Pa

My parents told me this story only once,

about my great grandfather

who was born in 1901

in Castle Dale, Utah.

When he was a teenager,

back when cars were still new,

he worked in a garage to service them.

The people he worked with would curse

whenever they scraped their knuckles

or couldn’t loosen a bolt,

so he started to do the same.

But one day he forgot his lunch,

and so his mother,

my great-great-grandmother

walked into town

to bring it to him.

She saw him,

but he didn’t see her,

so he cussed

when he scraped his knuckle

trying to loosen a tire.

She set his lunch down

and went home

without saying a word.

“Do you have to curse at work?”

His mother asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

“You have to curse when you work there.

All the other mechanics do it.”

His mother thought a moment,

before saying,

“Well, if you feel it’s a need,

would it matter what language it’s in?”

He supposed it wouldn’t

as long as he was cursing.

“If I taught you to cuss in another language,

would that work?”

He came back to work the next day

with a new word,

something that sounded like

“Tux-cuttah-hah.”

He told the other mechanics

it was a curse word in German,

and soon that was the only curse heard in the garage.

A few years later,

he moved to Germany,

and learned that

“Tux-cattah-hah”

meant

“Thank you very much."