Right Here, Right Now

I'd grown up hearing about the Berlin Wall. I was a child when it was built. My teachers made it sound like the Great Wall of China. That it was so impermeable, so immense, it could never fall.

One of my German professors in college (I tried, really I did, but if you want to know how I feel, read Mark Twain's "On the Awful German Language) told us solemnly that he fully expected to never see his brother again. And that his mother had died and he'd had no chance to go to her.

On the evening news, there would sometimes be stories about people trying desperately to cross the wall, to run that hell of mine fields and barbed wire and soldiers with guns.

I couldn't believe it when CNN first started showing pictures of people up on the wall. I was terrified for them.

And then I fiercely, desperately wanted to go to Germany. I was married at the time and didn't much care if Xman would come with me or not. I imagined myself running to Orlando International Airport, getting on a plane to Germany and then wandering around, asking "Where's Berlin?" Then I would go to Berlin and the people would still be dancing on the wall. A couple of them would reach down their hands to me and pull me up. And I would dance on the damned wall, too.

Well, I didn't go to Germany. But I wrote a book about the fall of the wall, a novel of my heart that probably stinks to high heaven. It was about one man killing his father, knowing he would die, to free thousands of people. Oh, and the paparazzi girl who could be a duchess or his sister, and the Audrey Hepburn-like aunt who once killed a man with a hatpin. Yeah, it pretty much stank on ice, but I loved it because in my ending, the hero died and the paparazzi girl walked away from a bloody hunting lodge bereft but proud.

See? That's why it lives in a binder in the basement.

Oh, but those were heady days. I prayed and held my breath that it was last, that freedom.

So far, so good.