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 The color green is coming back into our lives
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A view from the 10th floor of the Museum of Arts and Design on Columbus Circle looking north up Central Park West and northwest across the Park to upper Fifth Avenue. 2:00 PM. Photo: JH. |
April 7, 2009. Yesterday it rained in New York.
Downpours, misting. But wet, and grey. I happen to like that atmosphere. At the beginning of April it means the buds are brimming and the color green is coming back into our lives. In this grey light the green is almost iridescent, and the white buds of the pear trees that line many streets almost looks like powder puffing. So this is a time when, according to Mother Nature, grey means promise. Good to heed.
At noontime I went down to Columbus Circle to meet Barbara Tober and Holly Hotchner at the Museum of Arts and Design where Hotchner is the director. I had not been to this new museum yet.
I am planning on doing a Diary on it and my friend Barbara Tober’s involvement in its development and growth. To most New Yorkers it has long been a matter of architectural controversy. Its new home has been that way since it was first designed by Edward Durell Stone and built as a museum by Huntington Hartford in the 1960s. I am not going to write any more about it now but plan to after I gather a little more background.
JH and the Digital came along for a look-see too. Suffice to say for the moment: it is a fabulous museum and collection in many ways. And the views looking out from the foot of Columbus Circle northward and northeast up Broadway, up Central Park West and across Central Park over to Fifth Avenue and north to Harlem, are metropolitan spectacular, and made even more dramatic by yesterday’s mélange of cityscape, grey skies, shining pavements and the green just about to burst in the Park.
Last night I went over to the New York Athletic Club on the corner of Central Park South and Seventh Avenue, for a booksigning by a young man named Chesa Boudin. Eleanora and Michael Kennedy were hosting.
Eleanora told me about it over an early dinner at Swifty’s on Sunday night. Chesa is a 28-year-old Yale Law student who has written a book called “Gringo; A Coming of Age in Latin America” which Scribner has published (official pub date April 14).
It’s a “travel” book that begins with an 18-year-old’s odyssey: his first trip abroad, alone, to Guatemala. His objective: adventure and learning Spanish. Over the the next eight years, Mr. Boudin criss-crossed the southern American continent visiting 27 countries.
“This is not Latin American for Yuppies,” wrote Seymour Hersch in his review of the book. “It’s cheap beer, fried plantains, long dusty bus rides, radical politics, the repeated kindness of desperately poor people sharing what they have with an outsider, and Chesa Boudin’s eagerness to share what he’s seeing and what he’s feeling with sympathy and empathy – as he tries to sort it all out.”
Sunday night when Eleanora Kennedy was talking about Chesa Boudin (who is a close friend of their daughter Anna), I asked if he were any relation to Kathy Boudin, famous in the 1970s and 1980s for her role in radical American politics.
To Boomers, the name Boudin (Boo-deen) revives the memory of the turmoil and turbulence of the Viet Nam era, the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent political wars. The Weathermen.
There was an old Federalist townhouse on West 11th Street -- on the very posh block between Fifth and Sixth -- which exploded in the late morning of March 6, 1970 when some young political radicals were engaged in making a nail bomb (that went off, killed three people involved in the process, and brought the house down to rubble).
Kathy Boudin was in that house, although she escaped. Ten years later she and another political radical David Gilbert became involved in driving a getaway car for some other members of the Weatherman Underground and the Black Liberation Army who were planning on robbing a Brink’s truck in Nanuet, New York.
That was botched and ended with some law enforcement and security people being killed. Both David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin went to jail. Boudin went to the Bedford prison and served 22 years. Gilbert is serving a 75 years to Life sentence now in Dannemora.
They had a 14-month-old boy at the time of the robbery. They had left him with his Dominican babysitter, to carry out. His name was Chesa.
Chesa’s mother and father did not come home that day. In fact the next time he would see them, they would be behind bars and would remain there (his mother at least) for the next 22 years of his life.
The child was brought up by friends of his parents who had two sons of their own – Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayer, both compatriots of Boudin and Gilbert, although they had returned to a traditional life in Chicago. Americans were reading about Dorhn and Ayer last year because they were neighbors and acquaintances of a man named Barack Obama.
I remember those days in the 60s and 70s and the names, Boudin, Dorhn, Kunstler, Patty Hearst, The Black Panthers, Jane Fonda, and on and on and on. It was a long list. Now a dim memory only to those who were alive then and almost completely unknown, if indeed at all understood, to the generation that came after. The idea of their offspring, born into the world of the cell phone and the computer and the Ipod, is almost inconceivable were it not so.
I took a picture of the two mothers of Chesa Boudin last night at the New York Athletic Club. With their son. Two women in their mid-60s, they looked like mothers of a young adult. Young grandmas maybe too. They did not look like political radicals although Ms. Dohrn looked like the kind of mother who had little patience for nonsense.
I asked her where her “son” learned such aplomb at public speaking. “The Rotary,” she replied, almost as surprised as I. “The Rotary?” I wasn’t sure if I had the same (“Rotary”). “Yeah, the Rotary Club. They were one of his sponsors and if you’re going to be sponsored by the Rotary, you better learn to speak well; it’s expected.”
Ms. Boudin looked like a very grateful, maybe even somewhat dazed mother, by the accomplishments of her son.
In the beginning of his travel memoir “Gringo,” Chesa Boudin talks about the first family he stayed with in Guatemala, and how his Spanish was so bad, he was having a hard time communicating. However when they asked him about his family, he felt compelled to tell them as honestly as he could about his family background. This wasn’t easy with his very limited linguistic abilities. He fumbled around for the words, finally producing one from his pocket dictionary: “encarcelados.” That raised a few eyebrows of confusion and alarm ...
He wrote:
How could I, with only the most basic Spanish, articulate to my now concerned hosts that in October 1981, when I was just fourteen months old, my biological parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, had left their Manhattan apartment and dropped me off at my Dominican babysitter’s house, only to head off into a tragedy? How could I explain that, while I played and fussed as an infant, my parents made a terrible mistake, the worst of their lives? They had waited in a U-Haul in Nyack, New York, as a couple of miles away, members of a radical armed group of black nationalists robbed a Brinks truck of $1.6 million. Tragically bungled, the Brinks robbery left three men dead and an entire community traumatized. By the time my mother and father received a twenty years to life sentence and a seventy-five-years-to-life sentence, respectively, friends of theirs, Bill Ayer and Bernardine Dohrn, had taken me into their family and become my other parents. How could I explain to Delia what the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s had been about, or how my parents, white Jews, got involved in antiracist and antiwar activism and ultimately armed robbery?
Exactly. |
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| Michael and Eleanora Kennedy |
Eleanora Kennedy, Anna Kennedy, and Dennis Ashbaugh |
| Kathy Boudin and Judge Gustin Reichbach |
Robert Rionda and Priscilla Whittle |
I arrived at the NYAC reception for Chesa Boudin last night just as Michael Kennedy was reading to the guests many of the glowing reviews of the books – “a delightfully engaging trip through Latin American, in an ingenious combination of memoir and commentary ... the modesty and clarity of the prose all bring a young Orwell to mind ... marvelous voyage of personal discovery provides a vivid portrait of the richness and diversity of Latin America ... superb travel memoir, filled with memorable characters whose stories capture the tragedies and the promise of this vast region.”
When Michael finished he introduced the author. A kid to these eyes. In jacket and tie (you will not be admitted into the New York Athletic club in jeans and sneakers and jackets are required also). Mr. Boudin talked briefly about how much he loved Latin America, although he had by now become a world traveler and maybe even an addicted one – having visited more than 80 countries.
He quoted Mark Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” |
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| Chesa Boudin and Camille Varlet |
Scribner's Alexis Gargagliano, Kate Bittman, and Tyler LeBleu |
| Scott Palumbo, Lindsay Caprioni, and DPC |
Chesa Boudin and Maria Paz Gaviria |
| Rebekah and Chris Simunek |
Judge Gustin Reichbach, Judge Emily Goodman, and Michael Krinsky |
I was watching and listening with more than just curiosity about what the young man had said about his book. I was trying to observe this obviously very intelligent, very self-possessed, now-grown child of another generation, a child of fiercely passionate and political and intellectually brilliant parents, both of whom he knew only from prison visits for his entire childhood.
I was wondering about what kind of mother Bernadine Dohrn was, and what kind of father Bill Ayer was, to this quasi-parentless boy. Who grew up and went Yale, who became a Rhodes Scholar and studied at Oxford, who’s now attending Yale Law; and has traveled the world for the past ten years of his life and even written a book about some of it.
Watching and listening to him speak to the scores of friends and family last night at the New York Athletic Club, I could only think, there is the proof: we are all miracles. Maybe two sets of parents both here and gone did it. Maybe he’s even a double miracle.
Read the book and see for yourself. |
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