Reading this morning's obituaries, I came across this:

"She loved traveling, dancing, bowling, gardening and playing “The One Arm Bandits”. She loved spending time with family and friends. L___ also had a unique language that was all her own. Those close to her knew exactly what she meant. Others, puzzled as they might be, just went along with the flow. Some common expressions include: “For Judas PurrEast”, which she often used when she was told something out of the ordinary. If she was engaged in a conversation that she did not particularly care for, she would say “Scratch it” or “Knock it right there, you're sittin on a keg of dynamite.” By the way, that's just between you, me and the gatepost. The finest words of wisdom she ever gave is instilled in her children and grandchildren ”If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all!” “Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone”. Let's see, how old is she? Old enough to know better and too young to care! Laura was preceded in death by her husband, Bill; sons, Dubba G. (Wm Guy III) and Jim;"

It's nice to come across an obit that manages to convey the unique spirit of the departed. I wouldn't say her expressions are so unique, though: a lot of people used to talk that way back before our culture started applying 'cool' and 'awesome' to every single situation that comes along, regardless of whether it really is all that.

My dad had a unique turn of expression that didn't run to cliches or exclamations like this lady, and I am hard put to describe it. A lot of the time you really didn't know what he was talking about, and we were often in situations similar to that sentence in the obituary: "Others, puzzled as they might be, just went along with the flow."

He didn't watch television, listen to the radio, go to movies or use the Internet, so his cultural references came from reading the Wall Street Journal and talking to people. I don't think he listened much, he just made statements of his opinions. If you remember those Wilferd Brimley TV commercials, my dad had that same manner of informing you what you ought to be thinking.

He often mispronounced words because he'd only read them. I can only remember two examples: Thiokol (as in Morton-Thiokol, the maker of solid rocket fuel), and the word hospice. Morton-Thiokol was in the news back in 1986 when the space shuttle Challenger blew up, and instead of pronouncing it thigh-o-kol, he was pronouncing it thee-ok-kul. He never could wrap his mouth around hospice, pronounced it hos-spice (like seasoning for food). Not a big deal, but string a bunch of these together with an opinionated, rather narrow view of life, and sometimes we really had no idea what he was talking about.

After he died, I was working on his estate, and one of the investments was in a sort of guest ranch here in Northern Colorado. The accommodations consisted of yurts. Yes, I mean those circular portable dwellings sometimes made of felt. I could just imagine a phone conversation with my dad where he would say:

"I've got some money tied up in this place that has yurts."

and I would figure he didn't know what he was talking about. What would he know about yurts? And then after he dies, I open his briefcase, and there is a brochure with a picture of the yurts. I had to laugh.

Not to say the man was some kind of insular hermit. He traveled the world: in the 1980s, he flew a small plane from Jerusalem into Jordan as part of a Peace Flight, participated in D-Day commemorations at Omaha Beach (and his picture doing that is in the June 2002 National Geographic), flew his Cessna to the Caribbean, Alaska, and Mexico, visited Australia, was stationed in Guam during World War II.

And through it all, he remained blissfully bigoted and obnoxious, with his own turn of phrase.

To a degree, I've decided it runs in his family on his mother's side because several years ago I met one of his first cousins, and she talked somewhat similar to how he put words together. It's not that the family were recent immigrants - my dad's grandparents came to Colorado from a Scottish settlement in upstate New York around Ballston Spa. I don't know if they'd ever lived in Scotland. I suppose I should go visit with the distant relatives still in Scotland to see if I pick up a sense that they have an unusual way of communicating, although considering it's a whole other country, I probably wouldn't know if it was them or everyone there talks like that.

Speaking of distant cousins, back in the early 1980s we went to a big family reunion on his dad's side of the family held in Iowa. There was a man there whose voice had the same cadences and tones as my dad's. Speech patterns and tones is something family tree researchers never talk about because for the long-gone ancestors, most of us are lucky to have photographs, never mind voice recordings.

That's him on the right, talking to one of the other Flying Farmers members in Wray, Colorado.