Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller 1:12 a.m. Tuesday, June 18: The light is on over the bed. Cindy is sitting bent over slightly at the edge. Her face is tight. She’s looking at her watch. “Five minutes apart, 45 seconds long,” she says in a breathless way. “The contractions.” “Huh?” I mumble, feeling very cozy under the blankets of this cool dark morning. “Let’s go, Dave,” she says. “I think this is it.” Suddenly, very suddenly, I’m awake. 4:20 a.m. Tuesday, June 18: We’ve just dropped Noah off with a friend in Rutledge. So far, so good, with our Plan. Suitcase is packed, dog and cat fed. We even had time for a quick sauna before leaving. We are on our way to the hospital in Duluth. Cindy spies the gas gauge. Less than a quarter of a tank. “Do I have to take care of everything?” she asks. “This is the first time in two weeks I didn’t get gas,” I say in a weak voice. So much for that part of the Plan. “Why, just today, I pulled into the Deep Rock, but I didn’t have any checks with me. ...

David Heiller Buying a lawnmower is no small event in our family. The questions rage: “Should we buy new or used? Off-brand or name brand? Three horse or three -and-a-half horse? Twenty inch cut, or 22 inch cut?” And of course the main question: “How much does it cost?” My wife and I anguished over the issue for the past month. We knew the hand-me-down mower in the garage would not make another summer. Cindy wanted to go with a new mower. She figures we have a big lawn, and will probably always have a big lawn, so a new mower would be a wise investment. She also figures that if we still had the money spent on used mowers and repairs over the past three years, we could have a very good new mower. I can’t argue that point. We’ve had four used mowers —three bought, one given—since 1981. Each of those mowers was serviced at least once during the summer. That’s between $150 and $200 in mowers, for three summers of sporadic cutting and abusive language. But since I was in ch...

David Heiller   What’s a rocking chair? On the one hand, it’s an object usually made of wood and screws and glue, with some polish and varnish to make it look nice. On the other, it’s one of those special things that is worth much more than its material value, and means much more. David and Lynette with Grandma in the rocking chair. We have a rocking chair in our son’s bedroom. It’s wood, with a leather seat that conforms to its rocker. At night, when we put son to bed, he gets the rocking treatment. As we move back and forth, he tells me about his day in 21-month-old language. “Matthew, guy boy, dee, now, house,” he says, meaning he had fun playing with his friend Matthew, who has a father and some brothers, and lots of cars, and a cat, all in a big house. When he’s done talking, h e takes his bottle and listens while Mom or Dad sing to the rhythm of the rocking chair. After a few minutes, he is in bed, relaxed, content, ready for sleep. His parents are smiling too. ...

David Heiller Have you noticed how complicated life is getting? I’m not exactly an old timer, but even in my 31 years, things have gotten pretty sticky. A good example is soda pop. Just 20 years ago, you had a choice of cola, root beer, orange, maybe Seven-Up. Sugar free? Yes, if you could stand the after-taste of an industrial drain pipe. Noah with his 'I'm pretty clever' look. Now, there are regular flavors covering all colors of the rainbow, with sugar-free that tastes as good as regular, plus decaffeinated, and sugar-free decaffeinated. Radios are another good example. When I was a kid, we had one radio in the house. It sat on the buffet in the living room, with an orange face lit from within by a small light bulb.  Two knobs handled the works, the left one for turning it on and controlling the volume, the right for tuning. Saturday nights my oldest brother would bring it into the our bedroom and set in on the dresser next to the bed. He ruled over it with a...

David Heiller There comes a time in every child’s life when they cease being babies, and become something more. It is a metamorphosis from a helpless bundle of pink skin into a human being. Mothers may not know what I mean, because they spend more time with their babies, and probably never think of them as helpless bundles of pink skin. But to dads, who roll around on the floor with them perhaps for only a few minutes a day, the metamorphosis hits all of a sudden, and sometimes it hits hard. Malika with her bearded and bespectacled daddy.  She's thinking about, the last time she got hold of that beard,  or the next time she scores his glasses.  That’s what happened at our house last weekend. Cindy had been telling me how our six-month-old daughter had been going through a growth spurt, guzzling more milk per hour than a young Holstein. Cindy had pointed out that Mollie was sitting up by   herself now, and laughing at her big brother, and babbling...

David Heiller I have a secret weapon that could probably be sold to the highest bidder and used in the torture chambers of totalitarian regimes throughout the world. This weapon doesn’t cost millions of dollars, wasn’t developed by the military, and isn’t even illegal. But under controlled situations it will force the stiffest of upper lips into jelly, and melt nerves of steel into lead. I discovered the weapons Sunday morning, at 5 a.m. My wife and I had celebrated our fifth anniversary the previous night, with dinner and a Greg Brown concert in Duluth. We had finally got the babysitter home, and settled ourselves into bed by 2 a.m. That made the weapon even more potent three hours later. Small cute boy? Not really, more like a diabolical  weapon on the morning here described. Cindy heard it first, and deserves much of the blame. Thump. The sound of bare feet sliding out of bed in the next room. Pad-pad-pad-pad. Those tiny feet approaching with both stealth and fi...

by David Heiller What comes to mind when you think of Saturday night as a child? For many people, it’s bath night. Or maybe that should be capitalized. Bath Night, an American institution. David (left) and his older brothers,  presumably AFTER Bath Night the previous eve. As a child Bath Night for our family had a certain ritual. I had seven brothers and sisters. The girls got the upstairs bathroom usually, while my two brothers and I splashed downstairs. Glenn, nine years older, would usually bathe first, because he had places to go and people (usually of the opposite gender) to meet. Danny and I followed. Three years my senior, Danny was expert at taking baths. He convinced me that no soap was necessary. There were little germs in the water, and these germs drove tiny bulldozers that scraped dirt away. Mom ended that theory, possibly after finding no ring in the tub one too many times. After the bath, it was into pajamas and onto the living room floo...

David Heiller There’s always a bit of adventure when friends and relatives come to visit at our house, often thanks to not having an indoor bathroom. I’ve gotten used to the privvy, but city-dwellers especially seem to put the walk to the outhouse in the same category as a trip through the jungles of the Amazon. The bane of many guests at our house  in those days: The Outhouse. Take this past weekend, for example. On Saturday morning, my mother-in-law arrived for a two-day visit. She sat down at the kitchen table and announced, “I have to go to the bathroom.” Most 53-year-old women don’t proclaim such things at the kitchen table. But at our house such announcements are often made by guests, because our bathroom is a two-seater about 20 yards from the house. By stating her intentions, my mother-in-law was working up the courage to actually pay her visit. An hour later, still sitting at the kitchen table and two cups of coffee further along, she announced aga...

David Heiller “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” the Bible teaches us. That lesson applies to everyone, even two-year-old boys who accompany their fathers to laundromats. Noah and Daddy in a much better pool of water. We have a washing machine at home, sitting in the garage, where the car should sit. While it waits for the handyman to get plumbing into the bathroom, the handyman washes clothes in the laundromat. Sometimes, he takes his son with him. The son, Noah, is at a stage known by many as the “Terrible Twos,” a stage that ranks second only to adolescence in testing human patience. Sometimes such 26-month behavior isn’t intentionally Terrible, though the consequences are. The laundromat episode was one of those innocent catastrophes. With the best intentions, I let Noah “help” me take the wet, clean clothes out of a front loading machine. We watched the red light flash off, watched the spinning come to a halt. “Now open the door,” I said, lifting Noah up so he could...

David Heiller I didn’t have the good fortune of knowing Anny Ahlbom very well. I met her one early spring afternoon in 1982, while working as a magazine and insurance salesman. She asked me right into her home six miles west of Rutledge. We drank coffee and ate apple cake. The 90-year-old lady led me through the house, showing off the paintings and carvings done by her late husband, John. She played the piano and sang and danced with me, a total stranger. She gave me a pair of mittens which she had knit, and a set of woolen wrist bands, then took my mittens with a promise to knit the hole in one of the thumbs. I didn’t have a chance to sell her anything, and by the time I left two hours later, I didn’t want to. When you enter Anny’s old house, the work of John Ahlbom overpowers you. Practically everything is hand done, starting with the rock exterior walls. Walls inside are painted floor to ceiling with murals of forests, horses, lakes. Figurines of men and animals, carved ou...