The first line in my college entrance essay stated, "I was sixteen years old when the Berlin Wall came down." Such was the importance of the end of the Cold War and the democratization of Central/Eastern Europe in the late '80's and early '90's. Just as my whole childhood was spent fearing Soviet nukes, nothing informed my young adulthood like my fascination with the buffer states in Eastern Europe and their move to their rightful, and geographically correct, position in Central Europe.
Lech Walesa, the Prague Spring, the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 etc... all part of what formed the religion for my bored suburban soul, and at the top of my geeky Pantheon was Vaclav Havel. Hard-drinking, chain-smoking, playwriting freedom fighter and architect of the Velvet Revolution - so named as an homage to one of his favorite bands, The Velvet Underground.
I sat through one of his plays and I actually saw him once when I was working on Charles Bridge pimping a tourist bar. He walked by with, and was dwarfed by, Jacques Chirac. That was in 1994, 5 years after the Velvet Revolution and 1 year after Czechoslovakia split into Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Since then I have married a Western European and settled down in the same kind of quiet Californian suburb I was fleeing when I ran off to Prague, but between my youth and Havel's death there were several more adventures around Czech Republic, a master's thesis written about expatriate culture in Prague during the early 90's(and yes, this was at a very reputable university), daydreams about taking The Boy to Prague and him looking at the wallpaper on my laptop saying "Pog!"
Words can't express how much this man I've never met, only saw once and who governed a country of which I was not a citizen effected my life, but it was profound. And I am sad.
Odpočívej v pokoji , Václave , a díky.
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