Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller I saw two men approaching on the street.  As they came together, a dawn of joy and recognition blazed in each face. They kissed cheeks, shook hands firmly, lingeringly, and barraged each other in loud voices: “How are you? Fine, thank you, and you? By the grace of God, I am well. How is your family? By God’s grace, all is well with me and mine. And you, is everything well? Everything is fine thank you, God’s grace is shining fully.” A street scene in the city where David lived for two years. This continued, in Arabic of course, for a full half minute. I smiled in childish wonder, thinking I was witnessing the momentous rejoining of two brothers separated at birth and discovering each other on this dusty Moroccan street. My disillusionment soon followed. The men, after the last “May God be with you,” abruptly pulled apart like clashing symbols and continued on their separate ways, as if nothing extraordinary had occurred. Indeed, nothing extraordinary had oc...

David Heiller I saw a cousin this summer that I hadn’t seen in many years. She is a couple years younger than me, yet she is already retired after a successful career in the military. Early Autumn 2004 at the Spillway on the Mississippi,  in Houston County, Minnesota To top this off, she lives in Hawaii. We got to talking about the weather there. No bugs, lots of sunshine, temperatures almost always in the 70s and 80s. Paradise, in other words. I told her that I could never live in Hawaii. Claire and me in Wright County  in the fall of 2002.  I like the oak leaf ears . She looked a bit surprised at that. I explained that I enjoy the changing of the seasons too much, and what it brings out in me. That’s a hard thing to describe on a muggy summer night when Hawaii did seem like paradise. I don’t think Barb understood. In fact, it’s hard to describe any time. It’s more something you feel, and it ’ s happening right now. Chances are you know what I’m ...

David Heiller Music was a big part of my life when I was in the Peace Corps in Morocco from 1977 to 1979. Roger and David making music in Morocco. I played the banjo a lot to pass the time. When I’d get together with American friends, we’d always play music. One of my most memorable musical moments in Morocco came at a workshop that the volunteers were having in Tangiers. I don’t know how much work we got done at this workshop. I do know it was a good time to visit with friends, compare war stories, and play music. We were sitting around in a hotel lobby, playing music, when an English gentleman joined us. He brought out his guitar, and the rest of us soon put ours away. He was good. Very good. The kind of performer you’d pay music to see at a college coffeehouse. He played song after song. Wow, it was nice listening to him. We fell under his spell. And he came up with a classic line that night, one I still remember. One of the volunteers asked him, with a dreamy lo...

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...

by David Heiller The moon shone bright that summer night in 1978. It lit the land with a white glow. Rocks stood out on the hill to the south like a black and white negative, their shadows deep black. The rolling hillside below the rocks had a stubble of grain, already a stubble and it was only May. The Moroccan sun will do that to land. In the moonlight, the stubble lay as smooth as the coat of a Siamese cat. A Moroccan full moon in the coastal city, Ceuta. I stood on the balcony of my apartment, on the third floor of a brick building, marveling as I always marveled, at the full Moroccan moon, so bright you could easily read a book by the light. Across the street, the neighbors had their television on. The screen flickered from scene to scene, though I could not see the picture. The windows were tinted a milky color, so that nosy neighbors or lonely Americans couldn’t peer in on moonlit nights. The sound came through the windows, the only sound in the night at the edge o...

By David Heiller The night was cool. A heavy mist, just short of a fog, hung in the air. Buildings seemed covered in a light, light gauze. The cobblestone street shined, slippery, reflecting light from shop windows, doorways. David in Sidi Kacem, Morocco in the Peace Corps The place was Morocco, the city of Fez, the year 1979. Four Americans walked up the steep street of cobblestone, streets so narrow an American car would barely pass through. But there were no American cars here, not even during the bustling days when horses and drivers would crash through, shouting “red bellick, red bellick!”—“look out, look out!” Now, on this misty spring night, even the bustling crowds were gone, sitting in their homes, talking, or watching the single channel on Moroccan TV, eating hirara, the soup made from leftovers on Sunday night. The four Americans had rendezvoused in Fez for some fellowship. Each lived in different parts of the country, in smaller cities. They taught ...

David Heiller I had a lot of memorable experiences when I was in the Peace Corp from 1977-1979, but one of them has always stood out in my mind. I’m thinking about it a lot these days. I taught English as a second language in Morocco, which is a Muslim country of primarily Arab people on the northwestern corner of Africa. For a few months I rented the bottom level of a house in the middle of the city from an elderly Moroccan couple, Fatna and Driss. They lived upstairs. They took me under their wing, so to speak, and we became good friends, as good as a Moroccan family could be to an American guy. There were a lot of cultural and religious barriers that prevented what I would consider real closeness. I moved to another house on the edge of the city because I felt too claustrophobic in the middle of the bustling medina. But I kept in touch with my Moroccan family. Every Friday, which is their holy day, they would invite me to a noon dinner. It was great for me. I not onl...