From My Father's Son by Taylor Plimpton:

My father’s voice was odd not just in what it said, but in what it couldn’t. These are some of the things my father could not say: Shit. Fuck. I love you. Actually, that’s not quite true. I did hear my dad say shit once. We were out to dinner, and he was explaining the habits of some odd-ball bird he’d encountered on one of his adventures (he loved oddball birds, and would give us little wooden sculptures of them for Christmas), and when he used the word guano and it didn’t register and I gave him a questioning look, he said, sternly, “You know—shit.” The word came quick and short—indeed, no one has probably ever uttered the word quicker—and it sounded so strange coming from my dad’s proper lips that I thought perhaps I had misheard. “What?” I said. “Shit,” he repeated— “Guano…”

Before that night, his curses were never actually curse-words, though it was perhaps because of this that they held such weight. “Shoot!” he’d hiss, when he was mad. It was scary, because he was never mad, and to see this normally oblivious, benevolent white-haired figure of civility fill with pink steam, to hear that gentle voice that loved nothing more than to tell lighthearted stories and laugh suddenly shout-whisper, “Dammit” at some injustice on the other end of the telephone—it was unsettling, for sure. But looking back on it, it’s kinda funny, too, the fact he cursed like that. Hearing the words “Dammit, I’m mad as a hornet!” uttered in George Plimpton’s voice made anger sound totally ridiculous, which is exactly what it usually is. (My dad’s been dead near 25 years: not that he held many in his life, but what grudges could he possibly be holding on to now? What will you be mad about a quarter century after you’re gone?)

And so fuck was definitely out of the question, but what about I love you? Why was that so hard for him to say? There was love there, no doubt—actually, the fact he couldn’t express it made him sometimes positively brim with it—but speak the words his voice could not. At least, not to me, nor even to my sister, a fact she mentions in the documentary about him. You’d be on the phone with him and get to the end of the conversation and you’d say I love you, Dad, and at most, he’d reply, without subject or object, “Love,” quick and formal and uncomfortable, like he was signing a letter.

Of course, he came from a family where such endearments were not expressed, and phone conversations were curt. In fact, my dad’s farewells seemed loquacious in comparison to his mother’s. She would not even say goodbye. There you’d be, talking with her on the phone, and she’d say, “Well, tell him I called,” and you’d say, “OK Grandma, good to talk to you, I… Grandma?”

There was one more matter I never heard my dad discuss, that is, until I saw the documentary—the assassination of his dear friend, Bobby Kennedy. From what other people had told me, I knew a little bit about it—that my father (and mother) had been right there by Bobby’s side in California when he was shot, that my father had tackled Sirhan Sirhan to the ground, and wrestled the gun from his hand—but not a word of it came from my dad himself. In fact, the police deposition that the filmmakers managed to uncover may in fact be the only time my father ever spoke about the tragedy, publicly or privately, and it is truly one of the most harrowing and heartbreaking parts of the documentary. And it shed light on my father, too, to hear the great storyteller finally tell the one story he would not tell: it revealed something about his integrity as a journalist, and as a man.

Nevertheless, it’s a strange thing, that one of the great voices of modern storytelling had limitations, restrictions, words and phrases it was incapable of uttering, matters it could not express: Death, love, tragedy. It was almost like its very essence, that gentlemanly timbre, did not allow it to broach certain subjects. Sure, as a legendary raconteur and first-person nonfiction writer, my father was his voice—he was the story he told of himself. But I wonder a little bit if that was really the whole story. After all, a good narrative involves so much editing.

Perhaps it was, finally, the stories you couldn’t tell that defined you even more. The tragedies you could not express. The things you wish you could have said but never did. And that great, beautiful tension between what was in his heart, and what his voice allowed him to express, is the basic tension of language we all face, only heightened. My dad could never say what he felt, not really, and neither can any of us. It’s not putting a word to it that’s the problem, either—Plimpton was a genius at finding just the right word—it was about having the courage to say the things that you were afraid to say. For such admissions to escape my father’s lips, they always had to be a little removed, somehow.

“How’s your mom?” he’d always ask me. They were divorced at this point, and had been for a while, but they still talked, and visited every now and then, and they would sit out on my mom’s porch on Long Island and look out over the pond at the birds and tell each other stories and laugh till the tears came to their eyes—but he could not ask her this directly—“How are you, Freddy?” (I had the sense that when they spoke, if there was a serious question he would ask her, it was “How’s Taylor?”) Oh, there was such tenderness in him, and the fact he couldn’t express it, not directly, not really, well, it was the sweetest thing, I guess, heartbreaking, almost. After all, he had lost my mom, at least in part, because he had been unable to communicate with her, to show her how much he still loved her, because when it came to matters of the heart, that old gentleman’s voice was incapable of saying a word.