Roxie and Fred

They meet by chance. Age doesn't matter.Roxie, 88, is alone in her woodsy retreat, having survived a lifetime of romance and outreach to underprivileged women. A misfit as wife and mother, she's content now with her garden, yoga, and art. Fred, 48, children launched, has left his uninspired wife and work to paint fulltime, shackled only with his demons of doubt. And then one day in a life drawing class?Theirs is a love story that shatters orthodoxy as they discover themselves...
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They meet by chance. Age doesn't matter.Roxie, 88, is alone in her woodsy retreat, having survived a lifetime of romance and outreach to underprivileged women. A misfit as wife and mother, she's content now with her garden, yoga, and art. Fred, 48, children launched, has left his uninspired wife and work to paint fulltime, shackled only with his demons of doubt. And then one day in a life drawing class?Theirs is a love story that shatters orthodoxy as they discover themselves anew.Roxie as a young woman has left her prim, stifling marriage and a 12-year-old daughter to aid Tibetan refugees in Nepal. She next volunteers in Africa to help women and orphans, becoming linked with a rebel fighter and bearing his son. She is forced to return to the U.S., without her 2-year-old. She takes up her life as an independent woman decades before ?the women's movement,? a pariah to the families of her upper-class Boston background. For years she ran Head Start programs, aided battered women and pregnant teens, secured jobs for single mothers from the ghetto. Now, in the present time, she takes sustenance from her one unforgettable love affair, seriously practices yoga, hikes mountainsides, grows her own food, meditates, reads, and indulges her passion for drawing. His daughter and son launched, Fred at midlife has departed from his lackluster wife, suburban home and career exhibiting highly saleable paintings to stretch his work far beyond the commercially-palatable. Despite an abyss of uncertainty about his inherent talent and depth of conviction, he forges ahead without the support of a woman helpmate for the first time in his life. Money issues pale contrasted with his guilt over leaving his wife, sweethearts as teenagers. And then, out of the blue, he meets vibrant and beautiful Roxie, unaware of how very advanced she is to him in age.