The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a charming little sandwich book. AJ Fikry is a widower who lives above his bookstore and is slowly drinking himself to death when he meets a pretty young bookseller from one of his favorite publishers, suffers another loss, and then discovers a toddler left in his store with a note asking him to care for her. He ends up raising Maya in the bookstore, and strikes up a close friendship with a local police chief.

AJ is a lovable character after you get past his initial gruffness. He loves reading as much as a bookstore owner should, and each chapter begins with a brief note from him about a book he read. It's a story I'll remember for a long time.


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Home Front

Home Front: A Novel by Kristin Hannah
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the story of an incredibly strong woman learning to live with some weakness, some vulnerability, and some reliance on others.  Jolene is a black hawk pilot in the National Guard, and she's deployed, along with her best friend Tami, to Iraq.  The deployment occurs right after her husband tells her he no longer loves her and while her preteen daughter is treating her with typical disdain and disrespect.  She also has a four-year-old daughter and her husband, who will be a single parent during the year she'll be gone, is a criminal defense attorney who works 60-plus hours at his own law firm. There's a lot to the set-up, the history and the current situations of all of the characters, but I'll let each reader discover these elements for herself.

There are some twists and turns in the story, and there were several times I had to close the book and get a grip on my emotions before continuing.  Note, I am NOT usually emotionally affected like this!

This story is the best Kristin Hannah book I've read.  I have a new, more intense respect for, and a better understanding of, our service people.  Well done! 


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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Harold Fry receives a card from former co-worker Queenie Hennesey telling him she's dying of cancer, he sets off on a 600-mile walk to see her.  He does this without a plan, a map, or a cell phone, in yachting shoes.  Harold is recently retired and exists with his wife in their home, in separate bedrooms for the past twenty years.

As he walks, Harold ruminates on his past and examines some of his regrets and choices, inspects his memories and stares into the cracks.  He encounters people, he learns how to eat roots and mushrooms, he learns how to tell which direction he's heading from the sun and the bark patterns on the trees. He evolves.

The writing is fantastic, and Harold's journey is inspiring.  He saves himself.  I won't ruin it for you by telling you whether or not he makes it to Queenie and what else happens along the way, but I will say this: the ending is not sad.


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What Alice Forgot

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I spent the last three days engrossed in the story of Alice and her sudden memory loss.  It begins when she falls off her bike in spin class;  when she comes to, she believes it's 1998 (it's actually 2008) and she's shocked at her flattened stomach and toned physique, has no recollection of her three children, and thinks she's still in the early, easy years of her marriage.  She's on the brink of divorce, and she can't remember why.

As Alice struggles to remember, she pieces little glimpses of her past back together and reconciles with her sister.  She's appalled at what she learns about her 39-year-old self, and tries to re-establish her 29-year-old self as she remembers it.

This book really made me think about what I would have missed out on in the last ten years.  A very enjoyable read, with a satisfying ending!  Liane Moriarty hasn't disappointed me yet.


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The Solitude of Prime Numbers

The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I bought this book for my mom's birthday because i was attracted to the cover and the title, and I knew she'd loan it to me after she read it.  The story was written by an Italian physicist and translated to English, which is also interesting to me as I'm an Italiophile.

The story follows two characters, Alice and Mattia, each of whom survive a childhood trauma that leaves scars and alters their behavior and their life paths.  Near the beginning of the book, Alice is in a serious skiing accident while training for competitive downhill skiing.  She never quite learns to trust anyone after the incident, and develops anorexia as a way to control her Universe.   Mattia loses his twin sister, and starts a lifelong habit of mutilating himself.  They become friends, and they each recognize the intense feelings they have for each other, but neither of them acts.

The characters are well-developed; each is a lonely, prime-number-type entity unto himself or herself.  The story is like a deep study of loneliness and trauma, and the question of whether or not one causes the other and how a person might deal with life events.


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Birthday Celebrations

My birthday falls three days after Christmas. Most people, when learning this, assume my 'special day' is often overlooked and that I was cheated, present-wise, as a child. They respond with a sympathetic comment not regarding my age, but regarding the date on which I acknowledge my age. I've always liked my birthday, even as a child, mainly because if I didn't receive my entire wish list of gifts on Christmas I merely had to wait three days to open another mountain of presents.

My parents weren't rich but they always made sure I had a separate celebration for my birthday. Three days after Christmas (it's also 3 days before New Year's Eve) is actually the perfect day to celebrate, creating a festival atmosphere on the last week of the year.

As I contemplate my upcoming birthday, a milestone only if one is concerned with prime numbers (I'll be 43), I realize most of the birthday celebrations in one's life are for other people. The first birthday usually passes with the gift recipient unaware, drooling on chocolate cake and toddling about to entertain the guests. By the second birthday, the child is able to enjoy opening the gifts but still has no idea why they are receiving them. Birthdays 3-25 are generally anticipated and celebrated by the birthday kid, her friends and family, co-workers and significant other(s). After 25 though, at least for me, the birthday reverts to yet another event requiring observance, if only to avoid appearing gauche for ignoring it. 

The Bookworms ladies still call me kid.  I'm the second youngest Bookworm, the eldest being 74, and the next eldest ringing in at 71 or so.  Although they are loathe to use the 'seventy' word, so they tell people they are sixty-fourteen and sixty-eleven, respectively.  They're both aging in grand fashion, retaining their curiosity and joy in small pleasures, so maybe they're on to something. 

Ready, Set, Change Career

All my life I've worked inside. I've been a waitress, a grocery cashier, a credit union teller, accounting clerk, accounting manager, internal auditor, and an electric utility company member service representative. Now I wear work boots (!!) and have a company truck with a tool box to accommodate my sledge hammer and brush axe. I still have a clipboard. It helps me recognize myself when I picture myself in my mind's eye slogging through the brush, jumping ditches and annihilating small trees and branches that have committed the crime of blocking my vision from one stake to another.

I'm a staking technician: the person (no longer the 'guy') who travels to potential job sites, usually alone, sometimes meeting a homeowner or electrician, to design new electric services, service upgrades or power line extensions or rebuilds. Luckily, I do this in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where the most likely potential threats aren't man or machine, but wolf or bear. Or domestic dogs, unchained and salivating, rushing to defend their patch of crabgrass decorated with their own leavings. This is where my brush axe becomes a multitasking defense implement that so far I haven't had to utilize beyond brandishing it in a threatening manner. Dogs are easily impressed with long, swinging sticks with gleaming metal ends.

I'm the first woman to hold this position in my 72-year-old company. I don't feel as if I'm breaking down barriers, just quietly enjoying the challenges of a physically and mentally demanding job. I'm 40, and I've convinced myself it's a good time of life to drastically switch careers and also to do something outside with the hope of  maintaining my slowly ebbing physique. My education is not in engineering but in business management, with very little math, which turns out to be a regrettable disadvantage. But I'm having fun. Each assignment is its own project, much like a puzzle or mind-boggling riddle, and merits its own file filled with color-coded documents and drawings (I'm no artist but my sketches are improving--should have taken drafting as well as trigonometry) with a clear end, when I can close the file and stash it away in the 'finished' section of the drawer.

Every day brings a new puzzle requiring a creative solution and I approach it with interest and intensity.

Mobile Home

I once lived in a car. I was only 17, so there were no worries about personal safety or suspicious shadows because I was still immortal. Sleeping while sitting up in the driver's bucket seat of a 1977 Ford Pinto caused no physical repercussions as I leapt out the door every morning, fresh faced and full of energy, performing an abbreviated personal cleansing ritual before working all day as a waitress in a busy medium-priced restaurant. My tips amounted to $100/day, but I was reluctant to spend any of it on lodging. Who  needed a bed when I had a perfectly fine and comfortable Pinto, and generous friends whose showers I could use? Life was simple then.

When I mention living in the car to my children (this happens only rarely and after I've had a couple beers) in an attempt to illustrate how rough I had it, the kids are always skeptical. "I doubt it, Mother. You can't even sleep in a tent, let alone a car." It's true. I can no longer sleep in a tent or on a blow-up mattress. If I sit for too long on any kind of chair, hard or soft, reclining or straight-backed, my back and legs stiffen up and require an embarrassing sequence of Yoga moves to loosen sufficiently to walk like someone my age (40) rather than an octogenarian.

Maybe living in the car caused my muscles to begin petrifying prematurely. Sometimes I blame the car-living for my restlessness--I have never, before or since, been able to literally wake up and drive. One time I was reading by the dome light and fell asleep and had to push start the car the next morning, popping the clutch just before the on ramp (did I mention I lived in the car at a rest stop along the freeway?). It was quite invigorating to jump out of the car and immediately perform intense calisthenics and strength training. Again, I was 17. I remember all of these events clearly but can't imagine feeling energetic after sleeping in a car.

Everyone's question, upon hearing of my car-capades, is: How long did you do that?

This is where the story disappoints. I should have stuck it out, stayed in the car longer. Think of the adventure--the stories I would tell! I could have slept the whole summer in that Pinto, relying on my little battery-powered alarm clock (this was in pre-cell phone 1987) to stir my brain every morning. And the creepy shadows? I barely  noticed them.

So how long was it? "One week," is my standard answer, unless someone probes or expresses doubt, at which time I confess "five days". Five measely days I now look upon sometimes as high adventure, sometimes as teenage folly from which I was lucky to escape unscathed.

Short Nights

The other night I met a couple high school classmates for a drink at the bar. We've been out of school for 22 years now and as I gazed around the table at my dear old friends' faces I felt every one of those years. We're all sporting fine lines around our eyes and maybe a few gray hairs; a couple of us have gained a few pounds. As a group, we still look good and our recent or upcoming 40th birthdays provided enough conversation fodder to see us through the evening. Our memories of grade school and high school featured vastly disparate recollections--after hearing a couple stories circa 1986 I wondered if we had in fact attended the same school. We agreed we all blocked out certain memories, sometimes to make room for new ones and sometimes to alleviate humiliation.

There was a time when we said we were going out for a beer, we meant ten or eleven beers. Now when we meet for a beer we each have three or four, then leave the bar early to prevent hangovers. What will happen in twenty more years? Will we sip our Milk of Magnesia together? Maybe we will race our walkers to the bathroom.

Aging (Slowly and Bravely)

My 40th birthday was nearly three months ago, and I'm adapting to my image in the mirror. I've also adapted my morning routine to include make-up every day (it's no longer optional, and neither is the under-eye wrinkle eraser) and a flat-iron styling (actually adds some waves to my dull, drab, lifeless hair). I notice a more insistent hunger, distracting and seemingly insatiable, and a nearly constant tired feeling invading my body.

I've also noticed I care a lot less about hurting others' feelings. I don't purposely set out to ruin someone's day, but if I occasionally ignore my diplomatic tendency and speak my mind I no longer lose sleep over it. In fact, sometimes I speak my mind on purpose, and wish I'd started this practice two decades ago.

So, on my birthday I received a new bike from my daughters and my mom: a cruiser-style bike with ten speeds and a wicker basket. I first told my daughter I coveted this model a few years ago when I spied a friend riding one through our Village, mentioning "I want a bike just like that, but I have to wait until I'm 40 to pull it off". My daughter remembered this and orchestrated the purchase of a gorgeous black bicycle with hot pink details, ready to ride to work and help me slough off the 6 pounds haunting me since last fall.

I know, fewer pounds translates to more wrinkles, but at this point I'd rather trade the weight for more energy even if it means staring at the aging woman in the mirror, wondering who she is. I'm not afraid of aging, as long as I can maintain my pace: slowly and bravely, slowly and bravely.

My Baby's Driving!

My youngest child just received her driver's license. She passed the driving test with flying colors despite her inherent anxiety (yes, she takes after me) and she's piloting our old Toyota Tundra around the Village, displaying the company name and hopefully drawing some business. Who wouldn't want to hire a construction company with such a cute advertiser?

There are a few other benefits to leaving the company name plastered on our daughter's truck: she can never say "it wasn't me" when someone spies her truck at a party or friend's house; the police or any other concerned citizen can easily dial her mom to report her driving habits, since the phone number is prominently displayed on three sides; and the truck is noticeable even to those half-asleep, allowing ease in tracking her progress around town. In a town this size people will call me to report my children's driving transgressions anyway, but with our blatantly labeled truck, my youngest daughter can't drive around the block without someone calling to let me know who she's with, which way they were headed, and if she used her turn signals (she always does). Just another way living in a small town provides peace of mind for parents of teenagers (this position is preferable, by the way, to being a teenaged parent), ensuring we don't go insane too quickly.