When the Phone Rings at Supper Time
Essays and stories about home and homesickness.
A Sturdy Dining Room Table
“Can you die from homesickness?”
I remember Zach, my younger brother, asking our mother at the dining room table, thirty-something years ago.
Hearing his question, two things rushed over me: first, instant relief, because I was not the only one who didn’t know the answer. Then, cold fear, because I was about to find out.
Mom ran her band-aided fingers through his hair and said, “no, you can’t. But it can feel like it, sometimes.”
“Will it ever go away?” he asked, possibly imagining a lifetime of unsuccessful sleepovers and school trips.
“Maybe,” Mom said. And then something like, “You’ll learn how to miss home and have fun at the same time.”
This is only a rough recollection of how the conversation played out. But it is precisely the type of thing I learned at our dining room table, over and over again.
Our house in Mill Park, a leafy suburb of Gqeberha (nee Port Elizabeth), South Africa, was memorable for a lot of reasons.
The sound of our feet on the hardwood floors, the personal touches our parents put on it, the immense and glorious garden Mom cultivated from scratch. The changes we experienced in it, the changes it underwent around us.
At the center of this tapestry of memories is our dining room table.
Not a fancy or particularly large piece of furniture.
It was sturdy and squat, so we sat close, faced one another, and couldn’t break it. The wood had been stained and finished, making it spill-proof; durability is important to a family of five.
And there, the lessons overflowed. How to use a knife and fork. How to hold court in a group conversation. How to be together and make time for one another in a household where people have competing needs and priorities.
We told jokes, broke the news, made plans, did homework together, discussed deeply personal things. Our mother peeled oranges and handed us juicy wedges. We wiped our dirty hands on the tablecloth. Kicked each other. We argued, made up. We laughed.
There, I studied Ross, my older brother, and learned to parrot his views about music, surfing, and social politics, while formulating my own. I witnessed Zach tackle questions that I was afraid to ask, and from him, I learned that homesickness was not fatal but chronic, and that I’d never grow up if I couldn’t face the unknown.
There, Mom and Dad returned each night. To speak with us, argue, break down. Season after season, year after year. Things got busy, often difficult, even unbearable at times, but they always came back.
An Intruder
If the table was a sacred space that brought us together, its antithesis was the telephone.
Our home phone was beige and plain with thick buttons the color of a bad bruise, and it sat on an antique sewing machine at the end of a passage. When it rang at supper time, its echo was piercing. Dad would throw his head back. “Who is it calling now?” One after another, we would imitate dad’s response and hiss at the phone.
“Don’t answer it,” Mom would chime in. “This is not the time to be phoning anyone. Leave it.”
And that’s what we did. The phone was a crass, uninvited presence at an important nightly meeting. And for the most part, when we were young, I didn’t think more of it.
But as us kids got older and started taking control of our lives and making plans, we were drawn into using the phone more often. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad only fought harder to manage the amount of time and money and space it took up.
They faced a losing battle.
After all the growing up we did at the table, we began to leave it. Slowly, then suddenly. Our busy little lives took us all in different directions for different reasons. College. Jobs. Relationships. Failure.
I don’t remember the last time we sat there as a family, in that house, ignoring the telephone as we ate.
When I moved to the USA in 2012, it felt like being ripped apart. It has been eight years already and they keep going by, adding up, putting space between me and childhood memories.
Even though I have made a home in America, that hollow feeling that comes from missing a first home—a place of origin—is always there. I am learning to live with the feeling that Zach brought to my attention so long ago. To inhabit two realities: to be both homesick and home.
To be honest, I am not always an even-keeled person. I love you all—brothers, parents, grandparents, and now my wife and son—with a neediness that can feel shameful at times. With a desperation that I often try to hide or tone back. The homesickness I feel is the chronic kind. It’s most acute every time I go back to South Africa and realize that it’s not where I live anymore. It’s a feeling I get at 2am when I wake up completely confused about where I am, who I am, or how I got here. It’s a constant obsession with time passing and no choice but to let it happen—and hope that everyone I love, wherever they are, is safe.
This little book of stories and essays is about a lot of things. It’s about reconciling my former lives with a new one. It’s all of the hugs I haven’t been there to give or receive on birthdays and hard days. It’s about dwelling on the past for an extended moment, spending time there in ways I can’t do physically. It’s some of the true and tall stories that have emerged while trying to re-emerge myself, in a new place, without the people who shaped me.
Mostly, it’s a long-distance phone call to family. Once upon a time, we sat together on a nightly basis and hissed at the phone. Today, it’s the one way I get to hear your voices and see your faces often.
