Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller He was brutally honest. He wasn’t trying to make friends. Good teachers are like that, and Dwight Diller is a good teacher. I would like to pass on a few of the things I learned from him last weekend. Not so much about the banjo, although that’s what he was trying to teach 15 of us in St. Paul. His words, seen from a different angle, could apply to many aspects of life. Dwight plays a clawhammer style of banjo that he learned growing up in West Virginia. I don’t want to condense his story too much, lest I misrepresent him. But it was pretty obvious that he draws strength from this very specific music from his home, and like most of us, Dwight’s home is where his heart is. Not Virginia, or Kentucky, or North Carolina. He doesn’t play that music, even if you or I couldn’t tell the difference. It’s not that he dislikes it. He’s not a musical racist. He has played it in the past. He is famil­iar with it. But he won’t play it anymore, He sticks to songs from ...

David Heiller I’ve got a friend from back home. I’ll call him Carl here. I’ve known him since eighth grade, when we shook hands over the line of scrimmage at football practice. We became best friends in high school, and w e kept that friendship through college, through the Peace Corps, and through my married life these past 17 years. He was best man at my wedding. Carl struggled through one long relationship that didn’t work out. Then he met a woman that seemed right. They were happy together. They got married seven years ago, adopted a child, and bought two farms. When Cindy and I would go to Brownsville to visit my mother, we would try to see them. They seemed like a happy family. You never know from a distance. I called my friend last week to see if we could get together over Easter. We were going to Brownsville to see my mother. The first words my friend spoke when he answered the phone stopped me short. “I’ve got some bad news, Dave. Mary and I are getting a divor...

David Heiller My friend Deane discovered a mother black bear and her three cubs three weeks ago. He had been walking along his creek on Sunday afternoon, March 22, and came within one stride of stepping on a big black hole in the snow. He stopped and peered in for a closer look. He could make out a mother bear and what looked like three cubs. I visited the bear family the next Saturday, along with our two kids and some other friends. We tromped through knee-deep snow, and had to leap over a narrow stretch of fast water. The extra work added to the adventure of seeing a bear den. Her den was just a little depression in the grass under a fallen tree. There wasn’t much protection, once the snow melted. One cub, about the size of a terrier, had crawled on top of her and was bleating like a lamb. We could hear other muf fl ed cries, somewhere under the mother, which is maybe why they were crying. It was bear talk for “Move, Mom, you’re killing me!” We stood and watched from ...

David Heiller It’s amazing how a little snow can make us Minnesotans feel whole again. And a little nuts too. Last Thursday night, eight inches of snow blew in on us during the night. And it transformed our lives: ·              Randy Gordon, manager of Banning State Park, saw what he thought had been placed on the endangered species list: cross country skiers. He’s seen more bats in his bat caves than skiers this winter. ·              Banning Junction saw another endangered species: a paying customer who actually arrived by snowmobile. ·              LeRoy Cronin saw yet another endangered species, Alexander Hamilton, who graced the 10-spot I paid him for plowing our driveway. (LeRoy is worth every Lincoln penny.) ·              Tom ...

David Heiller “Let’s see, I’ll wear the red checkered shirt, and my green pants, and my good tennis shoes. What T-shirt? Here’s the one from T & M Athletics. Last time I wore my Camp Courage T-shirt, but T & M should be just as good. Yeah, that’ll be O.K.” I stuffed my Homer Hanky in the right rear pocket. It was so fun going to those games in 1987. We went to one playoff game  and one series game. I still have the  beloved homer hanky.  As I dressed myself Saturday morning, my mind fell into a habit as old as mankind, or at least as long as mankind has played the game of baseball. Baseball is a game of habits, and of superstitions. Ever notice how Kirby Puckett crosses himself as he steps up to the plate each at bat? It’s a habit, and it helps him hit .330 and make those catches in center field. The way I dress to a Twins game helps too. I wore that red checkered shirt to the Twins first play-off victory this year. Those green pants, they helped D...

  David Heiller “I want Emlee.” My daughter, Malika, lay in the strange bed in the strange house of my sister, in the strange state of Texas. It was the first night of our vacation. “You want what?” I asked with a smile. “I want Emlee,” the two-year-old repeated. I walked out of the room, Emily’s room, where Malika had staked her claim for a week. Emily sat in the kitchen with the rest of the family. “Guess who Mollie wants to see?” I said, looking at my niece. Emily laughed and walked past me to her room—no, to their room. Malika and Emily Emily and Mollie took to each other right away on our vacation last week. The first night, after saying goodnight to “Emlee,” Malika woke up several times. Emily held her for a few minutes, and told her, “You know, if you want, you can just come over to my bed, you don’t have to cry.” Some 12-year-old girls would have called to their mother for help, or at least complained in the morning. Emily didn’t complain. “Oh, she ...

David Heiller It’s late on a Monday night. I should have written this hours ago. But I was too busy transplanting catnip and trumpet vines that my mother gave to me. I was going to write this column about Mom, what with Mother’s Day around the corner. I was going to find some poignant way to say how much she means to me. But I ended up planting three catnip plants and four trumpet vines instead. Mom would prefer it that way. Never put off tomorrow what you can do today, she says, and I do too. It’s one of my favorite sayings. We visited Mom last weekend. It rained most of the time, but that was fine. Rainy days in Brownsville are fine. You can sit and visit at the kitchen table, play the banjo or a game of Scrabble, maybe even watch the Twins play a game or national TV (they won!), and not feel too much guilt. It’s raining. At one point on Saturday, I told Mom I was going to take the plastic off the basement door. That was on my weekend job list, along with trimming the...