Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller Snakes. Just the word sends a shiver up most people’s backbone. I don’t mean that everybody is afraid of snakes. Most people aren’t afraid of snakes, once they spot them and get over the initial shiver. It’s that first sighting, when you see the grass move and the snake slither, that makes everybody jump. This first heart-pounding surprise is what gives snakes a bad name. Take a group of kids, and put a snake in their midst, and that snake’s future will be gravely in doubt. I remember when I as about 12, some younger kids caught a big water snake by the river, carried it up to Main Street, and proudly killed it for all the town to see. I saw it, and yelled at them. “Why did you have to kill the snake?” They looked at me like I was crazy. “It’s just a snake,” they mumbled. Of course, the other strike which snakes have against them is that some are dangerous. Marlin Perkins will testify to that—remember that Wild Kingdom episode when a python nearly squeezed him to d...

David Heiller The flu knocked me out for most of last week. I missed three days of work, as I sat delirious and fevered in the big chair by the woodstove at home. Cindy, my wife, gave the flu to me (not intentionally—no one hates me that much). We suffered together, while Noah had his run of the house. Noah is our eight and a half month old son. Noah setting Binti straight. Ask Binti, our 70 pound dog, about Noah’s supremacy. She’ll swallow and try to crawl under the woodstove. Noah wrestled Binti into a black mop last week, while Cindy and I watched helplessly, calling encouragement to the faithful dog from our perches on the furniture. Noah rolled on Binti, climbed on Binti, rode Binti, and hung onto Binti’s ears as if they were reins. Binti grunted, groaned, licked, and eventually struggled to her feet and went outside. Noah had his turn at us too. He woke up in the middle of the night several nights, and cried till we brought him into bed with us. Is there any...

David Heiller What does the word “frugal” mean? To some, it means being prudent or economical. It means you can save money, because you are cautious and thrifty. These are virtuous qualities. Looked at from another angle, frugal brings up images of Silas Marner hunched over his pile of gold, carefully counting each penny, literally a penny-pincher. It means tight-fisted, uncompassionate, scrimping, tight, or worst of all, stingy. Both definitions are right, and you can probably recall people in both categories. People who would give just about everything they own to help another, and people who would hardly part with a dime to give to a crippled beggar in the street. There is a third definition of frugal too, which comes to my mind when I think of a man I know. His name is Willie Boyer, and he lives in rural Tamarack. When you live in rural Tamarack, you know you live out in the country. I first met Willie in the winter of 1977, when I was caretaker for some property and...

David Heiller THE EDSEL, Ford’s greatest fiasco, was introduced to the American public on September 4, 1957, as the first of 110,000 rolled off the assembly lines in Detroit that year and 1958. Edsel The Edsel, named after a Ford son, soon became the laughing stock of the country. They were big cars, with a lot of electronic gadgetry, and perhaps ahead of their time. But most people agree that the reason they didn’t catch on is that they just plain looked funny. It was the round grill on the front end that created the belly laughs, commentator Harry Reasoner said on the radio this week. No car had ever had a round grill before. It made the car look like an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon, Reasoner said. Ford, I think has the last laugh, though. Just try to buy an Edsel from someone who has one of those originals. They are collector’s items, worth far more than their original purchase price. Cars are really an important part of our lives. Whether you are one of those peo...

David Heiller WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, we used to talk about the “generation gap” a lot. The generation gap was some sort of chasm that separated kids from adults, ranging from different values to different styles of clothing. Noah opens the cabinet door  to begin  his selections for the  mornings' radio station. If your father didn’t like the length of your hair and told you so, this was the generation gap. If you believed in free speech to the point of certain four letter words, and your mother disagreed with a bar of soap in hand, you were victims of the generation gap. If you protested the war in Vietnam and your neighbor fought there, the generation gap was taking its toll. I never put much stock in the so-called generation gap. I always thought it was just a phrase, an easy way to express something that is very complex. It was a cliché, because it was used too much. But now the generation gap is back on my mind, in the form of my 11-month-ol...