2010 Frida and Diego

2010   Frida and Diego. Community of Latin American and Caribbean countries, a Mexico visit, Hugo Chavez, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Leon Trotsky, Ricardo and Yanet Ochoa, Elizabeth and Mennonite Central Committee Mexico, Ocean City, New Jersey; grand parenting, Gloria, Sadie, Four bothers biking Pittsburgh to Washington D.C.,  Naomi Moon (1924-2010), Charles (Chuck) Fausold (1929 -2010).  

In February of 2010, the leaders of the Latin American and Caribbean countries gathered in Mexico to form a community somewhat parallel to the Organization of American States (OAS) without the USA and Canada. The event hardly made the news at all in North America, but we were in Mexico visiting Elizabeth so we watched the developments. It seemed overdue for the Latin American nations to have a forum for their own unique issues and to consult and work together. The new group would include Cuba long excluded from the OAS by the USA.

The ideal of a Simon Bolivar-envisioned united Latin American was championed by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president. At the meeting, Chavez also personified some the difficulties when he almost came to blows with his neighbor the Colombian President Álvaro Uribe. The Colombian apparently challenged Chavez calling him a coward to which Chavez responded "Go to Hell!" Chavez saw a community south of the Rio Grande River which would be patterned after his Venezuelan socialism which he borrowed from Cuba. Some of the participants such as the Brazilian president Luiz Inacio LuLa made a ceremonial visit to Fidel Castro after the summit.

I am writing twenty-five years after the Soviet workers model ended, and yet the thoughts of these 20^th century ideas and personalities still reverberated especially in Latin America as Elizabeth guided Gloria and me around Mexico. It was a Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky tour. Elizabeth said we were on the trail of Harrison Shepherd, the character in The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver which we had all read. Kingsolver’s Shepherd was Mister Everyman mixing plaster for Diego Rivera’s murals and cooking for Rivera and Frida Kahlo with whom he became a life-long confidante. He even served as a secretary to the Russian exile Leon Trotsky,

There in the Belles Artes museum is the large mural “Man at the Crossroads” with Vladimir Lenin which the Rockefellers earlier rejected, and many other murals at the National Palace, all with virtuous workers of the world and greedy capitalists of the dollar. I think the first Rivera painting which caught my attention was “Liberation of the Peon” at Philadelphia Museum of Art in the early 70s, during my radical worker days. The innocent brown body being released and the four loyal horses; I never forgot it. We looked up Diego Rivera’s murals in San Francisco and Detroit when we visited those cities. I think my life-long fascination was Rivera’s popular honoring of the original and indigenous Mexicans in paradoxical combinations of capitalist tastes, proletariat dogma and artistic achievement.

We went to The Blue House now museum of Frida Kahlo who was an amazing story of an artist who turned her pain into productive energy and art. All this and married to the impossible Diego Rivera. Frida Kahlo caught our daughter Elizabeth’s imagination, and her own house at Regent Square has many Frida Kahlo images and reproductions; she is the one to tell the Kahlo story. Nearby was the house and garden where Leon Trotsky lived his last years in exile; in the sixties we marched with Trotskyites with calls for peace and justice. I think his appeal was in part the incongruity of an European intellectual type having once served as military head of the young Bolshevik regime in the 1920s. There is something charming to visit the Coyoacán courtyard where Trotsky tended rabbits and chickens (the cages were still there) and his large library behind a high fortressed wall which still could not protect him from Joseph Stalin’s henchmen. They finally killed him with an ice pick.

We got another view of Hugo Chavez and Venezuela when our old friend Ricardo Ochoa and his wife Yanet and children Daniel, Adriana, Erica visited us the last week of July 2009. We took in  white water at Ohiopyle and three rivers Pittsburgh, then picked up Elizabeth and headed for Ohio hosted by children Hannah and Anson, brother Paul and Carol, cousin Rob and Mary Schlabach. I remember visiting with Rob’s children about their alternative farming operation in which James asked Ricardo: “What’s wrong with your president?” One evening we went to see the Cleveland Indians and the Detroit Tigers with their Venezuelan players: Miguel Cabrera and Magglio José Ordóñez. The Ochoas had brought along a Venezuelan flag and waved it to outfielder Ordóñez who I later found out was a Chavista supporter.

Ricardo and Yanet were an interesting combination because he worked as a government economist and she as a Procter and Gamble executive. I had the impression that both stayed under the political radar and visited the states quite often, Ricardo for baseball and Yanet for business. But what I remember most was one evening when Hannah and Anson and our grandchildren built a bonfire and we sang camp and Christian folk songs. It was our common faith which had brought us together initially in the early 80s and was still the binding chord of our relationships. Hugo Chavez died March 5, 2013.

Elizabeth was in Mexico from August 2009 to August 2010, a year of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) service, helping out in administrative leadership while one of the country directors was having a baby. I loved our visit to the Bruce and Jamie Friesen-Pankratz family who went native and were working in public education, development, and latrines in a very rural barrio Zacango near Olinolá. One could say much more about MCC’s projects there, but Elizabeth told it at “Mexico Missives” http://lizannemiller.blogspot.com   In Pittsburgh, she had lived in a number of apartments; then she bought a house in Regent Square in April 2008. It was near the Parkway East, hence happily for us not far to visit. One of her first projects was to tear out the thick carpeting and we helped sand and seal the old floors, and then the next year after our week at Ocean City, New Jersey (August 2009),  Elizabeth took off for Mexico.

Ocean City (1980) still had some cachet for us, even if it was the most humble boardwalk along the Atlantic shore embracing little kids, ice cream, mini golf, bird sanctuaries, and Ferris wheels. Maybe it was the influence of the large gospel tabernacle which was still there (often full on Sundays and where we might catch Tony Campolo). We took our extended family vacation there and took a family photo before Elizabeth left the country and granddaughter Sadie to school. Gloria and I took care of Elizabeth’s house and the renters while she was gone. Eizabeth had projects outlined for that year such as sanding the upstairs wood floors, and painting. We enjoyed being her Regent Square house caretakers. Nice little art movie house across the street too.  

Meanwhile, there was grand parenting and here Gloria was clearly the leader. She and Sadie had a special bonding early on, and each Summer Sadie came down for a week and she and Gloria did all kinds of activities. Gloria loved sun bathing and Sadie played in the little plastic pool under the umbrella. Sadie had a theatrical sense and sometimes wore her grandmother’s bikini swimsuits. They also went over to Tom and Margaret Miedels' big pool. Sadie’s favorite indoor activity was playing school and soon she was the teacher with lesson preparations, assignments and three students--or mainly one. Aaron soon left for the nearby computer, Levi was expelled for bad behavior, and Gloria her favorite pupil was given good assignments and continued her straight-A student career with Sadie.

In the fall of 2009, I assembled a Little Cottages playhouse for the children which was a nice break from publishing and connecting with extended family. My uncle Abe Schlabach helped with the roof and gave me fascinating explanations on biblical prophecy. By January we spent a week with Sadie and Aaron while Hannah and Anson went south on vacation. On September 15, 2010 my birthday, Hannah, Sadie, Aaron and I went to the Wayne County Fair and took in the Home Talent Colt races and some small-time wagering. Sadie had an art exhibit in the education section of the Fair.

About this same time, Gloria and I bought bikes and took up some biking on the Allegheny Passage which runs through Connellsville, going from Pittsburgh to Cumberland in day trips. Other Millers, especially David, were also doing some biking; in fact one Saturday, most of us brothers and sisters and the Miedels biked down the Holmes County trail from Fredricksburg to Millersburg and back; the trail runs right through our old Holmesville childhood farm, now owned by the Smith family.

Then David got fever to do the complete Allegheny Passage and C&O Towpath from Pittsburgh to Washington DC, and we brothers joined him. The week of August 29 to September 4, 2010 David started at Pittsburgh, I joined him at Connellsville, and Paul and Roy joined us at Deal (near Meyersdale) which is also near the Continental Divide. We coasted down to Cumberland, Maryland, and from there on to Washington. One of us drove the trailer vehicle with bike racks, all joining for dinners and discussions in the evening and ending on the Washington Mall. We spent the night at the International Guest House where David and Brenda had been directors during their voluntary service days in 1969-70. It was good to be together for a week, but no one was urging to extend the time. We were getting old.

I was now old enough to have outlived some of my mentors and neighbors. Naomi Graybill Moon died on February 9, 2010. At the funeral, her husband Ivan (1917-2011) was already in lost memory land and died the next year too. We and the Moons had often gone to peace meetings in Pittsburgh together in the 70s, and we owned a TroyBilt tractor together for many years. Naomi was a friend to any and all, especially the ones with disadvantages, the poor kids of Kingview. She would come with them to school board meetings when they were in trouble. For many years, she was a proofreader at Mennonite Publishing House and wore the traditional Mennonite head covering every day.

Then Charles (Chuck) Fausold died on August 4, 2010, and he was a kind of model, somewhat on the nature of H. Ralph Hernley for me—also a Christian but a Methodist. For a decade we played tennis together on men’s night at Hidden Valley, and he had been Gloria’s principal at the Connellsville High School. He often walked his dog Star by our house in the summer evenings and we visited. But I was also getting older. On July 11, 2010, I led worship at Scottdale Mennonite for the last time. I forgot things, and Gloria said I talked too much. I knew she was right.  

The beginning section on Latin American came from newspaper and TV reports while we were visiting daughter Elizabeth in Mexico in February 2010.  Most of this chapter comes from memory and from my personal files, datebook, and journal of 2010.