Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks

I read this book in grad school at Central Michigan when I should have been doing a term paper for my World Lit class. I found Fitzie so much more interesting that Sophocles and Euripides. I remember very little about the Greek dramas I studied that term, but I have great memories of Chocolate Days. It oughta still be in print, if only as an historical record of how it was in 1970 - back when I was young, in love, newly married with a little boy to brighten my days. Where are you, Edward Hannibal? Write me, okay? (March 3, 2009)

Well, okay! It's 11 months later. Hannibal has personally republished Chocolate Days. I wrote him a letter and he WROTE BACK! I recently bought the new Authors Guild Press edition of the book and have just show more finished reading it. It is still a 5-star read forty years later, no question. If you want to know how it was back in the turbulent times that were the 1960s then here is a book for you to read. Fitzie and Janice were, I believe, eminently representative of young marrieds who came from working class blue-collar backgrounds. Fitzie worked his way through Boston College - nights and weekends at an ice cream and popsicle plant (hence the title) - married his high school sweetheart Janice, took an ROTC commission and did his time in the army and saw a bit of Europe. Then he dove into the advertising game in the Big Apple, trying to escape his Boston Irish background. But that "good Catholic boy" was always there, lurking inside his head, the nuns and Jesuits who had educated him, whispering in his ear about sin and evil and all that other nastiness.

Here's the thing though. Reading CD,PW again in 2010 seemed, in many ways, a totally different experience from reading it in 1970. It seemed richer and even better than the first time. The only explanation for this is, I suppose, that perspective, that hindsight, that an additional forty years gives you. In those intervening years my own marriage has gone through some tough times, all my kids have grown up, and I have lost a brother and a father. Fitzie is only thirty years old at the conclusion of Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks, but he has already gone through some trying times in his marriage and known the pressure that work-home conflicts can bring. He is beginning to see how hard and complicated life can be.

Towards the end of the narrative, Fitzie is attending the funeral of his mother, struck down by a sudden heart attack before she was fifty. He realizes, as he tries to comfort his grieving father how little he knows of his parents' life, but in watching his father he makes an even more important discovery: "... that all a man can really have is another to love and to love him, and for that other to be boxed and lowered into a hole in the earth forever is a terrible thing to happen."

Fitzie knows plenty by the conclusion of this novel, but he's still got a lot to learn. But you get a real sense, as you close this book, that he and Janice are going to make it, that this marriage will survive. And it's a good feeling. I loved this book when I read it at 26. At 66 I loved it even more. Thanks for bringing it back, Ed. I hope our kids and grandkids will discover this book. There are some very important lessons to be learned from it. (February 20, 2010) show less

Fitzie put himself through college by working summers at the popsicle plant. Popsicle-making days were a snap compared to days making chocolate ice-cream bars, and that become a metaphor for his adult life. Excellent depiction of one man's fight to break into corporate New York, with the ups and downs of his marriage and family life mirroring those struggles.

I loved this book and have read it three times over the years.