One of the most important things I do each week is call my grandpa. It’s (almost) always on Sunday afternoons and it’s the highlight of my day. While we don’t live in the same city, our weekly phone calls have become a tether between my life in Kingston and his in Montréal. These phone calls have made me realize just how much we have to learn from grandparents, especially our own.
Though I’ll admit that I’ve sometimes failed to call on the usual Sunday, speaking with my grandpa has become a non-negotiable part of my week. Earlier this year, when I was overwhelmed by moving, I let it go as far as to call him something as ridiculously late as Tuesday (or was it Thursday?). “I found myself wondering what day of the week it was,” he laughingly told me when we finally spoke. “I realized I hadn’t heard your voice on Sunday.” While he was gracious and lighthearted as he said this, I was immediately filled with a deep feeling of shame for putting off our phone call. Not only that, but I realized that I too had come to see our phone calls as cemented in the structure of my weeks. Like washing my face or doing the dishes, it had become something that I just did.
With all the things I’ve learned about my family and upbringing, these phone calls sometimes feel like I’m an unsuspecting client in therapy. I’ve learned and understood things about who I am and why I am the way I am in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Beyond providing a moment of connection, I realized that these phone calls have opened a space where I am given answers to questions I had never been sure how to ask. Perhaps the first one is: why did you immigrate to Canada?
I had always known that my mom was born in Cairo, Egypt, where my grandparents met and lived before they immigrated to Canada in the late 60s. I had also always known that my grandparents had chosen to leave in large part because they recognized that their daughter would not have the life they wanted for her if they stayed.
Even so, I had failed to recognize, let alone ask, about what their life had been like in Cairo. When my partner and I went to France this past May, my grandpa and I had long conversations about the city of Lyon, where we stayed. A big metropolitan city comparable to Paris in a lot of ways, our conversations about Lyon made way for conversations about Cairo, too. “It was a very European city,” my grandfather told me, noting that the street names were all in French. I learned that after church on Sundays, my grandparents would frequent the local cafés for cappuccinos and croissants. “They were in vogue then,” he said. “If a place didn’t have a cappuccino machine, we went somewhere else!” His familiar laugh brightened me through the phone as he reminisced about his time in Egypt and France.
I’m not quite sure what I had previously thought of the city my family had left behind, but I had certainly not thought of it in these terms. These small, off-handed stories have allowed me to feel closer to my family and to better understand where our familial culture comes from. When I think about it, my grandparents’ lives in Montréal were always inflected with a European approach. While my beloved paternal grandfather leads my heritage directly back to France, I had never considered that the kinship I felt with the people and places I visited there was owing just as much to my mom’s family.
When my mom’s parents visited us, there were big bowls of pasta, bottles of wine, and long lingering conversations at the table long past the end of the meal. With them, my sister and I were ingrained in a culture of sharing and receiving food. If this sounds more Italian than it does French, that’s because it probably was. After all, my grandmother’s father was Italian. My phone calls with my grandfather made me recognize that this way of life wasn’t just a product of my grandmother’s Italian father. Instead, it was brought over from both of my grandparents’ youth in Egypt. And so, these short, weekly phone calls with my grandfather have brought me to know my family, where we come from, and how that informs our lives, in ways that I hadn’t even thought to consider.
If you’re lucky enough to be able to pick up the phone and call your grandparents, I’d urge you to do it. All lives contain multitudes, but it seems that the lives of our grandparents contain even more. Conversations and questions about their lives will likely reveal a lot about them, but they might just explain more about you than you ever could have imagined.