I keep my piece of the Berlin Wall in a bin bursting with history

Valerie asked if she could borrow the Berlin Wall for a lesson she is planning for her students at the library of Sanford Pride Elementary School. Not the whole wall. That came down in shambles back in 1989. We’re talking about just a small chunk.

My cousin was in Germany that historic November night, when the demarcation between West and East German crumbled. My cousin scooped up a few bits of the graffiti-strewn rubble and gave me one.

More than a dozen years ago, I took an old foot locker filled with mementos and emptied it. I tossed out many of the contents. What I kept I stored inside a much smaller bin I had bought.

I had not opened this bin and riffled through its contents in a very long time, so I was surprised by some of the items that jumped out at me when I looked for the rock last week.

For example, a New York ball cap was squished at the top of the pile. It's no ordinary cap. It’s the one I bought at the gift shop on one of the upper floors of the World Trade Center in August 2000, just a little more than a year before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The rest of the items in the bin are more personal. I took a few of them out and showed them to Valerie.

There was the game ball, smudged with dirt, that Coach McGinnis gave me after our baseball team, Riddle’s Getty, beat Central Tire, 4 to zip, on July 11, 1981. Coach McGinnis gave me the ball because he had an appreciation for underdogs and evidently that night I had played my best game yet. That long-ago date on the ball made me feel bittersweet: my grandfather died five days later.

I saw a letter with handwriting I did not immediately recognize. I plucked the letter from the pile and saw that my grandmother sent it to me from Florida back in 1990. She said hello and brought me up to date on her and Grampy’s efforts to sell their mobile home in the retirement park where they lived in Fort Myers. I nodded solemnly as I read Grammy’s words. She and Grampy were selling their Florida home because Grampy was developing Alzheimer’s disease, and they no longer could afford to be away from our family in Maine during the wintertime. Ever the optimist, Grammy told me how she was excited to be returning to Maine to live here year-round.

Grammy died in 2008. Betty White would not have been the only one to turn 100 this year.

I showed Valerie an autographed photo I got from Linda Blair, whose performance in "The Exorcist" turned heads back in 1973. Val and I met Blair at SpookyWorld in the 1990s. Star-struck, I made a complete goof of myself, talking to Blair in a hyper rush of words and mentioning "The Exorcist" in a way that sounded like I was trying to remind her that she had been in the film 25 years earlier. Val and our friends stood by and watched with unfolding horror, wondering when I would get a hold of myself. Ever since, I have been measured and savvier when meeting celebrities.

I also showed Val my most recent contribution to this bin of memories: an ID wrist band from when I reported to the emergency room last October after a post-COVID bout of shortness of breath.

“Why do you have that?” Val asked, in a tone she insisted was not derisive.

“History,” I said. “I got this band because I was affected by the virus during this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.”

Looking through the bin now, I see all sorts of relics from my past – items that I last saw when I cleaned out that footlocker many years ago.

One of the belts I earned when I took karate at the local YMCA in the mid-1980s. The green bank bag I used when I collected money from my paper route customers in elementary school and junior high. The red mortarboard and tassel I wore the night I graduated from Sanford High School in 1990.

A yellowed newspaper clipping from the spring of 1989. My friends and I are seen in a photo, holding signs and protesting budget cuts the school committee was slated to discuss that evening. All my friends have serious and determined expressions. Me? I’m grinning at the camera, relishing the role of a rebel and the drama of it all. My father was chair of the school committee, by the way.

There is so much more in this bin. Letters written by me and sent to me by family and friends. Postcards my father sent me during my freshman year of college. A White House press pass I was given when covering President George W. Bush’s arrival on Air Force One at Sanford Seacoast Regional Airport. Some pictures I drew when I was a kid who dreamt of one day having his own comic strip in newspapers.

World history, national history and personal history, all in one little box.

Shawn P. Sullivan is an award-winning columnist and is a reporter for the York County Coast Star. He can be reached at ssullivan@seacoastonline.com.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: My piece of the Berlin Wall lives in a bin bursting with history