On my twenty-fourth birthday, I sat at a library looking through sliders that sat in a bucket. I gazed through them with ease, stopping on one that caught my good eye. It read ‘Peter Hutton’s recollection of West Berlin in 1980’. The librarian pestered me with a ticking clock, bringing to my awareness that the library would be closing. I couldn’t help but to grab the slider and ask if I could check it out. The lady with the thin grays told me to take it. I went home that day and searched more on this filmmaker’s journey to West Berlin. I soon found an excerpt from him that read, “Someone had given me some hashish, which I had been smoking. I became transfixed by the quality of light in the shattered window, which evoked an image from Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Suddenly a tiny woman jumped out of the bushes. I just about had a heart attack! “Mein Gott!” I said. “Was machts du?” “Und Sie?” she responded. “I’m looking for history,” I said. My German was terrible. Realizing I was not a native speaker, the woman answered in English: “I’m a botanist and I’m collecting plants.” I was a bit stunned. I wanted to make a portrait of her, but I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. She went on to explain that in this particular area of Berlin there were more species of plants than anywhere else in Europe. “Why is that?” I asked, still not sure if I was talking to a real person or a hallucination. She explained that trains came to Berlin from across Europe, carrying on their surfaces hundreds of seeds and spores. Upon arriving in Berlin the trains were washed. The seeds then germinated, and many species of plants that had not been indigenous to Berlin began to grow.” Right then, I made it a goal to see West Berlin’s flowering buildings. I am now thirty-two and have no passport. There is no moral. The End.
