Adios, Clayton

Sometimes I give my mother grief because she forgets to pass along news from home in a timely fashion. But last night, she got straight to the point: "Clayt died." I suppose I had that coming. My whole "skip to the chase" attitude put me in a position of having to swallow that pill. Clayt died. Clayton Orton. The guy who lived across the street from us for all those years. Gone.
It wasn't a shock, necessarily. He had been sick for some time, and his family had been preparing for this for months. He was eighty-six. He was in the Army Air Corps in World War Two. He played hard and worked hard. As Doctor Hunter S. Thompson would have said, "He stomped on the terra."
And yet, it's still a little confounding to imagine a world without Clayt in it. The guy was a force of nature. He built his own bar. He had four kids, eight grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren. He worked harder and longer than most guys half his age. He was all those things, but that's not what I will remember him for most. Clayton Orton was the most unrepentant curser I ever had the good fortune to encounter.
Clayt, as previously mentioned, was an airman not a sailor, but he swore like one. It came out in such a casual, effortless way that after a while it seemed more like a local dialect instead of the occasional blue streak. To say that it was part of his charm may be overstating things, since it is probably more appropriate to say that he was so charming that the words he chose didn't tend to reflect poorly on him. The thing is, if I ever tried to repeat back some of the stuff he said, I would sound like a complete clown. No, Clayt was an artist. And a father. And a husband. And a good friend and neighbor. He stomped on the goll-durn terra.