I don't remember much about the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was 10 years old at the time, and I remember that a few weeks later - probably over the Christmas holidays - a classmate of mine went to Germany with her family and came back with a piece of concrete.
"What's that?" we all asked as she showed it off in school.
"It's a piece of The Wall," she said.
The wall was, of course, one of the stops on my trip to Berlin in 2001 when I went with my friend Jenny (above). Part of it still stands, showing a clear division of East and West that is not easily forgotten.
Apparently, when it happened, I wrote a song about the wall coming down. My grandmother just reminded me when I spoke to her last week. I vaguely remember hitting some keys on our old, out-of-tune piano and trying to compose some ugly notes on a sheet of home-made music notation paper.
My grandmother, who had just been released from the hospital after a back surgery, remembers laying in bed as I played and sang to her from across the room.
"Oh, I wish we had recorded it," my grandmother said.
All I can remember is that I - when I was 14 or 15 - found some badly written piece of pink paper, and when I tried to play the notes on it, it sounded like the theme song to "McGyver." I tossed it on the spot and never thought about it again.
