Lucine and Bill have a daughter, Gretel, 17, who writes and acts and plays piano and French horn. She may well be the highest-ranking Armenian-American elected official in the country, at least until the voters of California send Cher to the U.S. They’re still there-or, more accurately, five miles north in Elba (apt name for an exile!), where Lucine is Town Supervisor. Always homesick, Kauffman persuaded his lovely and talented wife Lucine, a Los Angelena, to move back to Batavia in 1988 in what he called a “one-year experiment”-the year to be measured, apparently, in Old Testament terms. He had great fun in Santa Barbara with that crew of congenial editors drinking far into the night at Eddie Van Cleeve’s Sportsman’s Lounge, but in ’86 he flew east to become the magazine’s Washington editor. In the spring of 1985 he flew west to become an assistant editor with Reason magazine. He took a seminar with Christopher Lasch and thought on it. He bummed around out west for a while, sleeping in bus stations and writing derivative poetry in Salt Lake City flophouses (nah, he’s not a Mormon, just a BYU fan) before an ill-starred year in graduate school at the UR. Neil Diamond and Karen Carpenter, too, but don’t tell anyone. Two and a half years later he left Moynihan’s staff a bohemian Main Street anarchist who loved the Beats, the New England transcendentalists, early 20th century local colorists (Sarah Orne Jewett his Maine gal), cowpunk music, and the crazy old America. from the University of Rochester in 1981 and went therefrom to the staff of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the only dairy farmer in the U.S. After an idyllic childhood in his ancestral home of Batavia, New York, birthplace of Anti-Masonry, he was graduated from Batavia High School in 1977. He was an all-star Little League shortstop for the Lions Club Cubs but soon thereafter his talents eroded. Finally, in 2006, I saw it-in Washington, D.C., at the National Gallery of Art, when I was in town to do an overnight national radio show with a host who accused me of being “against penicillin, the Interstate Highway System, and the moon landing.” (Two out of three ain’t bad.) Ah, but there is a twist: “Kindred Spirits” was on display at the National Gallery courtesy of a Wal-Mart heiress who had bought the painting for the soon-to-open Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.īill Kauffman was born on November 15 (also the birthday of Bobby Dandridge) in the otherwise forgettable year of 1959. So rhymed William Cullen Bryant, the most precocious of American poets, the Berkshires wunderkind who grew grey writing free-trade editorials for the New York Evening Post and gave his name to what later became known as Needle Park, junkie central in midtown Manhattan.īryant is a subject of my favorite 19 th-century painting, “Kindred Spirits,” the Hudson River School masterpiece by Asher Durand in which the poet Bryant and the painter Thomas Cole are standing on a promontory in the Catskills, communing with nature as only dreamy and well-tailored antebellum artists could.įor years, whenever I was in the Vampire City I hoofed it over to the New York Public Library to see “Kindred Spirits,” which was, invariably, on loan. Yet, though thy winds are loud and bleak,
Either her fastball was moving or I’m getting old.Īfter half an hour I had a red softball-beaten pulp where my left palm used to be, so we made haste for the hot chocolate and further welcomed the month with me declaiming, to the general inattention of the household,
#Kindred spirits painting Patch#
March came in like a frigid lamb, and even though the temperature never did climb out of the teens the snowless patch in our backyard was large enough for my daughter and I to play catch for the first time in 2009.
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