Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

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 School starts this week, and along with all the advice parents will be giving their children, I’d like to add this: If you ride on a school bus, keep your windows up. Let me repeat that in a different way so that you understand clearly. The narrator of this cautionary tale . Don’t open your windows on the school bus, kids, unless it’s an emergency. I know, there’s no rule that says you shouldn’t open school bus windows. And on a nice September morning with the smell of dew and apples drifting by, you may think I’m nuts. After all, my son is going to ride on a school bus 80 minutes a day, which works out to six and a half hours each week, or 10 days out of the year keeping Dave Nyrud company. Shouldn’t he be able to smell the burning leaves along the way? Keep your window closed, Noah. Take it from someone who rode a bus to high school for five years, and who has never forgotten that one morning, lo these 20 years ago... My cousin, Jeff, was sitting i...

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...