"To ask her to marry him and to be sure she said yes, Don Chambers took Jenny Staley for a ride in a hot air balloon. How was Don to know that:. One, Max the pilot talked all the time. Two, the basket was small...and crammed with propane gas tanks and instruments and Max. Three, when Max pulled a handle overhead and ignited the dual burners, Don and Jenny couldn't hear themselves think, much less converse...
Don put his arm around Jenny's waist and spoke in her ear. 'Jenny, I love you.' She couldn't hear. Max burned. Don shouted." Anyone with less persistence would have seen an omen in the disastrous ending of this $250-an-hour proposal. But Don is dogged and in love. When Jenny says she can't leave her ninety-one-year-old rifle-toting granny and her twentysomething daughter, Don invites them all to move into his condo. But Grandma Windy won't budge.
Both the lovers are middle-aged, modern divorced adults; there is no reason they cannot consummate their passion. They are on the verge of just that when the phone call comes from Don's octogenarian father. He has broken his hip and Don must transport him from Michigan to Don's Arizona home.
When eventually the stingy old codger moves out and Don and Jenny are once more alone, who should arrive but Don's son Ron, a recent college dropout with a pet rabbit and a tank of oxygen to which he turns when life becomes too stressful, as it so often does.
Complications multiply, and through it all the hapless pair of lovers stumble along, their eyes on a simple goal - marriage and release from the demands of being the filling in a generational sandwich of older parents and younger children. Whatever transpires in the true-to-life drama spiced with the author's dry wit, the journey is a wonderfully enjoyable one for the reader.

Macmillan Library Reference

Macmillan Reference USA

Thorndike Press

United States, United States of America

Captures the amusing, frustrating, and heart-warming perils that face middle-agers as they cope with both demanding older children and extremely demanding parents, in a chronicle of the romance between John Chambers and Jennie Staley

2023-06-28