CarrollBlog

There's a terrific short story entitled "Impulse" by Conrad Aiken. The gist of the tale is there's a ho-hum guy who lives a truly uninteresting, dull life. One day on impulse, he steals something silly from a store like a plastic comb or a cheap ballpoint pen. He is caught immediately, brought to the police for shoplifting... everything avalanches downhill from there into absolute disaster. The End. One little tickle of nutty impulse-- I've never done anything like this in my entire life-- and the guy is crushed. This morning while walking on a subway platform, I saw a distinguished looking gent reading a newspaper. He was nicely dressed and had on one of those snap brim hats you see men wearing on the TV show "Mad Men" or in John Cheever short stories. Approaching him, I thought I'm going to snatch that hat and run away down the platform. The impulse was so strong for two seconds that I actually had to make a wide "U" around the guy just in case my devil-side got the better of me. When far enough away to know it wasn't going to happen, I smiled and then remembered the Aiken story. The subway came and I spent the rest of the ride home wondering what might have happened if...
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PS Speaking of Conrad Aiken, before dying he asked that his gravestone be a bench (in a Savannah, Georgia cemetery), so that visitors could sit on it and enjoy a glass of madeira with his spirit. The inscription on the stone bench is "Give my love to the world."