As It Ought To Be

My Father’s Battle
By Laura Grace Weldon

“Life as a whole expresses itself as a force that is not to be contained within any one part. . . . The things we call the parts in every living being are so inseparable from the whole that they may be understood only in and with the whole.”  

-Goethe

My 83-year-old father and I meet regularly at a quiet small-town eatery. Large windows light up the whole place. He remarried after my mother’s long illness and death, now able to relax back into bird watching and church choir.

For years he made lists of things to talk about on the phone or in-person, an eccentric way to handle his shyness, but now we talk easily. While he eats a cherry pastry, I tell him about a biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I’m reading. Goethe believed personal observation was more vital than conventional knowledge. “Colors,” he said, “are light’s suffering and joy.” He scoffed at critics who insisted he didn’t understand scientific theories about color. Instead, he asserted that color required both darkness and light.

My dad, a retired teacher, disagrees. He says theories must be mastered before making advancements. Goethe would have enjoyed debating that point. As we talk, beveled glass decorations at the windows break light into rainbows that bounce from my father’s face to the walls around him.

I’m grateful things have become close-friend comfortable between us. We talk and laugh companionably, happy to be sitting together rather than separated by the miles of our daily phone call. My father had been ratcheted tight by early adversity but something loosened in him recently.

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