In My Eyes, You'd Already Won.

I saw Luigi just before Christmas. He looked a little skinnier than usual, but really it was the same old Lui. He was arguing with my dad about how to fix something, he was calling my mum and sister "gorgeous", and he shared one of his new dirty sex jokes with me. He would deliver them and start laughing before he'd even get to the punchline - making me laugh prematurely too. Then he'd sit at the table having his coffee and catching his breath for a few minutes before him and my Dad went on another adventure to God-knows-where to collect metal scraps, or old hinges, or fibre glass, or the pot plants, or a second hand lawn mower 5 hours drive away that they were going to take the engine out of, or netting for the vegetable garden, or to the tip.

Vintage Luigi.

I remember as a kid learning to drive a car and then ride a dirt bike and even shoot a gun on his farm. I remember the smell of the abandoned sheep shearing shed in the far paddock. I remember hunting for rabbits with Roy the Pointer, who was so good that he would sneak up and catch them in his jaws before a single round had been discharged from shotgun. Regardless, I remember the old pool table in the farm shed littered with thousands of empty casings. Lui had invented a mechanism that would allow him to recycle the old bullets.

I remember the dog pen around the side of the shed which he'd created an automatic dog feeder which would feed the dog's every day when he wasn't at the property. It worked for a while but failed once and the dog's almost starved. Again, vintage Lui.

I remember the shower on that property wasn't tiled, instead, it was a huge collage of Playboy Bunny cutouts behind plastic to protect from the water. As a pre-pubescent young boy stepping inside, it was THE BEST shower ever. Still is.

I remember driving to that farm so many times in his big 4WD with the CB Radio and the big bottle of water on the dash that never get drunk. After many trips seeing the bottle there I finally asked him what it was for and he explained that sometimes when he's driving long distances late at night he gets tired; so he would take a mouthful of water from the bottle and swish it around in his mouth until he got home because "it's impossible to fall asleep at the wheel with a mouthful of water".

This was the kind of guy Luigi was. Inventive, intuitive, immensely practical, and genius. I probably won't know the full extent of the impact he had on my life for some time, but in the big wash up I know it would have been a hellova lot.

Above all it was his attitude to life. Lui has had cancer since I can remember. And I'm talking serious "loosing organs" kinda cancer. Yet like every time I saw him, like the last time I saw him just a week and a bit ago, you'd never tell. He always brought a big smile and infectious laugh, cheeky dirty sense of humour, incomprehensible energy, and that ingenius mind. I'm not exaggerating when I say people would have no idea just how sick he was because his attitude to life was so fantastic. He was a character, and a lot of people loved him.

On Saturday he went into hospital just like every other week but this time he never came out. Luigi died early on Saturday morning. It's a weird feeling knowing he won't huff-and-puff his way up my parents driveway next Saturday morning like usual. What I can't really find the words to explain properly is how I felt seeing (for the first time) my Dad cry. He's lost his closest friend of a lifetime. It breaks your heart.

Lui... it may have taken you in the end, but in my eyes you'd already won a long time ago, mate.

Thanks for everything.

Pace.