I spent an hour this morning preparing for next week's lessons, and though I'd already readied an article for next week's Article of the Week, I ditched those plans when checking the news, I realized what today was: the thirtieth anniversary of the breach of the Berlin Wall. The fall? Well, I guess so -- once it was breached, the Wall was no more a wall.
I watched those reports on CBS Evening News realizing the momentousness of the event though perhaps not its personal significance.
I say "perhaps" and not "certainly" because it's a question: would I have met K had the Berlin Wall not come down? Communist control in Poland at that point were already teetering. Solidarność's revolution, with Wałęsa at the visible helm, had already gained traction -- almost a decade earlier -- and gone underground again only to reemerge to take all available seats in the sejm just a few months prior to this significant day 30 years ago. Perhaps Germany could have remained divided while Poland transformed, but all those regimes were like so many dominoes or a Jenga pile: once one went, they all went. So I might have gone to Poland; I might have met K; but there are no guarantees, certainly.
From that spins out a series of eventualities that are far from certainties.
Had all that happened, it's hard to see that I would live in Greenville now, that I, after having planned and prepared for a week of lessons at a local middle school, would spend a late Saturday morning trimming hedges, pulling the remains of flowers, and mowing.
Where I would be, what my life would look like -- it's impossible to say. But it strikes me as odd that events halfway around the world helped set a trajectory that ended with me pulling purple hearts from the flowerbed as K took the Boy to rehearsal for the Polish community's annual Christmas pageant.
I prepared the Article of the Week assignment and decided that instead of the usual multiple-choice questions about bias and central idea -- all designed to prepare students for the standardized testing that will consume the final weeks of school -- I would ask them a simple self-reflection question: "What will be the Fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall event of your adolescence? What world event do you think could happen that would change the course of history permanently for the better?" And unlike all those silly questions that I have check, I'll be eager to read their responses.
