Last weekend several of us at the Bigs visited the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. We toured Reagan’s Air Force One and saw his old school motorcade. Well, it was old school to me; I was in elementary school when Reagan was in office and was unaware of most everything the man did until I was old enough to want to pay attention and understand the significance of his administration.
I remember hearing about Reagan’s speech on the evening news as my mom fried up dinner. I remember asking my seat mate about it one morning on the way to school. Her name was Tracy or Tracey; all I remember was that she was the only kid I knew who could speak two languages. Her mom was English, her dad was German still living in Germany and working as a mechanic. Everything I first learned about divided Germany came from Tracy/Tracey on the ride to and from school every day.
It was the first time I’d heard about governments splitting up a country with one half of it communist. She told me about communism, about how the government dictated your life and your reward from your own hard work. She told me how her entire family was working on immigrating to the United States.
After the wall fell I recall looking at my globe, the one my grandparents’ had given me to help with my geography homework. I sat at the kitchen table in our tiny little run-down house with the secondhand black and white television (we were pretty poor when I was young) listening to the news and looking at East and West Germany on my globe thinking that the Replogle people were going to have to recast it because the boundaries had changed, the whole world had changed.
And it was in large part to a man named Ronald Reagan.
I thought of that again as I stood on the patio and watched the sun set over that piece of wall right outside the Reagan Library. Physical, tangible possibilities, that is what it represented to me, and that’s the lesson I learned from Ronald Reagan.
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