The lives of others
Taki lives the High Life
New York
From my kitchen window I have watched a little boy grow up to be a man. I live in what Americans, with great economy of expression, refer to as a brownstone, actually a townhouse. It is on 71st Street off Park Avenue. My father bought it for us 30 or so years ago, and both my children refer to it as home. Although both have left, my daughter for Los Angeles and my son for Brooklyn, their rooms still feel lived in, with shoes lying around, old books, bric-à-brac and pictures of their parents looking less worn, to say the least. The house, I am told by neighbourhood historians, used to be a whorehouse, but a very upper-class one. Never a scandal, just a few gentlemen going in and out throughout the days and nights. I tell everyone that I visited it while down from school, but I’m not sure it was this one.
About 20 years ago I moved the kitchen to where my office used to be as the children were driving me nuts while I was busy writing the greatest Greek novel ever. Sitting in the kitchen and staring across the back garden into the lives of others is not my idea of fun, but it beats writing anytime. Which means I spent a lot of time in the kitchen looking into the apartment building across on 72nd Street. That’s when I first saw a tiny baby being brought home by his parents, and the nanny that slept next to the crib. My wife and I would look as the baby lay on its back and bicycled, his adoring parents standing over him — and a very good-looking couple they were, too — while he made gurgling sounds and strange noises. The nanny had left after two weeks and the baby’s door was always open.
As they say, time flies, and in no time the baby had turned into a little boy and was covering the walls of his room with flags and pictures of various baseball and football players (not girls, at that point). This came about ten years ago, one large Technicolor picture of some blonde I couldn’t make out. Most well-to-do boys go to day schools in the Bagel, Noo Yawk parents being incapable of hating their children as the English do and sending them off at six years of age. (I knew my parents loved me madly when I was sent away at ten.) And in no time at all, I saw a young girl come into his room pretending to study with him. I was getting old. This year the room is empty, the boy finally having left home, I suppose to go to university.
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Taki reader
May 15th, 2008 2:32pmDepressing, I guess.
David Lindsay
May 15th, 2008 5:18pm"Noo Yawk parents being incapable of hating their children as the English do and sending them off at six years of age"
There are many ways in which the Tories have long, or even always, been actively hostile to the views and values of those on whose votes they depend. Support for the anti-national, anti-farming, anti-manufacturing, anti-shopkeeping, anti-local, anti-family “free” market is one. Their actual record in office on the EU and on Northern Ireland is another. And there are plenty more.
But is there any more flagrant and fatal than the fact that they are not just largely products (which they cannot help), but also almost invariably users and stalwart defenders of just about the most anti-family institutions imaginable, founded on the premise that children should be brought up with as little parental contact as possible except when it comes to paying the bills, and organised towards the acting out of adolescence in single-sex residential environments?
George Kronfli
May 16th, 2008 12:51pmBoring sentimental waffle.
David Short
May 17th, 2008 5:48pmI'm not sure what's creepier. To observe other peoples' private lives, or admit to it.
Richard
May 20th, 2008 6:15pmTaki, you should have introduced yourself to your neighbors. I, for one, would have enjoyed having you as a neighbor.