Last Thursday, I bade farewell to my grandaunt, the unfortunate victim of a stroke. I had visited her on the Monday, or Tuesday, of the week she left.

My home country bade farewell, on the same day, to a war heroine who knew me, and I wish I knew her as well as she did to me: Mrs Elizabeth Choy. She was a POW (Prisoner-Of-War) who passed messages and food items to fellow British POWs, and underwent torture for her doings. She's a remarkable woman, and we had such a loss.

Double whammy? Yes, and not so.

In my Christian belief, I take comfort in knowing that the two of them are at peace in Heaven, revelling in a paradise without pain or suffering, and are waiting (eagerly?) for me to join them. Many are waiting for me there.

I much prefer to see what the mortal life and destined path God made for me has in store, and to live through it, thank you.

If it taught me anything, it taught me to treasure those around me: Friends and family, especially the older members of the family.

You're not going to get out of life alive, believe it or not. Oh the irony. You would be going alone, so you better know and relish the comfort and togetherness of those around us now.

The older members of the family. They evoke thought and emotion from me. They are not 'ancient relics', as rude and apathetic teenagers of this modern world would say of their grandparents (and their parents!), but 'ancient treasures'.

They are abundant wells of information, tales and wisdom. They hold within them stories of the past, history and time gone past that we will never experience, but they have and can share with us the priceless vector of life with their grandchildren, and to pass it on further generations, or to share their wealth of knowledge with others.

That would relate greatly to my grandfather.

He is a respectable man, reaching past his eighties, and living it well. We relate to him as the strongest man in the house, for he had a good set of muscules that would put many else to shame in his youth, and still had some of that strength with him still. He is senile too, let me tell you this with some pride, and that he can still walk long miles, further than I would have, to the supermarket and even take the public transport to Chinatown for a bowl of noodles (My grandmother and I went out to Chinatown during this period of holidays and ran into him, where he was indulging in a bowl of noodles, I think it was stewed pork noodles. I was surprised.) and even go to the hubbub of the shopping district to that particular supermarket, withstanding the crowd of teenagers and tourists.

What a plucky old man.

Why did I raise such an issue today?

The passings of the two old folk I would never see again, save at the cemetery - and this.

This evening, I was tucking into dinner: a good mix that could only be found at my home. Rice, baicai (white vegetables) that shrunk to the size of my thumb, double boiled beef cubes with mushroom and chunks of brinjal that floated in a gravy that had chilli as a main ingredient. It all was brought into a colourful mush as I tossed the mix of food in my plate and gorged it down. I love home food.

Grandpa, whom I will start calling here as the proper term I call him, Yeye (Grandfather) had eaten finish his dinner and was settling down with his daily after-meal fruit: a mandarin.

May the ol' wise banter kick start itself.

"This mandarin is... slightly bad...I took it because I could tell... from the smell... that it's starting to become bad..."

He talks with pauses, but his speech was still legible.

"You can still eat a mandarin... even when it's bad... there's an old Chinese saying...

"Lan gam tim, lan chang fu..."

"Lan gam tim?" I echoed.

"Lan gam tim... when bad, the mandarin is still... sweet... lan chang fu... when bad, the orange is... bitter..."

I nodded, "lan gam tim... lan chan gu..."

I had not quite caught it. I grabbed a sheet of paper and a pencil from the adjoining study room, and he repeated the saying sagely and continued, I like an old Chinese student jotting down after the master's words.

"lan lok yau, lek hei tou... when the pomelo's bad, you throw it out!"

I laughed. The pomelo was often a fruit associated with the upcoming Moon Cake Festival, or Mid-Autumn Festival, and had an auspicious meaning. To throw it out when it turned bad was not only logical, but would it mean throwing all the good stuff it brought along with it?

So, I took out the paper and read it out loud:

"lan gam tim,

lan chang fu,

lan lok yau, lek hei tou!"

My grandfather was laughing, and he took a bit of mandarin, and spewed it back out into his hand.

"This mandarin is bad... so dry... no juice at all..."

He disposed of the mandarin, and came back to the dinner table. I had put away my dinner plate, and went back to see if he had any more wonderful Chinese adages to tell me.

I wasn't disappointed.

"ma sei lok tei hai. When the horse dies... you get off it and walk on... That means that you have to... help yourself."

That is the oversimplified meaning of the saying: it means that to carry on, sometimes you are forced to do it yourself. The horse has died. You have to do the walking now.

Good words, Yeye. They are needed in a world which depends so much on each other for things, and sometimes should think Roodaka-style. Note: sometimes.

He was smiling fiercely at me, as he shared with me one more tidbit of information before he left. He had taken a new mandarin, one he bought himself and showed me (and my twin sister who had joined in the conversation) the odd feature of the fruit: the top shade of orange was opaque and clearly a reddish orange that shone in the light, while at the bottom shade was of a natural paler vermillion which was pockmarked and dull.

"The top bit... is wax... while the bottom is the natural colour. In Centrepoint (a large shopping mall in the shopping district) Cold Storage (the big supermarket), I saw two women picking at the mandarins. I told them... it was just wax... but they didn't believe me. They still looked at the colour."

Two walking dodo birds.

They just ignored the 'ancient relic', when it's my Yeye and is as useful as a walking Wikipedia. Now I'm exaggerating it.

But, I do treasure my grandfather, and this is a good reason why. He's a great guy, and he's the kind that would let a child sit on his lap and he'd spin his tales. I think I learnt of World War II from him.

And I love him. I love this ol' geezer for being the grandfather he is.

Before I typed this entry, I went downstairs looking for a cool sweet treat. Yeye was there, and saw me drag out a tub from the freezer.

"What is that?"

"Frozen yoghurt," I informed him.

"Frozen... yoghurt? Oh. If it were ice cream... then I would have some..."

Mental note: Buy ice cream for grandfather.