Take, for example, the fall of the Berlin Wall; it was the subject of a recent lesson I gave to the 4-6 grades at our school. The thing literally went up overnight, and one morning in August of 1961 the people of Berlin woke up to find their city split in half. People were cut off from jobs and family, and even though about 5000 people escaped over, under or through it over the course of the the next 30 years, it became an actual, physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain that clamped down over Eastern Europe after World War II. Recovery from the war in East Berlin had been slow; the wall made it even slower. Poor housing conditions, food shortages, low incomes all persisted in East Berlin while West Berlin flourished. Even the graffiti that marked the wall in West Berlin, noticeably absent on the east side, marked a society that had moved on and left its other half behind. And in the end, the nightmarish complex of concrete walls, barbed signal wire, watchtowers and checkpoints that formed one of the most hated barriers in history was taken down in one day by a mistake made by a party official at a press conference.
The reason I give you this history lesson is because I could never remember a time, until the time that it fell, that the Berlin Wall hadn't been a BIG DEAL. It was an example of the difference between Us and Them -- the Communists who built it; a real-life symptom of the Cold War that was being waged during the whole of my childhood. And the night that it stopped dividing Berlin, November 9, 1989 -- an event that eventually led to the disbanding of the Soviet Union and the end of that very same Cold War -- I wasn't even paying attention. You know why? I was worried about my hair. I was a junior in high school, and I had just celebrated my 16th birthday and gotten my driver's license a few weeks before. There was a girl's preference dance early that November, and I had asked a guy I'd been writing to who had been at boot camp all summer, but I was pretty sure that he had been writing someone else because he hadn't been talking to me as much since he got home, and it was a lot of drama [DEEP BREATH HERE] so I was really worried about the dance. And my hair. Because it was going to be my first real date. So I wasn't paying attention, and I missed it -- the whole history-making, game-changing tearing down of the Wall. I could have watched the whole thing unfold and been a witness to history, but now, 25+ years on, all I can do is wish I had been there. The guy turned out to be a complete knob, by the way.
I realize now that there are a lot of things that flew by me I wish I would have caught. The meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl? I was battling my way through 7th grade with terrible haircut (I worried about my hair a lot). The introduction of the cell phone? I was a 5th grader -- my most traumatic year in elementary school -- and distraught over the two C's I got on my report card for handwriting. My mom made me copy several pages out of any book I was reading into my Dukes of Hazzard notebook longhand over the course of the next summer so it wouldn't happen again. The attempted Reagan assasination? Well, I was 7 and I would be tempted to let myself off the hook for that one except for the fact that I remember being fascinated by the eruption of Mount St. Helens almost a year before and I have vivid memories of THE royal wedding -- Charles and Diana, not Will and Kate -- that took place in the next couple of months.
It frustrates me that I can recall with perfect clarity working out with Jane Fonda and her videos, but until last year held the belief that the Miracle On Ice occured before my time. I caught the end of the Iran-Contra scandal, and I even watched some of the Oliver North hearings, but my memories of the backlash following the release of New Coke are much brighter. I was fully aware of the damage caused by the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, but only because it happened the morning of my 16th birthday, and I was watching it on TV as I got ready for school. I don't remember the release of Apple's first computer, but ask me about the first time I saw Top Gun and I can give you exact details. That movie *sigh*...
I may have been unobservant, but I can't say I was completely oblivious to the history being made around me; there are several moments I won't ever forget. I saw the Challenger disaster happen in real time on a TV my first period teacher had pulled into his classroom. I think that was the last time I saw a live event on television for the rest of my public school career. I remember like it was yesterday being a 6th grader in a small town overshadowed by staggering loss a couple of days before Christmas when the coal mine I could see from my kitchen window caught fire and killed 27 local miners. The Wilberg Mine fire is just a footnote in the big history books, but the heavy sadness that accompanied the smoke pouring out of that mine portal for weeks will never leave me. Then there was the year my college-age brother, who happened to have a job close to home so he moved back in for the summer, bought an Atari and I would sneak downstairs when he wasn't home to play Space Invaders. I had a Rubix cube (which I could never solve; I always took it apart and put it back together after I got frustrated), I mourned the fact I never got a real Cabbage Patch doll, and I knew personally someone who died of AIDS before there was even a name for the disease (my sister's neighbor -- they had just come back from Saudi Arabia where she had been given a blood transfusion during a complicated childbirth).
I guess I'm probably not so unusual -- everyone has periods that they get caught up in the minutae of their lives and lose sight of the big picture. If we didn't all do it to some extent, no one would ever accomplish anything. What I would like to do is be more present in my own life; setting priorities that reflect what's most important to me and then really tuning in to what's happening as I attempt to stick with them. To me, that means not getting distracted by Facebook when one of my kids needs my full attention, or putting down my book long enough to talk to my husband about his day. It also means being more aware of what's around me -- not missing that one day every spring when you look around and realize the world is green again, or taking a walk under stars you can actually see from where I live. When something happens in the world that creates a sea change, I want to know about it so that I can discuss with my kids what it might mean for them and how it might affect what's coming. I'm working on it, but being blithely unaware for many years has taken a toll...old habits die hard. And maybe I shouldn't, but at least I've quit worrying about my hair.
