The Hitchhiker-The Troubadour--A New Book

What makes us human? We know that a few other species share with us some of our most valued experiences, such as our ability to perceive and respond to the emotional states of others. Today’s technologies remind us of our remarkable ability to deduce even some of the most subtle relationships in our environment, yet much of what we experience is still mysterious to us.

We love to construct grand theories of how things work. Questions, from “What's the meaning of life?” to “Does she love me?” occupy our thoughts whenever we lift our heads from the daily grind of survival. It’s often when something changes that we notice the ground that we’ve been walking on. Our personal narratives--the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves--become disjointed without our being aware of it until an event, or another person, comes along to remind us that we could have done things differently.

Judy Collins, a popular singer from a half-century ago, touched on these questions with two songs about how our perceptions of our personal realities change with time and circumstances.

Both Sides Now

I've looked at clouds (love, life) from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It's life's illusions I recall

I really don't know life at all

  

Send in the Clowns

Isn't it bliss?

Don't you approve?

One who keeps tearing around,

One who can't move.

Where are the clowns?

Send in the clowns.

“Send in the clowns” refers to the old theatrical device that was used when the script failed—when, as it so often happens in life, we are left to figure out something different. I invite you to check out the full lyrics of both songs, which even after all these years can stimulate a lot of personal rumination. Better yet, listen to them sung. I’m sure they are available on YouTube.

In different ways, the two stories in this book have to do with that mystery. The book is available from Amazon.com, in either paperback or e-book format. 

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Donald+Skiff

The Dolphin--A New Book

The Douglas Dolphin was an amphibious flying boat, one of a torrent of aircraft designed and built in the decades following the Great War (World War I) to realize man’s long-held dream of flying with the birds. While only 58 Dolphins were built, they served a wide variety of roles: private “air yacht”, airliner, military transport, and search and rescue. Wilmington-Catalina Airlines, Ltd bought the first two Dolphins in 1931 to transport passengers from the California mainland to and from Santa Catalina Island. 

In this novel, Edward (Eddie) Norris is a boy whose life-long dream was aviation and whose first airplane flight was in a Dolphin, when he was fourteen years old. Eddie’s story is part of the story of the 1930s, when commercial aviation came of age. 

This is a fictional story. A few names of people are real, along with their accomplishments, but where real individuals are included we’ve taken occasional liberties with actions and events to further the story. We hope that we’ve done them justice. 

The Dolphin is available in either paperback or e-book format from Amazon.com. You can see my Author's Page and more of my available books at: 

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Donald+Skiff

89 is a Prime Number ...

Not as flashy-dramatic as 90, nor (at my age) as ho-hum as mere 80, 89 turns out to be easily forgotten. In my dawn reverie before getting out of bed this morning, I considered at length how it feels to be 89. Lately, as I have become used to the number when asked about my age (the nurses always ask for my date of birth, not my age) I’ve sometimes forgotten exactly how old I was/am. The smirks I’ve received suggested that more important than the number of years I’ve been alive was the fact of my growing forgetfulness. “Ah, dementia setting in.” I suspect that’s why the nurses ask for my date of birth, to see what I still remember. Officially, it’s to verify my identity for their records. “Spell your last name and the date of your birth.” Okay, you’re who you claim to be. And you’re still present mentally.

This prime number thing occurred to me this morning as a bright spot: 89 is not as unremarkable as I thought. And the fact that I knew it is a prime number registered as proof of my mental abilities. How I knew, I don’t know. But immediately I went through the simple process of verifying its place in the infinite series of prime numbers. Those are, of course, numbers that are divisible only by one and themselves. To someone for whom numbers and mathematics are interesting, they are a delightful fact; for anyone else, they are as interesting as the circumference of the earth. Probably less, since we like to think about the earth as a place to stand while we whirl around in the universe.

Once it is past, however, the number becomes just a number. Next up: 90. Oh, boy. Ninety. From this side of it, it’s not just a number. If you notice, as I have for the past dozen years or so, the ages given in the obits section of the NY Times show fewer people die past ninety. The atmosphere is getting thinner.

I once met an old woman, the grandmother of one of my neighborhood chums, who remembered the civil war. It seemed remarkable to me at the time, but she wasn’t as old as I am now. I remember vividly the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. My sisters and I had to look it up on a map, but for the next four years The War was ever present to us. It was a huge thing. Four years. The Viet Nam war lasted nearly twenty years. Our troops have been in Afghanistan since—what, 2001? Seventeen years.

Numbers do not speak of experience. I’ve lived in Michigan for nearly half of my life, yet it feels more like perhaps a quarter, if I have to think about it. It feels like home to me now, but just barely. I grew up in Cincinnati, and that time still seems to me to have been more important years in my life. The same number of years since the Twin Towers came down.

How does one get a handle on the years? Eighty-nine—ho hum. Next Big Thing? Ninety—If I make it. Today is really all there is.

The Comfort of a Woman

He watches her as she bounces ever so slightly, her shoulders dipping in rhythm as she picks up dog toys from the floor. On the stereo, the Gramercy Five bounces gently along, with his wife responding unconsciously to the music. She was only ten years old when Artie Shaw put together his quintet, but her body knows what he was saying all those years ago.

Wherever did he find her? The three ounces of vodka in his gimlet take away almost every inhibition he had. But he doesn't need to do anything—all he has to do is watch her. With this woman whom he's treasured for a quarter century, even with all the limitations of age, here is a familiar feeling, one that makes life worth all of its pain and uncertainty.

She wasn’t his first love. That one had come in the loneliness of youth, a grasping for comfort, a mutual need for certainty. That one had ended, inevitably, in disillusion. The comfort was temporary, the certainty elusive.

Others followed, each one promising fulfillment, only to float away in currents of change. Each one gave him that which only a woman’s love could give, a buoyance in the maelstrom. He’d given back as long as they lasted; the flesh and the souls eventually tearing apart in mutual loss.

The playlist in his computer cued up Johnny Mathis and then Tony Bennett—long ago and fondly but faintly remembered, the regrets and the sighs of those years now barely noticed.

Earlier, as they prepared dinner, he'd played an old album by Herb Alpert and had remembered floating down a highway with another woman in her Mustang, the eight-track stereo blaring Tijuana Brass, feeling free for the first time in his life. He’d savored the memory. It didn’t matter that it was fifty years before; the feeling was still there.

“Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall” and other tender songs of Paul Simon the other evening had brought wistfulness in the midst of a world gone mad, a clutching for that old solace of youth, when the touch of a hand felt warm on the heart. The maelstrom was too violent, the love too fragile. The haunting drum solo in “Inna Gadda da Vida”—In the Garden of Eden—had marked the end of something precious, the fluttering of an Iron Butterfly, a nostalgic wail in sweet smoke.

A time of aimless wandering, accompanied by an equally lost companion, moved by Roberta Flack’s “Killing me Softly,” longing for something only glimpsed in the mist, something now forgotten. And then a rainbow, a swirl of hair, a voice from the past, the child of that first love. Eva Cassidy singing “Fields of Gold” and remembering, restoring. A hole of darkness, healed.

Now he puts on the track “What a Feeling” from Flashdance, and he watches her. “I can’t not move,” she always says, smiling at him.

Old music vividly remembered and responded to evokes feelings collected in a lifetime. Like faded snapshots (those were discarded years ago), the songs he’d shared with others become the themes of unwritten narratives and longings stuffed beneath the cushions of memory.

Now, a fitting coda to a life. In the waning time—months? weeks? days? that they can spend together, he basks in the glow of her, the comfort of a woman.

The only one.