Not So High Windows

'The first of the summer sun is out," someone said to me bizarrely at a funeral earlier today. I recalled the phrase from something. I came home and did a search and found it was something quasi navel gazing I had written for friends just after returning from Los Angeles. I reprint it here merely because I can't think of anything more enlightening right now, and the sun is indeed, out...

We weren't a literary family. We liked books yes but there was never the pretentious intellectual jousting I imagined went on at other dinner tables among the families of my better speaking peers at school. Nevertheless, when I was 13 and had one of many obligatory screaming matches with my parents, my sister, Carolyn, reopened my slammed bedroom door, sat on the edge of my bed and read me Phillip Larkin’s 'High Windows':

“When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise”

I loved it. Not least because it was the first time I had heard a poet say “Fuck”. Till now poets said ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and wondered lonely somewhere. Fuck was cool, especially from a fucking poet, I thought.

As years went by and friends still had screaming matches with their parents, albeit more mature and articulate ones, I would still quote Larkin verbatim – “They Fuck you up your mum and dad.” Thanks to my sister I could still say fuck and sound educated. Fuck was still cool.

“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

The first of the summer sun came out today and I watched my father in the garden taming nature. Flanked by his cats full of awe and admiration, he moved from shrub to patch to bed, commanding respect and beauty from this year’s chosen crop.

I stood at the window watching. The day’s work dutifully done, he pulls out a reclining chair in the shade, cats on the ready to warm his lap. I thought of Larkin, how he enviously looked on the younger generation at the brink of their new dawn, somewhat liberated, and somewhat high - believing they can change the world.

My generation knows better. Less idealistic, the novelty worn off, over tired on the comedown, we look up from our high windows, not down, envious and ready for a comfy chair in the shade.

I shout down, “Tea?”
“Love one, and a biccy and my paper.”
As I hand it to him, “I was watching you. You look totally at one.”
“I was.”
“Does it get much better than that,” I ask.
“Nope.”

Fuck off Larkin, I thought. This must be paradise.