Two Anniversaries

Today and tomorrow are special days. Each is a significant anniversary:

Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the premier episode of Sesame Street.

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I remember the Berlin Wall falling. (Here's Peter Jennings announcement of the news from 1989.) Isabel and I had met a couple of months earlier, as we started grad school at Northeastern and we were both beginning our teaching careers. Our offices were next to each other. I remember her wearing Hard Rock Cafe Moscow sweatshirt; she had gone to the Soviet Union with friends the year before. (The Hard Rock didn't actually open up in Moscow until 2003; her illegally-acquired bootleg attire just made her more attractive to me - I dug the bad girls back then.)

I remember Isabel telling us about her trip, and how she got the clear impression that the Soviet Union wasn't going to last much longer. So in some ways, it was no suprise when The Wall fell.

But what I remember most about The Wall falling was a student coming to me and asking if she could miss class for four days. When I asked why, she said she was going to Berlin with her father. Apparently, Dad was an entrepeneur, and when he'd heard that the wall was coming down, he made arrangements to fly to Germany. His plan was to get as much of the rubble as he could so he could sell it. He wanted his daughter to come along. How could I say No? I made her promise to write about it when she got back.


And she did write about it. She wrote about watching her father take swings at the wall with a sledgehammer while she gathered the pieces up and shoved them in a bag. At one point, someone in a uniform yelled at them in German, so they took off running. Very entertaining stuff.


And she brought me back a piece of the wall. I still have it. Oh, sure, maybe it's just a three-inch chunck of concrete with blue paint on one side that she found on the street in Kenmore Square, but I still think it's a real piece of history. And if not, it's a good story.

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Now, as for Sesame Street: This has come up before on Lympho Bob. I know the whole topic upsets my brother, because Sesame Street came out when I was a toddler, and my brother was already too old for it. So while I learned to count to 10 in Spanish and sing about the letter L, my brother "suffered through" Mr. Rogers, and only came out of childhood with the advanced people skills that he still possesses to this day. Sad, really.

I've loved Sesame Street all these years, and I still see life lessons in the episodes -- maybe even the kind of thing that you'd learn from Mr. Rogers. For example, one could easily learn about the Seven Deadly Sins through Sesame Street. Oscar is clearly a representation of Anger. Cookie Monster (my favorite, which I'm sure comes as no surprise) represents gluttony. I'm pretty sure that Lust is covered by The Count, but I need to think that through. Not sure how Big Bird fits into the whole scheme. Doesn't matter. The point is, I can count to 10 in Spanish.

But the life lesson I learned most and best from the Street was this: You've got to put down the duckie if you want to play the saxophone. Damn good advice for a cancer patient: some things you've just got to face.