The last time I got tear gassed...

My mother and I just had a brief conversation that included the statement above. It started with her coming into the kitchen to tell me that President Obama was in Prague, where I studied for a semester as an undergrad. I said, "Lucky him." And then asked her if she had ever been there, I couldn't remember. She said she had only been "behind the iron curtain once" - the summer of 1968, Berlin. She was traveling through Europe that summer with one of her brothers.

I said, but you stayed on the western side, right? No. She went through Checkpoint Charlie, where the guards were gruff and intimidating, especially to American students. She remembers the imposing architecture of totalitarianism, and the armed guards on building tops and everywhere. She came home to Chicago and soon after came the Democratic Convention.

She went down to the protests a couple of times with her parents, and once with her friend Landis. She told me about all the people in Grant Park, all the way down to the Field Museum, and how the police had their rifles trained on the crowds, and how the police lobbied tear gas into those crowds. Some people, who had asbestos gloves and masks, would pick up the canisters and throw them back at the police. And how the police were out of control. She and Landis realized that they needed to get out of there, and held hands as the made their way to the lake through the people, and headed south until they got out of the crowds. She can't remember how they got home.

"The last time I got tear gassed..." she thinks was when she went to see Jimi Hendrix play Red Rocks. She was in college in Denver. After that, she had tickets to see the Stones play (from my googling, I'm guessing this was in 1969, at Fort Collins), but when she got there she left. She couldn't handle crowds any more. I don't blame her.

Just a little random story from my morning, to show you should always ask follow-up questions to your family members. You may learn something.

I'm working on two posts - one about my fabulous lunch with Blue Girl (please do not call her "peppy"), and one about Adventureland, which I saw, and enjoyed even more than I thought I would, last night. Plus there is now a backlog of pie on which to report.