Cussing and Swearing Up a Blue Streak

In a Facebook exchange this week, friend Ed McDevitt (http://www.edmcdevitt.com/ ) and his daughter had a back-and-forth about cursing, and I got to remembering that...

One of my father's best friends was Artie Getzler; they met at work and really hit it off. The old man was still driving gasoline delivery trucks for Gulf Oil, and Art -- powerfully built, rugged-looking, square-faced and sandy-haired, with big, hard, freckled hands -- worked, inconguously, as an accountant. Getzler was the kind of guy who was smart and competent and well read and witty, and interested in everything; a good man, and a good friend.

He and his wife Ann vacationed with our family many summers at Lake George; they had no kids in those days, and seemed to enjoy being with my brothers and me almost as much as with our parents. One day Art and my father were working on one of the cars in the driveway of the summer place, and Art accidentally touched the battery with his ring, which formed a circuit to the frame through his watch and gave him a shock and two nasty burns. "SON of a bitch bastard," he said, shaking the hand and hop-stepping in a circle, "Son of a BITCH bastard. Son of a bitch BASTARD."

He went inside to wash and ice the burns. As he stood at the sink, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with the Reader's Digest. She looked up at him owlishly over the tops of her reading glasses. "It says here that, 'profanity is the last refuge of the inarticulate and weak minded; it is the unimaginative use of rote language to mask an incapacity for true creative expression.' " Art shut off the water and stared at her for a few beats.

"Bullshit," he said, and walked back outside, whistling.

But Art had a bad ticker, and when a heart attack sidelined him at 40-something, he was advised to get a hobby to help him relax as he recuperated. He decided to take up woodworking, and after a few early successes, he launched on an ambitious project to build a new set of kitchen cabinets. He measured and planned and measured again; he bought expensive hardwood and cut it with precision; he prepped and stained and varnished the pieces preparatory to assembly. My father and I arrived early on installation Saturday to be his helpers. Annie answered the door with an uncharacteristically grave expression that -- also uncharacteristically -- did not respond to my father's cheerful greeting. He asked, "Uh, where's Art?" In the brief silence that followed, we heard a repeated crack-splintering noise from not too far away.

"He's in the back yard," she said, and stood aside to usher us through. We passed through the bare-walled kitchen and out onto the raised back deck. Below us we could see Art swinging his axe, getting his back and shoulders into it and with a good rhythm going. He was breaking up the pieces of the new cabinet with application and precision, reducing each to flinders before moving on to the next. My father called down to him, "Art?" Art didn't answer, didn't turn around, didn't pause in his efforts. We looked at Annie.

"When he went to assemble them last night," she said, "he realized that he had made everything sort of, well, inside out. The finish and the detail work was all on the inside. The rough wood and the framing and everything were all on the outside. He hasn't said a word since. He just went to bed, and then he got up early this morning and... " She trailed off and gestured to the yard. "I'm worried about his heart," she said at length.

But Artie didn't seem to be in any danger. He was not sweating, not red in the face; he was breathing easily. We watched him work for a while, and then we went back into the kitchen for coffee. After what seemed like a long time, the chopping stopped, and then we heard Art in the basement, and my father went downstairs. Annie and I could hear them talking calmly, but not what they said. My father came back up. "He's going to start over," he said. "He won't need our help today."

As we left, we heard the sound of the radial arm saw biting into hard wood. "He'll be okay," my father told Annie. "Stop worrying." And he was okay, too, for a few more years anyway, until lung cancer took him away too soon at 49.