Jonathan Carroll's Blog, page 11

A Rain Marriage

photo by Elfriede Stegemayer

Every Sunday in the New York Times there’s a section I enjoy reading entitled “Weddings and Celebrations.” It chronicles not only the details of different couples’ wedding ceremonies, but how they met and courted. If you’re depressed and think life offers only bad luck, bad breaks or bad timing; that there is no magic around anywhere, then read a few of these columns and some hope will return.

My favorite story was from some years ago: A man was riding in a cab thro...

Buggy

At the bakery there are two people standing in front of me: an absolutely gorgeous woman, and a man who can’t take his eyes off her. The salesperson is doing something in the back of the store so we’re all left to wait a while till they return. Now and then the beautiful woman has nothing better to do than to look sideways at the guy. Every time she does, he perks up like a dog that’s just heard its master’s whistle. He misinterprets her looks for interest and starts to try to find ways to ge...

ELIZABETH THUG

She walked into the place and without saying a word, handed the man the wrinkled yellow slip of paper she had worked and fussed over for hours the night before. There were only two words written in careful block letters. After glancing at it (she watched his eyes carefully to see his reaction but his face remained blank), he looked at her, then once more at the paper to be sure he’d seen correctly. Eventually he asked slowly, skeptically “Where do you want it?”

Her shoulders drooped. Her whole...

East of Furious

He was the only man she knew who actually looked good in a Panama hat. Before meeting him, she had never seen a man wearing one who didn’t look either like a poser, a hoser, a loser, a tool or a fool. But not him, not Mills. He looked great — like a deliciously shady character in some Graham Greene novel set in the tropics, or a sexy guy in an ad for good rum. He also owned a cream colored linen suit which he often wore together with the hat in the summer. That outfit was totally over the top...

Nothing to Declare

It began by accident, as romances often do.

He’d had another rough night. A few days before, their new puppy broke its leg while playing. It was now encased in a tight bandage that covered a third of its lower body. This wrapping drove the young dog nuts. Obsessively it tried to tug the bandage off with its teeth.

Things were particularly bad at night when it would clomp from room to room, couch to chair to floor, trying to get comfortable and when it found that impossible, pull at the bandage....

Two Trains

Sometimes our joy and sorrow pass each other going in opposite directions in a blast and flash like two high speed trains inches apart from each other. You’re sitting in one train looking out the window. Suddenly zooming by over there, glimpses of faces rushing too fast for details. In an instant they’re gone. Then you realize it’s the same for those passengers, glimpsing your face. Our happy and sad almost recognizing each other as they cross for moments before speeding away towards the futu...

Elevator Music

He was only background music to her now, a familiar song playing at the mall or in an elevator as you’re going up a few floors. You recognize the tune instantly because you’ve heard it a hundred times. So you don’t completely ignore it, it’s there with you for the whole ride, but it takes up very little space while it’s in your brain. The elevator stops, you get off. The music and the memory of it are gone very quickly.

Elevator Music was originally published in Jonathan Carroll on Medium, whe...

Come close, but not too close

No matter how intimate you are with someone, in the end you can get hold of only a corner of their life. The rest is out of reach, or in shadow, hidden by them on purpose for all sorts of reasons, or even right there in front of us. But we turn away from it because we don’t want to acknowledge or accept it as part of who they are. Sometimes the reason we never get to fully know someone loved is because we don’t want to know it all.

Come close, but not too close was originally published in Jona...

She Made Him Sails

A close friend told me this story. I thought it’s too good not to share. The words are hers.

My grandfather loved the river and sailing. It was his lifestyle, something that was absolutely necessary to him. After the second World War, he immediately renovated his boat but had one problem: he did not have sails for it. He could not buy them because it was difficult to find anything like that in destroyed Europe at the time. Secondly, my grandparents did not have much money. But my grandmother k...

Slam or Click

“In life we pass through so many doors and close them behind us, sometimes with an angry slam, sometimes a gentle click. Moving on, we rarely think about the people we left behind or what they do after we’ve left. But they do carry on. It can be enlightening or at least surprising in both good and bad ways to learn how much of an affect we had on them and their lives in the direction they took afterwards.”

Slam or Click was originally published in Jonathan Carroll on Medium, where people are c...