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womzillaFor several years, my sister worked at a white-shoe law firm which had its offices in midtown Manhattan, either immediately by or very close to the large section of the Berlin Wall which is memorialized at Madison and 53rd (not too far from the offices of the not-quite-white-shoe trading and investment firm at which I now work). One year, when my parents were visiting, we all converged at her offices and she made a point of taking us past the wall segment, and we marveled at it together for a few minutes, this hunk of concrete desecration made sacred through preservation and spray-paint.
Then, being the type of people we are, my father and I were simultaneously seized by the desire to see the obverse of the wall. There's a couple of feet clearance between the Wall and the wall behind it, and enough light to see that other face is completely blank. We looked at that forbidding, no-man's emptiness, stood back, and simultaneously said, "And on the other side, it didn't say nothing."
I don't remember November 9 very well. I'd already gotten out of the practice of watching television news, so I didn't mostly see the crowds; I heard about them on NPR. I do remember driving down the highway a few days later when a news report came on--I don't at this point remember precisely of what--and something in it made it clear that Gorbachev was going to let Eastern Europe go without a fight. And I had to pull the car over because I couldn't see the road any more from the weight that no longer hung over me, that weight just waiting for a bad radar signal to kill me and everything I ever knew. "Even the word gone will be gone" was finally gone.
Then, being the type of people we are, my father and I were simultaneously seized by the desire to see the obverse of the wall. There's a couple of feet clearance between the Wall and the wall behind it, and enough light to see that other face is completely blank. We looked at that forbidding, no-man's emptiness, stood back, and simultaneously said, "And on the other side, it didn't say nothing."
I don't remember November 9 very well. I'd already gotten out of the practice of watching television news, so I didn't mostly see the crowds; I heard about them on NPR. I do remember driving down the highway a few days later when a news report came on--I don't at this point remember precisely of what--and something in it made it clear that Gorbachev was going to let Eastern Europe go without a fight. And I had to pull the car over because I couldn't see the road any more from the weight that no longer hung over me, that weight just waiting for a bad radar signal to kill me and everything I ever knew. "Even the word gone will be gone" was finally gone.
