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Health & Fitness

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Sometimes, I’m joined on my morning runs by my friends Kip and his lovely wife, Amanda. They’re not regular runners, like I am, but they are several years younger than my eighty-one years, so they have no trouble keeping up. I never know where, along my route, they will show up, because they don’t live locally. They live in the little village of Venice, in Massachusetts, which is right on the Atlantic coast, and they come to Stamford to tell me what’s going on in their lives, which can be quite chaotic at times.

The reason they can get here so easily and so unexpectedly is that Kip and Amanda are fictional, as is their village. They exist in my two novels, currently in print, Writer’s Block and The Best Sunset in Venice, as well as several awaiting publication.

Kip is like me in many ways. He also came to America as a refugee from the Holocaust, he also had a domineering, non-nurturing mother, a lousy boarding school experience, and an ill advised first marriage, and he’s also became an author late in life. One place where Kip and I differ, of course, is in the fact that, until just a few years ago, Fate really had it in for him. I mean, Kip’s bread always managed to land jam side down. Boarding school was a miserable experience, his wife, Marsha, ran off with the assistant football coach, the intimate little Midwest college where Kip felt comfortable teaching English suddenly grew into an impersonal university, and the woman he developed a relationship with…..well, I won’t tell you about that just now.

And then he met willowy Amanda, the Widow Lazaro, postmistress in Venice, Mass., and fell in love for the first time in his life. So Kip decided to chuck it all, burn his Midwest bridges, move to Venice, and cash in on his lemon of a life by writing The Great American Novel, a thinly disguised autobiography, all while courting the fair Amanda.

But Fate wasn’t finished with Kip. The new novelist and the old writing teacher in him couldn’t get on the same page, and The Great American Novel collapsed of its own weight, leaving Kip adrift, rudderless in his new community. Soon, Kip drifted into a vicious murder, a married lady’s hot tub, and an invitation to crew on a sailboat of dubious seaworthiness, on a voyage from Venice to Miami in November storms, with a captain no one else would sail with.

Well, somehow Kip managed to resolve these issues, and even to marry the lovely Amanda. In her spare time, Amanda is a sculptress, and a very creative one. The problem is that Amanda is also accident prone. In Barcelona she manages to eat something that makes her face swell up to the point where she no longer resembles her passport photo, and they can’t leave Spain. At the Athens train station, Amanda hyperventilates, leaving Kip to run around looking for a paper bag for her to breathe into…..in Greek. And then her late husband, the abusive Scott Lazaro, proves to be not quite as late as she supposed, when he turns up on their doorstep, making Kip search for his pistol and turning Amanda into a bigamist.

Kip loves Amanda dearly, but he also remembers that evening, sitting naked in the hot tub beside the handsome, urbane Lill Randall, when he thought Amanda to be out of his reach. Lill told him the story of her life and made Kip “the best offer he would ever receive.” What that evening did for his ego changed his life, and when problems come up again, and his ego needs a shot in the arm, that night in the hot tub comes vividly back to Kip’s mind.

There are other issues as well. Kip is asked to provide a father figure for a troubled fourteen-year-old boy. Or Amanda tries to reconcile him with the memory of his deceased, non-nurturing mother and discovers how domineering the mother can be….even from the grave. Or his old boarding school roommate, Alex, shows up in need of friendship and revives memories better left forgotten, before discovering a lost love in the nearby Unitarian church. Or Kip’s ex wife, Marsha, gets religion and comes back to make up to Kip for the way she mistreated him so that she doesn’t have to suffer in hell for her misdeeds. And you can imagine what havoc that can cause.

The remarkable thing, though, is that, one way or another, Kip and Amanda do manage to get their problems solved. They don’t always do it gracefully and, actually, I’m not quite sure how they do it, but their love for each other and Kip’s good intentions do seem to win out in the end.

So, when I’m running along Hope Street in the morning, and I suddenly find Kip and Amanda running beside me, I tend to tense a bit knowing that I’m about to get an earful of their loopy problems. Amanda always has a solution, but it usually tends to make things more complicated, and poor Kip has learned that any solution he comes up with is likely to backfire. Of course, afterwards, when I’ve commiserated with them both and I’m back home and in the shower, Lill Randall, the lady of the hot tub, will often climb in with me and tell me her side of the story.

If you’d like to meet Kip; Amanda; Lill; the Venice librarian, Doris; the former Green Beret, Holt; Lorna, president of the Connors Cove Unitarian Universalist Society; or even the boorish Tillman and the homicidal Erv, Writer’s Block and The Best Sunset in Venice are available from Amazon in both print and e-book format, as well as from your local bookstore. Who knows, you might even start encountering some of them along Hope Street or in your shower.

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