the family construction business<\/a> every summer.\u00a0 Typically, during my teenage years, my father (who owned and ran the company until midway through my mission, when my brother Kenneth took over) assigned me to work with \u201cRed\u201d Faler, the company mechanic.\u00a0 (I can\u2019t quite remember his real first name.\u00a0 It was something like \u201cElwin,\u201d I believe, which is probably why he went by \u201cRed.\u201d)\u00a0 I was and am useless as a mechanic, and I\u2019m sure that he thought me pretty worthless \u2014 the boss\u2019s impractical and day-dreaming son \u2013but I could run errands and fetch things and hand him tools and save him time for real work.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Red, who\u2019s been gone now for many years, was a massive man, with massive hands, but he was remarkably kind and gentle, even shy.\u00a0 I liked him very much.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
He had come to work for us after years of assignments around the world, supervising scores of other mechanics on massive international construction projects, and he just wanted to settle down.\u00a0 We represented quasi-retirement for him.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
He was also an absolute artist with cuss words, one of the two most eloquent swearers I\u2019ve ever encountered.\u00a0 His only serious rival was a favorite uncle of mine.\u00a0 I often dreamed of introducing them to each other for what I envisioned as The World Series of Profanity.\u00a0 Two of the most colorful personalities I\u2019ve ever come across, I think they would have really liked each other.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
He marveled at my inability to swear.\u00a0 One day, I slammed my thumb in the door of the company jeep.\u00a0 The pain was excruciating.\u00a0 But I didn\u2019t use any profanity.\u00a0 Not because I wouldn\u2019t have liked to, but because it just wasn\u2019t habitual for me, and I was in too much agony at the moment to come up with any new vocabulary or original prose.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Curiously, despite his genuinely foul tongue, he was a gentleman of the old school.\u00a0 You don\u2019t often see his like anymore.\u00a0 He was, for example, seldom if ever obscene; he simply used the other colors of the palette of profanity with consummate skill and originality.\u00a0 Once, he came\u00a0into the company office at lunchtime from his shop out back.\u00a0 Assuming that the secretaries were all out, and frustrated by some dumb thing that one of the workers had done to a piece of equipment, he let loose with a string of cursing that would have made most sailors blush.\u00a0 Suddenly, though, he noticed that, in fact, a secretary was still sitting there, eating a salad at her desk.\u00a0 His embarrassment and his abject apologies were comical but actually quite touching.\u00a0 In Red\u2019s chivalrous world, you just didn\u2019t say such things in the presence of ladies.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Red didn\u2019t have a religious bone in his body, so far as I could tell.\u00a0 He certainly wasn\u2019t a Latter-day Saint.\u00a0 But one of his overseas stints had been down by the Dead Sea sometime prior to the 1967 Six Day War, when not only the eastern shore of the Dead Sea was in Jordanian hands but also the so-called West Bank, up to and including the most historically interesting portion of Jerusalem.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
He was fascinated by military history, and so, during his free time, he would take his Bible and hike all over the sites of ancient battles.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t been to the Middle East yet \u2014 that was still a decade or so in the future \u2014 and I found his descriptions utterly mesmerizing:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then these g-ddamned sons o\u2019 @#$%&es come in over the pass from the north.\u00a0 Meantime, those stupid clueless *&^%$#@es were sound asleep,\u201d and on and on in that vein.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
He knew the historical portions of the Old Testament intimately, and loved recounting tales of battles and intrigue, always laced with generous helpings of expletives, profanity, and memorable adjectives.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
My other fantasy about Red, accordingly, was to bring him sometime into a Gospel Doctrine class on the Old Testament.\u00a0 It would, of course, have been the last time that I would ever, worlds without end, be permitted to teach Sunday School, but members of the class would never have forgotten those stories.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Red Faler is one of an ever-lengthening list of people I\u2019ve loved \u2014 including my irreplaceable brother himself \u2014 who have passed beyond the veil, but with whom I hope to spend a lot of time again, someday.\u00a0 What a reunion it will be.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
And Red constitutes, in my mind, a kind of argument for immortality:\u00a0 I can\u2019t really picture so vivid a personality as his simply ceasing to exist.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Paris, France<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/a>