Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

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 Monday night. Already I could feel the butterflies in my stomach, thinking about the first day of school. Not my first day. Thank goodness, those are done. No, I was worrying about my son. I was thinking about Wednesday morning at 7:20, when he would climb onto Dave Nyrud’s bus and disappear down the gravel road toward Willow River. The very first of 13 first-day-of-school photos Do people remember their first day at school? I remember mine. My mom took me by the hand, a block up Main Street to the red brick building. Mrs. Escar was waiting, grandmotherly smile, wearing a shiny green dress with little seahorses on it. Mom had her first competition. The next day, I stood ready for Mom to take me to school again, but she inform­ed me that I would have to walk all by myself. I wonder how she felt as I trudged off at the heels of my seven brothers and sisters. Now I know. Noah stood in the driveway last Wednesday morning, not saying much, just waiting patiently....

David Heiller Monday night, Sept. 3, 9:15. Mollie can’t sleep. She creaks down the steps for about the fourth time tonight. That’s not unusual. She’s a great staller. She crawls onto my lap at the kitchen table, and I hug her like a warm blanket. No yelling tonight. It’s a special night for us all. “I still can’t sleep,” she says. “Are you thinking about school? ” She nods, then raises her hand. “You have to raise your hand in school,” she says. “But not at nap time. You can’t raise your hand at nap time.” Noah has been teaching her the kindergarten ropes. Up a tree, where Noah and Malika liked to be. “I’m sad because I want to graduate,” she con­tinues, her eyes focused on a batch of fresh peanut butter cookies behind me. “You can’t graduate until the end of the year,” I say. “First you have to go to school and learn a lot of things and be a good girl.” She nods duti­fully, still eyeing the cookies. She’s not worried about school at all, I suddenly realize. She’s ...

David Heiller Summer came to an end on Monday of this week, Labor Day. It was the last day that the kids didn’t have school. Time with good friends.  It doesn't take a lot of  planning in the summer. Things change in a hurry when school starts. It’s a time of “no mores.” No more sleeping in for the kids until seven, not when the school bus arrives at 7:15. Suddenly we have to get up at 6 a.m. No more working on the computer when I wake up, or weeding the garden for half an hour before breakfast, or sitting down with a good book and a big cup of tea while the rest of the house is asleep. No more sleeping in the tent or the trailer for the kids. No more 10 o’clock bedtimes. No more inviting friends over for a day or night. No more cold cereal. When school is in session, I make hot cereal every morning except Wednesday. It’s my job, and I can do it in my sleep, which is good because I’m usually asleep when I make it. Tuesday’s oatmeal passed the taste tes...

David Heiller There’s nothing quite as exciting as the first day of school what with butterflies, teddy bears, turtles, and all. First day of first and second grade.  Almost bravado. First those butterflies, the kind that you feel in your mid-section when you do something new, something a little scary and a little exciting too. They swarmed inside of us two years ago, on Noah’s first day in kindergarten, and again last year when he started going full-time and Malika hit kindergarten. Now this year it’s Mollie’s turn for first grade, and we are again nervous. Every year it’s a milestone, carried by a flock of butterflies. We parents feel the butterflies as we answer the questions of our young. “Did you ever think you would learn to write cursive, Dad?” Noah asked on Sunday night. That’s a weighty question for a second grader. “No, I never thought I would,” I answered, quite honestly. “I remember thinking it was another language, that it wasn’t even English.” Suddenl...

David Heiller Last week my mother sent me an obituary of Doris Margaret Spinner of New Albin, Iowa who died on June 8, 1995, at age 81. She was known as Mrs. Spinner by most of the kids in Brownsville, where I grew up. She taught grades five and six there for 20 years. Malika, Brooke (Jeanne's daughter), and Noah playing school in one the Brownsville classrooms, turned local history room.  My sister, Jeanne, remembered Mrs. Spinner well. “To me she was a wonderful teacher,” Jeanne said on June 23 from her home in Klamath Falls, Oregon. “She explained things real well. She put a lot of her own wisdom into her teaching. She had a lot of patience. You could tell she was a mother and a teacher. She would mention her own children and experiences. She had that caring side. “We never had a substitute. In those days she was always there. I just felt she was a warm, caring person.” “She didn’t have any favorites. She was fair. She just had all the qualities you have...

David Heiller It was fun to write the articles in this week’s paper about the 1970 wrestling team. I think about that team and season a lot. I was a junior that year, and wrestled quite a bit of varsity at 154. Bob Lange wrestled at 145, and Ron Meiners wrestled at 165 during much of the season. When the district tournament came, Ron cut weight to wrestle 154, and I was out of a job. That was not a problem, because Ron was in another league, and that’s the nature of sports. You’ve got to learn to lose. That might not sound like a good attitude, but it ultimately leads to learning how to win. Bob Lange’s mother, Vi, reminded me of that. I found a folder full of old newspaper clippings about the 1970 team in a dresser drawer a couple weeks ago. One reporter interviewed Mrs. Lange after the state tournament, and she said, “These boys have won and lost and you must win and lose to be a winner.” I couldn’t agree more. The Langes personified wrestling, a sport which has a stran...

David Heiller I read an interesting book recently called They Called Me Teacher , by Tom Melchior. It contains stories of Minnesota country school teachers and students from 1913 to 1960. Those stories run the gamut of human interaction, but one that has to do with bad teaching sticks in my mind. Corrine Lesteberg Johnson, who attended District 40 East near Murdock in Swift County, from 1931-1938, wrote it. “We all knew that our second-grade teacher had never lived in the country. So we had a feeling that she thought she was better than the rest of us. I started at Christmas time making valentines. We had a long Christmas vacation, six weeks off, so what was there to do during that time but make valentines. I loved that kind of creative stuff. “I used foil from the Christmas cards and the laced doilies that my mother had bought. I made the cards so they were three-dimensional, you could open them up. Oh, I really worked on those cards. On Valentine’s Day I passed out al...

David Heiller That weekend, I am sure Noah  would have rather been fishing. Are you all packed up?” I asked my son on Sunday morning. “Yeah, I guess,” he said with his customary enthusiasm. “Did you make a list?” “No, I don’t need a list,” he said with disdain. I’m a list person when it comes to packing for a big outing like a canoe trip. And this was a big outing, even bigger than that. He was moving to a dormitory and going away to college. I could tell he was nervous about it, the way he snapped at me, so I let it go, and a few others like it. Pick your battles, I say. I probably did the same thing to Mom and my sister when I went off to college in 1971. I can still remember that car ride to the University of Minnesota, my sister chattering to keep me from getting too scared. Like I was chattering with my son on Sunday. It didn’t help much. I still had to go into the dorm, sign at the desk, get a key, go up to the seventh floor, and meet two strangers, ...

David Heiller The first day of school has changed around our house. Not too many years ago, the kids looked forward to returning to school. It was an exciting, nervous time. They wanted to see their old friends. They knew they would meet a few new ones. They were curious about their teachers. Those early years of the first-day-of-school photos were really fun. (Noah is in first grade, Malika in kindergarten.) When Dave Nyrud would pull up into the driveway with his school bus at 7:10 or so, they would jostle each other in an attempt to get on first. I couldn’t talk the kids out of getting on the school bus on the first day of school, but it wouldn’t take much talking now. For about the past three weeks, they have been lamenting the end of summer and the start of school. I wouldn’t say the kids hate school. That’s too strong a word. But somewhere along the line, they have grown to not like it very much. School used to be mostly fun. Now it’s mostly work. That’s n...