Atomic Town Dad: T.A.Welton

It was 1968 and I was home from college on spring break, speaking with my Dad in the living room. I with my jeans and long hair and newly-pierced ears, I was going to help stop the war in Viet Nam. My blue-eyed, black-haired theoretical physicist father spoke of the nature of humanity as he knew it, insisting that war among humans is inevitable. Bursting into tears, I left the room saying, "I believe peace is possible!"

A few years before that I had happened on a copy of John Hersey's HIROSHIMA. Reading through it I was horrified and deeply disillusioned, seeing that my Dad and his fellow scientists - all atomic pioneers I'd been brought up to revere - had participated in the horrendous pain and slaughter of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I never brought it up with him. The knowledge was buried deep, like atomic waste in some cement tomb far beneath the surface of the earth.

I think of my Dad now, white-haired, in his wheelchair. Last time I visited him when he was still at home, I helped him clean up after sudden diahrrea, helped him with his diapering, helped him get from wheelchair-to-car. I cooked him things he liked, especially greens with a little vinegar. We spoke of Tom Sawyer visiting his own funeral, and, laughing still - relaxed - we spoke of Dad's wishes for his own remains whenever that time should come.

Now Dad is in a nursing home. The nursing home music volunteer leaves her electronic keyboard in his room. Before I left to go home several states away, Dad played some slow Wagnerian chord progressions for me - the same ones I remember him bumbling through when I was very small. They hadn't improved a bit, but they were none the worse for wear. I'm more impressed with my Dad than ever. Sometimes when there's a little down-time at the library I google up his name. There's an article he wrote, "Memories of Feynman,"* which I read now and then, to recapture the excitement of growing up in a town and a household full of scientific curiosity about the wonders of existence.

I remember Dad as I knew and adored him when I was very young: the Dad who came home late from the Lab and played Beethoven - my Moonlight Sonata lullabye; the Dad who taught us four children the names of the stars and constellations late at night under brilliant skies; the Dad who loved to travel, and took the whole family on vacations to the sea, to the desert, to the mountains....The Dad who once laughed at a thunderstorm, encouraging the four of us tiny ones to dance naked in the pouring rain. The one who, with our Mom, brought us up in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, in Berkeley and Brookhaven; the one who talked about Oppenheimer and Feynman, and who scribbled theories in peacock blue ink when he worked at home on Saturdays.

I'm outlasting his belief in the inevitability of warmongering among humans, I think - or rather, perhaps I'm coming to some understanding of the spiritual physics of peaceful warriorhood. The alchemy of human consciousness. He doesn't see angels or talk with trees, and I do. I don't grok quantummechanics and he does. Never the twain shall meet - except, and only, in the heart. He's my Dad whom I've always adored.



*Physics Today, Feb. 2007, p.46: "Memories of Feynman" by T.A. Welton can be found online as a PDF file.