Things my Grandpa taught me.

Grandpa was always trying to teach me how to fight like a man, like his father had taught him. But I had only ever been taught how to cook like a man, which didn’t really impress Grandpa.

‘You’re using too much salt!’ he’d say, punching me.

Once we had given up on my recipe for salt-soup, Grandpa would sit me down and explain how things were in the old days. They didn’t call them back then, of course. They just called them ‘days’.

My grandpa was born at the age of zero to a poor family; poor in the sense that they weren’t a good family, not that they didn’t have money. But they didn’t have any money either.

Grandpa told me about how they used to wrap fish and chips in newspaper. Because his family had no money they could only afford to read the news whenever they got fish and chips. He’d look down at his dinner and see, ‘Australia At War!’ smudged onto the side of the snapper. That’s how they came to refer to the news as ‘the snapper.’
One day my great-grandfather came home from the mines and said, ‘Did you see the snapper today? You’re off to war, Sonny Jim!’

My Grandpa’s name wasn’t really Jim; that’s just what his dad called him. They never had a close relationship, so Grandpa never corrected him. This worked to Grandpa’s favour when his dad tried to sell him to some Italian migrants for a pot of spaghetti.

When the Lombardi family showed up in Grandpa’s street looking for him, they accidentally went to the Smiths next door who did have a boy called Jim. So the Smiths got the spaghetti instead and Grandpa’s family went without.

But the joke was on them because everyone knew that Lombardi’s spaghetti tasted like kangaroo shit; or at least it did after my great-grandfather got a job at their restaurant.

Eventually, of course, Grandpa did get sent to war. The men already on the front were disappointed, having expected a model train set to arrive instead. But since Grandpa was already there, they figured they might as well make a model soldier of him.

So Grandpa modeled his way through the war and became quite the pin-up boy. When he came home, a young lady asked him to sign his autograph for her. Not being able to read or write, Grandpa took this as a threat to his manhood and smacked her in the mouth. It was only afterwards that he realised she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, except for the fat lip.

Once the bruises healed, Grandpa married the beautiful lady and that’s how I got my first Grandma. At the wedding reception everyone danced and had a jolly good time, except for the people eating spaghetti, who felt rather sick.

Grandpa never did teach me to fight like a man, but I eventually did get him to try my soup. At the funeral everybody was touched by my eulogy; and all anybody said was, ‘Oh, wasn’t he a gentleman?’ and ‘What a good right hook he had’ and ‘I always told him not to eat so much salt.’