I guess I wouldn’t have noticed the fall of communism if it hadn’t been for the series of messages left on my answering machine by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. I was otherwise occupied that day, as I had been looking out my window and saw a woman throw a blue flower under the hood of a running car my neighbor was working on. She drove up in a red convertible, parked her car next to his, got out, and before he could stop her, she threw a blue flower onto his engine block, slammed the hood down and drove off.


I tried for the rest of the day and night to appropriate the incident for myself. When Hegel called, I heard the phone ringing, but I was too absorbed to answer it. It wasn’t until the next morning, when I’d given up on the blue flower affair, that I played back the messages. Upon hearing what Hegel had to say, I knew instantly that the Berlin Wall must have fallen in the night, and that communism was over, and that there was nothing anyone could do about it.


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