The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


With two little mysteries and two romances, Gabrielle Zevin's novel, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, is a page-turner. Grieving widower A.J. Fikry owns the only bookstore on an island off New England. His life is on the rocks; he is standoffish to everyone and downright rude to Amelia, a publisher's sales rep who visits the island quarterly. The first little mystery, theft of a valuable book, leads Fikry to befriend police chief Lambiase. The second little mystery, abandonment of two-year-old Maya in his bookstore, comes with multiple questions. As the plot unfolds over ensuing years, the reader is treated to brief commentary on myriad books by book-loving characters.



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Music Spans Generations

“You don’t strike me as someone who would like For King and Country,” my friend said. “My sixteen-year-old niece loves them.”  Implied was that someone fifty-plus years older than her niece should stick to Lawrence Welk’s ah-one-and-ah-two? Cue bubbles. Or perhaps would not like soul-thumping music enough to drive two hundred miles to a rock concert?

No matter, I took it as a compliment. Many people do tend to favor music from their own generation. I seem to have absorbed my father’s love for every generation’s music and almost every genre. After retiring from teaching in 1984, he bought and borrowed hundreds of music cassettes to record his favorites from each on mix tapes. On his playlists, Keely Smith and Diana Ross shared the stage with Sam the Sham and Boots Randolph. My dad might have said, “I have absolutely no musical talent; I just love music.” I could say the same.

Almost five years after Dad’s passing, we just discovered the extent of his hobby—about a dozen cases, twenty-four tapes each, of music cassettes. Before taking them to donate and/or resell, I popped a couple in my car’s cassette player. As I tooled around that day, memories flooded my car. Richard Clayderman’s piano stylings of the theme song from Chariots of Fire took me back to friends and feelings from the early 1980s. More time-traveling reveries with the gentle “Ballade Pour Adeline” from 1979. And “Memory” from Cats.

A few days after hearing this generation-spanning music, in an odd coincidence, I finish reading Mitch Albom’s The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto on the day Aretha Franklin dies. So I go from the book in which famous musicians from many generations and genres share memories of a dead musician, the fictional, brilliant musician Frankie Presto. From the 1940s into the 2000s, their paths crossed with Frankie’s in unusual ways. I close the novel and turn on the TV to see famous musicians from many generations and genres sharing personal anecdotes and praises of the exceptionally gifted Aretha Franklin.

By the way, For King and Country gave the expected high-energy concert. We old folks stood a few feet from the stage the entire time. I admit that an hour later when I got back to our hotel, my eyes still spun from all the strobe lights, and oh, I may have been a little deaf. But the group’s beat still pulsed in my chest, and my face glowed with that pleasure.

I Blame the Barometer

I forked the last little glob of tuna salad onto the last little curve of bread crust, then tore sweet orange slices with my teeth. With a clean plate, save two skinny, naked orange rinds, I had finished the healthy lunch prepared for us by my mother’s caregiver. Normally, I’d be satisfied, but today I brought my mother’s silver candy dish from the living room to the dining table. Mom and I took a few chocolate-covered almonds, and I would have inhaled all the rest, except just then my mother commented, “This is the last of my chocolate.” Knowing I’d feel guilty if I ate the poor woman’s last chocolates, I switched my attention to a jar of M&Ms. These candies were also getting low, but by some inexplicable oversight had been at about the same level in the jar for the last three weeks. I’d be doing Mom a favor if I made more room in the jar for the new M&Ms I’d buy her next week, wouldn’t I? Haha. After popping half a dozen M&Ms, I persuaded myself to stop. People sometimes exhibit unusual discontent when barometric pressure shifts, or so they say, so I blame my rationalization and lack of self-control on the barometer. Oh no, I’ve sunk to rationalizing my rationalizations!

Trying to concentrate on the benefits of a breeze, oppressively humid as it was, I made my way after my excessively indulgent dessert to the nursing home to visit Dad in the Alzheimer’s wing. Wheeling him from a common area to his room, I parked and braked his wheelchair in front of the CD player so that we could listen to his favorite music. His CD player sits atop a three-drawer nightstand. I snapped fingers and he rotated wrists to saxophone sounds and trumpet toots. I pointed out the window to treetops wildly gyrating in the storm brewing outside, and Dad said, “That’s very happening.” Opening a nightstand drawer, I pulled out a small plastic container Mom keeps there for him. I offered him its contents—a few M&Ms, a few Hershey’s Kisses, and a chocolate peanut butter egg left over from his Easter basket. He plucked out a Kiss, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth.

This is the point when he normally sits back and never thinks about candy again unless I extend the dish over to him. Today, however, he seemed to have candy on the brain. He stretched out his bony arm toward the dish on the nightstand. He couldn’t reach. His fingers strained and swam in the air toward the dish. I unbraked his wheelchair so he could roll in to get more chocolate. After he had almost polished off the chocolates, he rolled in, opened the top drawer and withdrew a jar of licorice my sister had left him. He started in on fat, black licorice chunks. Then, in another surprise move, he rolled in and pulled yet another container of licorice candies from a drawer. By this time, his lips and chin were smeared black. He pointed his face upward so I could tissue off the smears. After each foray into a candy dish, he replaced it atop the nightstand and rolled backward. A few minutes later, he’d ask, “What’s in that?” and point to one of the three dishes, then roll forward and help himself.

My father has late-stage Alzheimer’s disease. He remembers hardly anything. Yet today he remembered where to find his candy cache. Although he has always had a sweet tooth, in recent years he has been completely passive about satisfying it. I don’t know what was different about today, but I blame the barometer.

Postscript: I originally wrote this in a humorous mood in 2013. As I look back on the sweet tooth history of our whole family in light of recent science that now calls Alzheimer's Type 3 Diabetes, I realize with soberness that a lifetime sweet tooth may well not be a laughing matter.