I ask my sister how she got a piece of the Berlin Wall and she says they were driving through Berlin at the time they were tearing the wall down and the workers were just giving away pieces of it, handing it through the car windows. She says it was like a party. She was three years old and these big hands of hairy men were coming through the windows handing them chunks of rock and concrete as though it were cake and she had no idea what it was all about. I’m staring at the chunk of cement on the kitchen counter. One side is smooth and flat and painted flashy turquoise and purple with a skinny yellow stripe cutting down the middle—it looks like spray paint, maybe graffiti. The other side is broken and rough and you can see the fragments of things that they made the concrete out of: small smooth stones that look like they could have come out of somewhere deep in the woods and sharp gravel mixed in with this chalky-looking cement that doesn’t look American at all and then these tiny glittering particles. When you run your finger along the edge of it, it makes the sound of glass more than stone. My sister offers to let me take the piece of the Berlin Wall to school and show it around in my class, which is a very generous offer for her, I think. Then my dad picks up the heavy chunk of the Berlin Wall and drops it into a Ziploc bag and when I ask him why he’s doing that he says so it doesn’t get lost. He says it’s very important that it doesn’t get lost or stolen because it’s a real live piece of modern history. What does he care? He’s not even sure he was alive back then and now he’s calling this piece of concrete alive. He’s not making any sense at all. He takes out a big roll of silver plumber’s tape from a drawer and tears a piece off with his teeth. He sticks the strip of tape on the Ziploc bag and then takes a black Magic Marker and writes “BERLIN WALL PIECE” like it’s some kind of museum label or something. “There,” he says, “that oughta do it.” He’s totally nuts.