A few days ago all the grandkids met online and traded stories about Grandpa’s life. We wanted to celebrate his existence: all the funny and strange and wonderful things that only grandpa could of done, our memories, the present and the past, our childhoods revisited from long, long ago.
Ben told me one of his favourite memories was when Grandpa’s coat caught on fire. They were at Talpa and everyone started to smell something burning. Then George looked over at Grandpa and his coat was smoking. He’d been sitting too close to the light and now his coat was on fire. But Grandpa didn’t mind. He just laughed and said, “Ohh Chee!”
Except Sarah tells it different. Sarah reckons everyone was at the coast and they were upstairs and Katie could smell smoke. So they went looking for the smoke smell and then they found it. The smoke was coming from Grandpa. So George said all casual, “Oh it’s okay. Grandpa’s just on fire” and then Grandpa said, “Oh Chee!” Grandpa was tough and grandpa rarely complained and grandpa made do. He was teaching us how to make it in this world. He was teaching others the skills they would need to make it too.
James remembers going with Grandpa to pick up John for work at 6.30 AM each Saturday morning. They’d park out front of these apartments and then Grandpa would literally just ride the horn until John stumbled out. He lived by his own rules and cared little for what other people thought. That’s just the way he was.
Last night I spoke to Alex about the times Grandpa used to employ him for $5/hour. He was 12 or 13 and Grandpa would make him stand in the pond pulling weeds out in the Queanbeyan heat. Alex told me it was back breaking work and sometimes he didn’t even get paid. Half the time Alex didn’t even know if the work needed to be done. “But,” he said. “I guess it was character building.” But maybe that’s the point. Sometimes you have to pull weeds from the pond standing stand knee deep in water. Sometimes you don’t get to ask why.
Then Sarah told the stories of our youth. She spoke of grandpa’s ute that wouldn’t die and how we would fly around Talpa sitting in the back holding on for dear life drinking cordial out of plastic cups sometimes jumping out to open gates and when we returned to the main road times ducking real low and giggling, sometimes eating blackberries and laughing, avoiding the police.
And I remember the platypus.
I remember the sun and the hills and the dirt in the sun as it came through the windscreen.
I remember swimming in the river.
I remember calling the river the beach.
And did we even know how lucky we were? Did we know how lucky we were to have a Grandpa who had a ute who had a river that we could swim in all afternoon?
Grandpa always had the best intentions.
Kate remembers when he went to Canada each summer he would do his laps in their pool. At some point Marge started noticing the plants around her pool were dying. So she asked Grandpa about it and grandpa said, “Oh Chee. That’s odd. Because I’ve been watering them every morning after my swim.” So Marge said, “What have you been watering them with dad?” and Grandpa said, “Every morning after my swim I take a bucket of pool water and water the plants.” He just wanted to help. He wanted to watch it all grow.
But he was cheeky too.
Grandpa would invite members from the university and the church over for lunch or dinner and serve them goon poured from expensive wine bottles.
Another time he visited us in America and we went to the public pool. Over there they have these things called “safety breaks”. Every hour you have to get out of the pool for ten minutes so you can rest. Grandpa had been a concentration camp. He didn’t have time for safety breaks. So he threw his towel over the lifeguards chair and got in the pool and started his laps. But then it was safety break time. Grandpa just kept on swimming. The life gaurds blew their whistles and then they blew their whistles some more. But Grandpa didn’t care. He didn’t know what all the fuss was about. He was just wanted to swim his kilometre like he’d done every day since the mid 70s.
Grandpa was beautiful.
His unrestrained affection for Grandma in his later years, always talking about how pretty his wife was and telling her how much he loved her and how he would marry her over and over again. How he began saying, “The key to a long life is having a pretty wife! Right Ruth!”
One time Brigitte and her ex-boyfriend Tom stayed with Grandma and Grandpa a few years ago and Tom slept on the floor. Brigitte slept in the study and Grandpa came out in the middle of the night to nibble the cheese in the fridge or pour sugar packets down his throat. Because he’d do that. He’d steal the sugar packets from the café or the church and then keep them in his pocket, and at midnight he’d have his own private desert. Except this time he saw Tom and he said, “What are you doing! You can come sleep with me!” This was a 93-year-old man offering his bed to a stranger.
And I love how Grandpa used to sit in bed in the evenings and read his old books. He would read Faith and Fragility or The Fixed and The Fickle and sometimes he would disagree with himself. He’d read something he’d written long ago and he’d say, “Ohh Chee …that’s a terrible point!” But then, minutes later, he’d concede that something else was excellent. “This though,” he’d say. “This is excellent.”
And when I think about Grandpa now I think about a teacher who taught us to get on with things because, really what else is there to do? I think about the time Brigitte found him in our backyard with his shirt off eating sweating raw bacon in the Brisbane heat. He kept commenting how good the “ham” was, and when he found out the ham was in fact bacon he just shrugged. Then continued eating it the next day.
There’s a phrase grandpa optimised: any job doing is worth doing well, and he lived that way until the end, always striving for excellence, always wanting more.
Several days before he passed away Sarah and the family thought he was in his final hours. But then all of a sudden he began to wake up. He looked around and he said, “How old am I? I want to make it to 100” and then “You know … I wouldn’t mind a cookie.”
I’ll leave you with one of my earliest memories of Grandpa: I was maybe five or six or seven and I’d been hooning around Grandpa’s property on my bike. But then I lost control and crashed through Grandpa’s fence. I was a bleeding mess lying crying in the gravel. Eventually Grandpa heard my cries and he came down to see what was wrong. He said, “Oh Chee… well it’s time you learned to fix a fence!” So he picked me up from the road and he got his tools and set about fixing the fence. He showed me how hammers and nails worked.
He showed all of us the brilliant and unique ways the world could be put together.
Rest in peace Grandpa.
