More on: grandparents

I hear these words in your voice no matter who says them, in the well-water smell of the basement, by the artificial tree you and she would one day put a sheet over, so you never had to take it down or put it up again.

MY earliest recollection of my grandfather, James Nicol, comes from a trip to Britain when I was very small. Seeing him and my grandmother was a special treat, because we lived in New York and they lived far away in a place called South Africa. On this trip, however, we were all visiting their native…

DON’T FORGET YOUR TRANSFER,” my grandmother said. From 1989, she said this to me for ten years. It took two buses to get from the West Side, where I studied and lived, to the East Side, where she had lived her entire life, first on its lower end and now, in her eighties, its upper…