You could tell they were the sort of hands that had seen a few things. His veins popped from beneath his fragile, paper-thin skin. His joints were swollen and crooked from years of cleaning floors and fixing roofs, yet soft enough to have held a few babies and probably even more grand babies. I went to bed that night under a single flickering light hanging from the crumbling cathedral ceiling and wrote in my leather-bound notebook,
"I have just met my Egyptian grandfather."