Twenty-five years ago, I looked forward to my twenty-fifth birthday, just a couple of weeks later that November. I’d earned my master’s degree, and begun working as a counselor. The 1980’s drew to a close with short hair, skinny jeans and Jack Purcells. I remember wanting desperately to believe I could manage an adult life, and I was running up the credit card debt to prove it.

The past was the Fonz and the Cunninghams and a sense of order, the present held promise and anxiety and the Cosby family, and the idea of making it into the twenty-first century without nuclear disaster seemed as remote as the notion of the surreal Twin Peaks taking over the television ratings.

And, of course, this happened. November 9, 1989. Making skinny jeans, credit cards, Cosby, and adult life all seem a bit less important than the new world being forged by the fall of the Berlin Wall, one brutal length of concrete at a time.