When Vince Was Dying

in the summer of summer of 1988, I was sitting with him by the fireplace. Conversation does not come easy when you are with the dying. We were just sort of being by each other. Then out of the blue, he asks me, "What is a catalyst?" I was a little taken aback as my father had an ample vocabulary, why is he asking me this? All I could say was that I thought it was when something acted on something else, it changed everything. Then he asked me "So suppose there were dewdrops on a spider web, and then the sun rose and hit those drops, and lit them up, would the sunlight be a catalyst?" He already knew the answer.