Grandma and Trivial Pursuit

This is a random memory that I had to put somewhere…

Many years ago, I played a game of Trivial Pursuit with Grandma. As sometimes happens, we struck a run of questions on a particular topic. Grandma had no trouble with this particular topic at all.

Of course, I knew she was better placed to answer trivial historical questions than I was. Many of them were from her lifetime. Still, it seemed odd to me that she would be so knowledgeable about early 2oth century Australian boxers! Yes, boxers. Not the dogs, not the underwear (at least not that she ever told me about), but people who punch each other.

I asked her how she did so well on those questions. Was she a closet boxing fan? The simple answer was that she knew the people in the questions. If only I could remember now who they were and just what she told me! All I recall is that all her answers were along the lines of “well so-and-so lived down the road from me and I used to see them at…”.

I guess if I want to pursue this trivia further I will have to dig out the relevant edition of Trivial Pursuit and start flipping through the cards... What’s the Evidence Explained source citation for that?!

If only I had taken note of what she said at the time. I might have been able to tell Sharon something about Jimmy Semmens…

Grandma's strange phone call

It was school holidays. I was in my mid-late teens, and I was at my paternal grandmother's house. The phone rang. My grandmother answered...

"Oh really?! What a pity. I'm sorry to hear that. Well, thank you for telling me. Goodbye."

She turned back from the phone.

"That was odd."

"What was it Grandma?"

"That was someone calling to tell me that my sister had died!"

This stunned me. I didn't realise my grandmother had a sister.

"Oh... I'm very sorry to hear that Grandma!"

Her reaction was not quite what I expected.

"I thought she died years ago!"

Needless to say, Grandma had not been close with her sister. They'd had some sort of quarrel many years earlier, or perhaps they just didn't get on. You could say that explains why I didn't know about the sister... but what about her seven other siblings?!

Grandma was the youngest of nine, seven of whom lived past childhood. Her other siblings had passed away by the time I was old enough to pay much attention to family connections. Grandma was never one to talk much about the past. I'm glad I persuaded her to talk me through her family photos, just the once, before she passed away.