Not quite an alien concept
Growing up, my father believed the world outside our gate had very little to offer us.
Our holidays followed the same script every year: wake up, do house chores, read, do more house chores, read some more, watch some television in the evening, go to bed, wake up, repeat.
Friends, neighbors, relatives, community. What a foreign concept.
Grandparents? Those were an alien concept.
Friends were distractions. Neighbors were gossip. Relatives envied us. But grandparents? Grandparents existed somewhere in the background. More titles than people.
Looking back, the irony isn’t lost on me. For someone who kept us so isolated from everyone else, he cared deeply about what everyone else thought.
For a long time, school holidays were windows into lives I knew nothing about. Lives I only came to know through stories.
My friends — acquaintances, if I’m being honest — spent theirs with their grandparents. Always coming back with stories. Inside jokes. Little habits they had picked up. I always found it fascinating that their grandparents actually knew them.
Mine barely knew my name.
Visiting my grandparents, which happened about once every ten years, felt ceremonial. Even calling it a visit feels generous. We accompanied our parents while they became sons and daughters again. We were there to make an appearance, nothing more, before anyone could ask why we’d stayed away for so long.
My grandparents and I barely exchanged words. They were strangers whose blood happened to run through my veins.
I wanted that too.
To be close to my grandparents.
Better yet, to know what it felt like to have them.
To be an extension of home instead of an obligation. I wanted people who loved me simply because I belonged to them. It is a good feeling, or so I imagine. Not one I would know of, though, if you asked me.
Yesterday, my mother and I visited our new home. She had bought the place from an old couple in their eighties and nineties who still live next door. Visiting them came with the house.
Warmth.
That’s what it felt like.
Get oceanwaves’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The warmth of someone older than you.
The warmth of a grandparent.
She insisted on putting something on the table simply because we had passed by. It wasn’t much, but it was warm. The gesture. The food. An ordinary gesture, perhaps. It felt anything but ordinary to me.
A stroll with an older person; my first with someone old enough to be my grandparent in my twenty-five years on earth.
We talked.
More accurately, I talked.
Continuously.
For twenty-five years, conversations with elderly people, my grandparents included, had always intimidated me. I never knew what to say. Silence always arrived too quickly.
But with her, silence never stood a chance.
She could no longer hear through her left ear. Old age had begun collecting its due. Her children nagged her about it. Every fifty meters or so, she stopped to catch her breath. Just for a minute. Then we continued.
A woman who no longer had her whole life ahead of her.
Most of it was behind her.
Yet she carried it lightly.
Making warm food for guests.
Speaking proudly about her children.
Finding joy in a simple walk.
Perhaps this was what I’d been missing all along. Not grandparents, but the quiet privilege of walking beside someone who had already lived so much of life. Someone who had lived long enough to look back.
And on a random Monday, I caught a small glimpse of it — conversations I would have had with my grandparents.
Not quite an alien concept anymore.
Just slightly foreign still.
