Alexander's Part-time Band

This is Book #4 in the humorous Kip/Amanda domestic adventures series.
When Kip’s old boarding school roommate, Alex, shows up on his doorstep, homeless, friendless, and on the verge of suicide, he revives memories better left forgotten.
Kip is a retired college professor, enjoying a new marriage, new social status, a new self image, and a new career as a successful novelist and competent sailor in the coastal Massachusetts village of Venice in which he recently settled. The love and admiration of his bride, the sensitive and creative sculptress Amanda, goes a long way toward supporting this fragile new reality.
Then, as he tries to lift his old friend out of his depression, the memories of a miserable boarding school experience and frustrating childhood threaten to topple Kip’s new reality. In addition, having just moved his writing chair into his new study and begun a new book, Kip discovers he cannot write there, but only when he is in the presence of his creative sculptress wife. He reasons that it must be Amanda’s creative energy that enables him to write, and his new-found self image as a successful novelist begins to unravel. He, again, begins to see himself as the hapless, fuddy-duddy professor, whose first wife ran off with the assistant football coach, and whose colleagues shunned him because what he has might be contagious. He tries to conceal this development from everyone, as he struggles with his own depression and the fear of committing suicide – it would be so easy on his boat. He doesn’t dare go sailing alone on his beloved Manda.
Then Amanda discovers that friendless Alex has a grandson living right there in Venice and teaching saxophone. But the grandson's orange hair and life style are too much for the conservative Alex to accept, and the relationship gets off to a bad start. Amanda comes through with an ingenious and unorthodox way for Alex to bond with his grandson. The bonding takes place, and Kip discovers the true cause of his writer’s block.