I had a strange internal geography growing up. I knew, intellectually, that the USSR and Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia were real places (unlike, say, Greece, which I believed was a myth until I found it in an atlas one day). As a child of Cold War media, though, it was difficult for me to imagine that they existed on the same plane as the United States, however many times I saw Ronald Reagan on TV with the latest in a series of soon-to-be-dead Russian leaders.

In this half-imaginary Eastern Europe I’d created, the Iron Curtain was a tangible object – not the harshly-lit barbed wire fence I only recently learned was a feature of the Czech countryside, but a tall, solid sheet of gleaming steel, undulating across the landscape. Later, I learned that the Curtain was metaphorical – and I assumed that the Berlin Wall must be, too. I’d seen the checkpoints in films, of course, but that didn’t translate, in my mind, to a great concrete barricade, covered in graffiti and subject to being, quite literally, torn down.

But then, on a no-doubt chilly November morning, Jan was late to class. Jan was a German exchange student, and Jan was never late. This morning, though, he was, and when he ran, breathless, into Mr. Augustin’s Mythology class, his English had all but abandoned him. Mr. Augustin listened to his broken attempts to communicate his excitement to the rest of us, then spoke to him in German. A moment later, he said, “The Berlin Wall has been torn down. Jan’s parents called to say they’re arranging to meet members of the family who were trapped on the other side the night it was built.”

No televised image, no classroom discussion, no Hollywood movie could have made the Wall real for me the way Jan’s flushed cheeks and gleaming eyes did. And if the Wall was real, then so were the people whose lives had been affected by it. And if they were real… Then so were all the other people I saw every night on the news. I don’t know if I’m articulating this well – I’ve never tried before tonight, and sometimes it’s still hard to wrap my head around it.

Jan, wherever you are, thanks for that. You opened up my world that day, though it took me years to realize it.

Photo by abhijeet.rane on Flickr. The painting reminds me of Pyramus and Thisbe, though I’ll hope this one had a happy ending.

Tags: Berlin Wall, Germany, High School Stories, I'm Such a Dork Sometimes, Laramie, Things I Thought I Knew

I had a biography of Abe Lincoln when I was a kid, that told about his early life in Illinois childhood in Kentucky and Indiana.* The rail-splitting was in there, and barn dances with shoo-fly pie. I think I remember it because it stimulated my imagination visually – I had such clear pictures in my head of the woods around the Lincoln family’s tiny cabin, and of Nancy Lincoln’s dying face, drained of life and color by the slow agony of milk fever.

Milk fever, as I remember it, followed the birth of a stillborn child. The poor mother’s unexpressed milk hardened inside her breasts, resulting in pain, swelling, infection and then death. I categorized it as a subset of childbed fever – really, puerperal fever caused by poor hygiene. (When I tried to Google it today, all I could find was a description of certain “morbid symptoms” which might appear in the week after childbirth, but which don’t appear to be fatal, and several references to a hypocalcemic condition that may affect dairy cattle, goats and dogs, and which may well be fatal if not promptly treated.)

And then today, researching something else entirely, I learned that Nancy Lincoln died of milk sickness, which was caused by snakeroot poisoning. A common affliction in the early Midwest, it occurred when cattle ate the very toxic white snakeroot, and passed the poison through in their milk.

So what about that stillborn child, I thought? That younger brother or sister whose death robbed Lincoln’s mother of life? Never existed. There was a younger brother, who died in infancy, but five or six years before Abe’s mother died. There was, however, an older sister, Sarah, called Sally, who died in childbirth at the age of 20. Her baby died, as well.

Somewhere in my mind, then, Lincoln’s mother Nancy (who might well have had milk fever after the stillbirth of Lincoln’s younger brother) and his sister Sarah morphed into a single person, buried in a grave under the poplar trees, where irises bloom in the spring. Always assuming I didn’t make that part up, too.

*And that’s something else I learned today – Lincoln didn’t grow up in Illinois at all. Now I’m wondering how many other bits of history I’ve just got wrong!

Tags: Abraham Lincoln, I'm Such a Dork Sometimes, Milk Sickness Which Is Not at All the Same Thing as Milk Fever, Oops, Things I Misremembered, Things I Thought I Knew

Memorial Day Weekend, 2005.

There was a stack of particle board leaning against the wall in the office, and I needed to get to the outlet behind it. “I’ll just ease it out away from the wall,” I said to myself.

Have you ever tried doing that with a stack of wood? It gets heavier the farther it gets from vertical. I think the pull of gravity must be stronger, closer to the ground. (Yes, you guessed it. I never took physics.) Anyway, everything was fine until the boards reached about a 45-degree angle. Suddenly, I couldn’t hold them up any longer, and I couldn’t push them back toward the wall, either. So I dropped them on my leg.

NovySan was outside. “What did you do?” he asked.

“Dropped a stack of particle board on my leg. But I’m okay! Really!”

“Go get an icepack,” he said.

“No, no. I’m fine.”

“You have a show tomorrow,” he said. And I did. So I got an icepack. NovySan is very wise. And the bruise really wasn’t so bad – it didn’t affect the muscle at all.

I can’t say that for the one I picked up a few days later, when I sat on the corner of a metal filing cabinet at work.

Yeah. That shit hurt.

Tags: I'm Such a Dork Sometimes, Love, Ouch