Where I Was

When the Berlin Wall came down, I don't remember much except seeing news images. I remember being more focused on the Tiananmen Square protests earlier that year, so when the Berlin Wall came down I was pretty startled. It seemed very sudden. As I've read other accounts, I've noted that most other people in the west were very startled by this, but the people in East Berlin saw it coming much sooner and were pushing for it. Of course, over the next year, the rest of the Eastern Bloc came apart and finally the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. Then this led to all the wars in the Balkans and Central Asia over the next decade... and the world continues.

On 9/11 I was up early and in the car, driving to San Diego to teach a class. I listened to radio reports of the disaster the whole hour and a half. I heard the report of the second tower collapsing while driving past the 55 interchange on the 5, so that was about five minutes after leaving the house. It was a PowerPoint class that day at Kyocera, the cell phone factory. We made presentations out of the pictures of the disaster that were coming out of New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania. We let out early and I drove home and talked to Laurel about it. That night, with all the air traffic in the country shut down, we were woken by fighter jets doing a flyover. It scared us both half to death.