Love Story Series

 Judith Waller and Jerry Carroll

 

 

 Once Upon a Time, Two Strangers Meet…

By Judith Waller Carroll

In October of 1967, Stanford fellow Jerry Carroll moved to San Francisco to begin his career with the San Francisco Chronicle. That same month, I, a small town girl from Montana, moved to the city with my older sister, Sharon Waller now Knutson. Several months later, Sharon convinced me to go on a double date and in classic Hollywood fashion, Jerry and I met, argued and clashed, but soon realized we’d met our match and eloped to Reno on November 9, 1968. 

These photos and poems tell our love story.

 

 

 

 

Let’s Say

We didn’t go to North Beach
that night in December.
I said no to my sister
when she arranged the blind date.
You said no to your roommate.
We didn’t stand together by the jukebox
playing Edith Piaf, or after dinner,
walk down to the pier.
The moon wasn’t reflecting on the water
like a beckoning future.
Our past lives didn’t float off to sea.

From Ordinary Splendor, MoonPath Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

Pas de Deux    

The man I met on a blind date
forty-two years ago
is on the roof with the leaf blower  
while I stand below, slowly easing
the long cord from the bunched-up coil,
guiding it past the claws of the ladder
as he inches up the slope.

Even the crows are silenced
by the roar and whoosh, as gravelly
bits of leaves and broken branches swirl
off the eave and scatter past the neighbor’s fence.
Dust settles all around me,
but I barely notice, my attention focused
on the cord, the pitch of the shingles, his feet.

He side-steps down for a stubborn twig
and I head the same direction,
reeling in the cord like a fishing line,
casting it high so it clears the roof line,
the vent pipe, the puffed lip of the skylight.

We meet at the low gutter,
our hands briefly touching, pivot
back to our positions—his right arm taut,
my left leg poised for an arabesque—
and begin our slow dance back.

From What You Saw and Still Remember, Main Street Rag . 2017

 

 

 

 

 

The Start of Our 50th Year Together

January 2nd, your birthday,
and a record cold front
moving across the South.
Even inside I can’t get warm.

Imagine how cold those birds
must be, flitting from one feeder
to another, scavenging seeds from the ground.
A scrub jay hunkered on the tiny perch
is so still we worry he’s injured.

And this is why I love you—
because you station yourself by the window
and keep vigil until he slowly rises,
head no longer drooping, pecks
at a sunflower seed then ruffles his feathers—
shaking it off, you say—and flies away.  

From Ordinary Splendor, MoonPath Press, 2022

 

Three a.m.

I wake and find your side of the bed empty,
a faint light at the far end of the house.
You are in the sunroom eating a piece of toast,
an old man with disheveled hair,
but the same tenderness in your eyes
that drew me to you fifty years ago,
those years drawing us so close
I sometimes feel we have become one being,
speaking a silent language of our own.
You return to bed, but I linger,
staring out at the  night sky,
the wild beauty of the stars.

From Ordinary Splendor, MoonPath Press, 2022