another interesting tangle of facts uncovered

The recent firing of Native American activist professor Ward Churchill had me checking Wikipedia to get my facts straight, and among other things I learned that he was alleged to be involved with the Weathermen Underground in the late 1960's. They of course were perhaps the last major domestic militant left wing group our country has seen, the likes of which are conspicuously absent in our present era of unchecked neo-imperialistic conservatism run amok. The Weathermen accidentally blew up a building on West 11th Street in Manhattan, which interestingly was the former residence of Charles Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch, and his son James, a successful poet who memorialized the event in a poem. James Merrill was a thoughtful and talented homosexual poet whose best known work is called "Lost in Translation". That poem, not to be confused with the Bill Murray movie, was about spending time with his governess at the Merrill's sprawling Southampton estate while awaiting the arrival of a jigsaw puzzle from the city. The "Lost in Translation" title alludes to the fact that the governess spoke French and German as well as English and used the languages interchangeably so as to expand the young poet's mind. It turns out she was Alsatian, but never volunteered this information due to her self-consciousness of her latent German-ness at a time the US and Germany were at war. The Southampton estate was called "The Orchards", which sounded familiar to me, and sure enough it is one I have a very old post card of in my collection, a delicate, hand-tinted thing that identifies the owner as J.L. Breeze. My guess is that Mr. Breeze built the place that was eventually bought by Mr. Merrill. James Merrill, the son, died of AIDS in 1995. This is all ancient history now.