I feel the end is near.

How can I say goodbye to this man who gifted me with so much? All I know is that if I turn out to be even a fraction of the man he is, then I will have done right. Dad hasn't been responding to us for a couple of days now. He stays asleep almost all the time. My sister said he opened his eyes for a short time tonight. I had not long left the hospital by then.

Attention NASA, there is a man on his deathbed who made parts for your Lunar Rovers which sit on the moon to this day. He was a machinist, he didn't design the parts, he made them out of raw metal to your design specifications. He was a craftsman of the highest order, a machine shop was his plaything, his toy, and the arena wherein he crafted some few small parts which made your dreams come true. Please join me in honoring this man who played a small, but important part in advancing the human effort to explore space back in the day. My father, Daniel Wayne Hollifield, who took your blueprints and made them real. His part in the history of space exploration is small. He was a team player who worked on many projects never asking for or expecting any special recognition. The race to space was run by thousands and thousands of people who each played some individual role in a massive undertaking. Not all were astronauts, nor working consoles at Mission Control, nor even engineers. Many worked in the background creating bits and pieces which would one day be assembled into the mighty machines which allowed mankind to reach outward to touch the face of our nearest celestial neighbor, in hopes that we would learn valuable lessons to explore further into our own solar system, and perhaps one day to the very stars themselves.

Ladies and gentlemen. There are many craftsmen and women just like my Dad, who made the parts to make the machines which made our dreams come true. Few are left these days. Soon, there will be one fewer. Honor him and his compatriots who gladly gave their skills, their lives, their devotion so that we could reach the moon, and so that, one day we may even reach other solar systems. And on that day, it will be a team effort. Astronauts, Mission Control, engineers, and those people like Dad, who make the things which are part of the things which make our future dreams come true.

The old guard passeth away, and the new guard assumes the mantle. Without the craftsmen, the designers would only be daydreaming. Lift your tankards and glasses in toast to the unsung heroes who strive behind our more well known heroes to insure that we have the tools with which to reach for our dreams, to achieve the impossible, and to learn all which can be known.

Dan

BOILERPLATE:

First off, if you do the Facebook thing, feel free to join us on the Aphelion page there. The link is Aphelion Webzine. As an aside, the Editorial Mafia and I have found Facebook to be very useful. Given our different locations and schedules, it's come in handy as a way to discuss production details of new issues. Sometimes there are several of us using Facebook at the same time, so it's almost like the old chat room days.

Dan's Music Page This is my promo page here at Aphelion. All the links below, and more information about the albums, are located here.

The Never Bank On A Learning Curve CD on the Create Space website. My first album, with a wide range of styles and genres, covering the past three years of my working with the MAGIX Music Maker programs.

The Second Helping CD on the Create Space website. My second album, with just as wide a range of different musical styles, showing just how much I've learned in the past three years.

Dan's Studio-D Page on the Bandcamp website. Digital downloads of the albums, or each individual song if you prefer it that way. Just click on the album cover thumbnails and you'll see a list of each song on the album. Next to the song titles are links to read the liner notes, or to download the individual song. You can listen to each song for free. There is also a link to download each entire album at one go. I cannot say enough about Bandcamp! This is an amazing website. I have Rob, and many other friends, to thank for finally talking me into checking it out.

Here are some links to pages I have up promoting my music. When my book comes out I'll add those links to the promotion page, too. So far, there are links on that page to the Create Space Preview songs, the Create Space page for each album, the Amazon.com listings, and the link to the digital downloads page.

And here's a link to my Sound Cloud page:

Dan's Sound Cloud Page where all my music has been stored for your free listening pleasure. These are not as high a quality recordings as the ones on the CDs or on Bandcamp. But SoundCloud does have the virtue of having everything collected together in one place.

Check those links out, buy a CD or download if you like what you hear. And once again, thank you for your time,

Dan all my music has been stored for your free listening pleasure. These are not as high a quality recordings as the ones on the CDs or on Bandcamp. But SoundCloud does have the virtue of having everything collected together in one place.

Check those links out, buy a CD or download if you like what you hear. And once again, thank you for your time,

Dan