Within seconds, my grandfather and Uncle Joe are tossing British sailors around this diner. It is our two against their eight, but it is by no means a fair fight. Grandfather Giacomo, only 5�4�, is built like a cinder block. This is a man who walks five miles each way to work, and then spends the day working, basically, as a human fork lift. I forget the Italian word for his job, but it loosely translates to �lumper� in English. His job was to move massive, awkward things around construction sites. A 150 pound bag of cement here, a four-foot square fieldstone there. This squadron of pasty Limeys is simply no match for him.

The MPs arrive with the fight in full swing. As my uncle would explain years later, the MPs apparently make a quick decision that the best thing was to get the sailors out of there. So they do, restraining Giacomo long enough to hustle the sailors into a wagon. They race off.

Now Giacomo wasn�t what you would call a cerebral guy. Indeed, he labored to make himself literate in English over many, many years. But somehow he knew, in an instant, where that wagon was going and how to get there faster on foot than they could by wagon.

I knew my grandfather much later, as an old man, but I have seen pictures of him as a young man. He was never built for speed. But, so the story goes, he was waiting at the brig for that wagon-full of sailors. And when they let them out the wagon door, he proceeded to finish the beating he had started at the diner.

I have heard different endings to the story. In one version, Giacomo and my uncle Joe end up in the brig instead of the sailors. In another, the young waitress ends up as my Uncle Joe�s bride. (And in a poignant but unconfirmed related detail, the story has my future aunt bailing uncle Joe and Grandpa out.) In still another version, it is the sailors who finally end up in the brig, begging to be put there to be kept safe from my grandfather. Who knows really, what happened. It was so long ago, and Grandpa has been gone for almost forty years. Even Uncle Joe has passed, and my aunt�always my favorite by the way, with her big warm smile bearing flaky chocolate cannoli�is frail and forgetful.

Still, thinking back on my grandfather, the solid little man with his thickly accented and broken English, I can�t begin to doubt the gist of the story. I can see him now, his face darkening when he hears the sailor�s curse, stubbing out his little black cigar, rising from the lunch counter with death in his eyes.