It was 20 years ago today that the Berlin Wall fell. I was 8.

I don’t actually remember if I noticed at the time. I was in grade 3. My dad’s plant had been locked out, and then on strike for almost 2 years and he was working as a pizza delivery guy.
I may have my timeline wrong; perhaps my dad had already moved to Kincardine for a job at the nuclear plant. I don’t know. I know the rest of us moved up in April, but at the time, my years were not divided into mere months, but into markers like summer, back-to-school, winter, Christmas, and my birthday. Perhaps they told me, perhaps they were too busy trying to put food on the table to explain far-way world events to an 8 year old who was too busy cutting out paper bats to listen/care.

What I do remember of The Wall actually occurred about a year later. I remember a Captain Planet episode, where there was this guy who thought the Cold War was still going on, and the Planeteers had to show him pictures of the Wall coming down before he would believe them. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but I came away from the show with the impression that the wall was a Bad Thing put there by Bad People, and now it was gone because it had been Wrong. I didn’t quite grasp that it had just happened. I imagine that I figured it happened in the BC era (“Before Caitlin”), as did all World Bad Things, like the war my grandpa fought in.

I didn’t grasp it until my grade 9 geography teacher pointed out, 5 years later in a lesson on European geography, that the wall fell “in our lifetime”. I remember what ripped jeans (covered in trendy patches) I was wearing. I remember being awed and horrified that something like that was allowed to happen at all, let alone happen in the late 80s. The world was supposed to be safe, and somehow, a mere 5 years ago, it wasn’t. It isn’t.

It was a huge paradigm shift.