Memories, the Wall and Tinsley Hall

I graduated high school in June, 1989 from a small NATO high school in Holland.

The 400 some-odd students in that school were present at the epicenter of a changing world. Ronald Reagan had recently put MX missiles in western Europe to counter the Soviet SS-20s, to great protest by many and the glee of others.

Mikhail Gorbachev (you know, the guy who actually ended the cold war), had been loosening up the Soviet Empire to change since 1985.

The Irish Republican Army and the Red Army Faction were still actively setting off bombs around England and the Continent –one of which killed British military personnel about three miles from my house, literally shaking us awake in the middle of the night.

I think most of us in that school knew that we were in an incredible time and noteworthy place, but we just took it for granted.

I returned home a month later and enrolled at NAU. Like almost every other student, I did my orientation and nervously began the grind.  I lived in a dorm called Tinsley Hall and tried to learn how adapt to this vastly different lifestyle.

This time sticks in my memory, not so much because of the new school and bad cafeteria food, but because of November 9th, 1989. Just five months after I left Germany the Berlin Wall was coming down.

I remember coming back to the dorm, to my room mate from small town Arizona telling me that he “thought there was something happening in Germany on the news that looked important, and you should see.” He was not quite sure what it was.

So, there on my little TV was everything: people dancing on the wall that I had seen only a couple years before. They took sledge hammers to this here-to-fore insurmountable monolith. They poured champagne on each other in elation.

I remember running up and down the halls of the dorm, sticking my head in every door and yelling “The Berlin Wall is coming down! Turn on the news.”

Unfortunately nobody did. They did not get it.

It took me a while to get over the fact that this was not of incredible importance to most students. I couldn’t see how they wouldn’t find this of central importance. At the same time it was an incredible historic event that I wanted desperately to go and see first hand. It was a lesson in perspective.  People find important that which is most immediate.

It also drove home for me just how lucky I was to have been where I was the four years previous and that I should never take that kind of opportunity for granted again.

I’m sitting here typing and looking at this piece of the Berlin wall in a frame in my office. In the frame, mounted under the little asbestos-filled piece of oppression, is a picture of my brother and I as teenagers, jokingly pretending to climb the wall, circa 1987.

No much to say, but Happy 20th Anniversary of the fall of the wall.