I guess today is the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall. Or the fall of it I bet. I dunno, I saw it on Twitter. HEH.

I have a big affinity for that old thing, as I once turned a paper in a month late about it, and I was born and lived the first two years of my life on the West side of it. My dad was an officer in the Army and and drove tanks out in “the field” (an abstraction I’ve grown up with, the ambiguity of which I’m only just now realizing) while my mother, my age was at home havin sie babies.

We went to East Germany once, or maybe I was still in my mom’s stomach, it’s a family myth, the truth of which hardly matters. What I was told was that they’d cross Checkpoint Charlie, a name I’ll never forget not just because of that paper or History class but bc of an old sweatshirt my mom used to wear, it had a big bear on it too, and was one of those shirts that as a child you don’t quite understand so you stare at it constantly and consider words like Berlin ifrom the back of a grocery cart long before you know what they mean.

Anyway the story goes that my dad was in his dress blues and they walked into a rowdy family restaurant, it was early on and maybe there were still things like bustling restaurants, but as soon as my dad walked through the door, complete silence overtook the room, only gasps and the clinking of a few forks as they dropped onto plates under gaping mouths.

I’d have to check with my mother to see if I was yet born, yet the baby waitresses would declare beautiful and whisk away to the kitchen to show the cooks, but this detail, of the silence my father commanded, such a departure from any ideas of him I’ve turned over in my head, has always been entangled with my ideas of the Wall, that place I may or may not have gone, when I was a beautiful baby who crawled to the door with a book dragging behind me as soon as he came to the door.