeepers but chained the kids to their bedposts. Then there are those who don’t even wipe the table and get chained to the bedposts themselves by the kids after falling for that fatal line: “Mommy and Daddy let us do this to them all the time.” We’ve had some very good babysitters, including Jane Doe, who we have hired for the summer. Babysitters... the good ones make life so good, and the  great one s  fill us with gratitude,  even decades later. Jane Doe watches Noah and Mollie one day a week, while Cindy and I put together this newspaper. Jane started last week. She had...

David Heiller It’s funny how children can grow up and you don’t even notice it. It’s like leaving your bare garden for two weeks in early June and coming home to see everything sprouted and growing like crazy. That’s what we did last week. We came home and saw a garden full of young plants, and on the east side of the house, the yellow irises were in full bloom. Like Emily. That’s how I felt after our family took a vaca­tion to Texas. We had been there six years earlier, and that was the last time I had really seen my niece, Emily. Malika and Emily Oh sure, we saw her briefly a time or two since then. We had seen pictures at Christmas, and heard tidbits in letters and from Mom, who keeps tabs on her grandchildren like good grandmothers do. But we didn’t see Emily grow up, which is the way things go in this modem world of ours, where people move far away in search of jobs and security and happiness. Six years ago in Texas, when Emily was 12, she took our daughter Mal...