Sunlight

LYNN HAYDEN (ne REICHERT), a teacher in rural New Jersey, brings about a change affecting all U.S. aviators, civil and military. She proves to the Federal Aviation Administration and later to the President as Commander-in-Chief that aviators have a higher incidence of skin cancer (melanoma) than the general public, no doubt due to long hours in the cockpits of planes with clear canopies affording little sun protection. Her thirty years teaching government and civics in the same rural New Jersey high school she had attended arm her crusade, and the death from melanoma of her friend since their childhood, Air Force fighter pilot JAKE LANDAU, impels it.

LYNN and JAKE grow up like brother and sister and remain steadfast friends throughout their lives. Obsessed with flight since childhood, seeded by the frequent overflights of fighter jets from nearby McGuire Air Force Base, JAKE on his sixth birthday makes his birthday wish - to fly - and jumps out of his first-grade classroom's window. Despite that early disconnect with reality he achieves his dream of flight, graduating from the Air Force Academy and spending three decades as an Air Force officer and gunship fighter pilot stationed around the globe, including flying combat sorties in the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars.

Both of them face adversities threatening but not derailing their life quests. LYNN's rare neurological condition of agelasticism, which incapacitates her from laughing and being ticklish, subjects her to teasing and makes her feel like a freak. Her daughter dies at age five of brain cancer. JAKE's choice of a military career transforms him into a human tumbleweed and constrains him to a life behind the perimeter fences of airbases, estranging him from his parents and costing him a woman he loves.

Shortly after LYNN retires from teaching and JAKE from the Air Force, the sun becomes their formidable adversary. While flying his glider JAKE passes out and nearly crashes, leading to the discovery of his terminal melanoma. No longer able to fly he gets his affairs in order, leaves his entire estate to LYNN, and drops off a cliff to his death. LYNN's crusade begins when she learns of the melanoma. She finds in his belongings a crow feather she had given him on his sixth birthday, the day of his attempted "flight" out of the schoolhouse window, which triggers a powerful emotional reaction enabling her to laugh. The novel begins and ends with a signing ceremony of the new sun protection regulations at the FAA where Lynn has been invited to relate the poignant story of how they came about.