First Times

There’s a first time to everything, a first moment after which you have a second and a third and a fourth until I is totally normal and you happen to lose count…

The first time you walk as a child, your parents celebrate it, they make a whole big fuss out of it and then you walk everyday for the rest of your life and no one notices…

The first time you speak as a kid they are flying off the ground (your parents) and usually anyone present that day, it is like they have witnessed a miracle, they talk and everyone around them talks but it is your first time, from them onwards you talk and no one listens anymore…

The first day of school you miss your parents and you may even cry, the following days you wish you wouldn’t leave school and keep playing with kids your age…

The first time you fall in love you are willing to invest everything, the feelings, the presence, everything, the following times you walk in caution…

The first time you break-up with someone you love you depress about it, through the rest of your life breakups become more of a routine for you, not that depressing cause you know someone else will come along the way and someday it may work right…

The first time you get a job, you try to prove you are worthy of the job and do your best, the following times (i.e. when you switch jobs) it is nothing but a routine, you do it cause you know how to do it, you don’t care about the results but you know they will be fine…

The first time your wife gives birth to a child you celebrate it so badly, you feel the world is dancing all around you, you can’t imagine how beautiful it is to have a kid and well when she gets pregnant again and again with a zillion other kids you are not as glad, and you may even start complaining of how she keeps popping out babies…

The first time you do something wrong, you feel guilty about that action, and depending on the size and magnitude of your wrong doing your guilt will vary, once you are done with the first time guilt doing the same mistake becomes a normal thing and you may not even remember later on it is a wrong action as it evolutes into a day to day routine…

There are two things that everyone have once, the first time for those are the last time, birth and death, and they are both celebrated with happiness and sorrow respectively (although some may celebrate the death of someone else with happiness too). Other than these two everything can have a first, second and millionth time, depending on the pattern of repetition and the chances, wanna have the real feel of life, make the best out of your first times and embrace them with their good and bad, they are the ones that really count, the times that really matter.

Memory Lane

It was past midnight when I thought of browsing through my hard disk. I found this folder full of memories which was almost 1 GB of size. I started deleting all the folders in it until I stumbled upon two documents and I started reading them. A smile was carved through my face as I read it, and I decided to go through both documents till the end.

I decided to keep those documents and a 20 MB PowerPoint presentation, everything in that folder represented nothing but past but as I smiled and made my decision to keep those there were two things I was thinking of:

1. There is always an upside to everything. Always that positive side, even to people, and we gotta believe in that positive side at times even with all the negativity.
2. A nice memory wouldn’t hurt. Indeed it is always worth a lot.

What I Really Miss?

There are a lot of things I miss about the past, precisely my days in Egypt, here are some off the top of my head:

1. My best friend.

1. Playing Tomb Raider on the night of my final exams in the University.

1. Burning CDs all night long on the 2X CD Writer while playing jumbo jet with my best friend.

1. Playing estimation and listening to the comments we all make, those were really fun.

1. The four hours of studying before my final exams in which I select what to study and what not to based on some kind of expectations of mine. And well I miss how it always worked and how the exam always had what I expected.

1. The nights of playing risk at my friend’s in El-Zamalek when the plan was actually to study before the exams.

1. Cairo and the Nile after 2 AM.

1. The smell of the stink on the streets in Cairo, it is like my lungs really got used to it in the five years I spent there. It is what keeps me alive and happy.

1. The dreams and the hopes we used to discuss.

1. Le Baron Nile Cruise.

1. The people I know, those who care and those who don’t, the way they make life different and better.

1. The way everyone complains in Egypt and does nothing to change their lives.

1. Akher Sa’a And El-Shabrawi.

1. Sidi El Mansour Coffee Shop.

1. The Camp Coffee Shop.

1. Cilantro El Mirghani and Cilantro El Korba.

1. El-Shams Club.

1. The Northern Coast.

1. El-Tahrir Square.

1. The microbuses.

1. The Air Conditioned Buses.

1. My bedroom in Cairo, my old PC, the terrace, the street, Koki’s Internet Café, everything about my life in that home and the surroundings there.

1. The first day in the University of Cairo.

1. The last day in the University of Cairo.

1. The Dynamite sandwiches, the Koshari, and Fatayer Wael.

1. City Stars and the movies I watched there.

1. Pizza Hut – City Center.

1. Nazlet El seman.

1. Pizza Hut – Nady El Shams.

1. Pizza Hut – El Nozha El Gedeeda.

1. Dreams Abas El- Akad, Dreams Eltayaran , Le Louvre.

1. The need for speed games all night.

And most importantly, the laughs and the frowns, the things that made me happy and the things that hurt, as much as some were painful, they just made my life, they just made me want to stay more and live there more…

The Second Memory

Still the same day, still the same arrangement and my dad is still telling us about the hardest moments, there comes a second one when I see another tear… It is a story about one of my aunt’s…. My dad was in prep school back then. He was attending his uncle’s wedding with my grandpa and grandma. Back at home my aunt ‘N’ was left with their neighbors since she was badly ill… Anyways, the neighbor was supposed to give her a medicine at a certain hour and when that hour drew closer my dad started getting worried…. He thought it would be better if he went back home and made sure his sister got her medicine on time…

He tried to get to my grandma who was in the middle of the crowd talking to people but he couldn’t… What he needed was money to go back home… That didn’t stop him though, that is my dad, nothing would ever stop him from achieving what he aims at… He starts walking his way home… A good distance but he is determined to make it to where he wants to be….
When he arrived at home, he knocked the neighbors door and apparently when he asked her if she gave my aunt the medicine she said she forgot… He was ten minutes late so it didn’t make a difference… My dad tells me he tried to give her the medicine when his sister who was below two years of age nodded with her head and refused to take it as she smiled a smile that my dad described to me as some sort of an unspoken, “Don’t worry.”

My dad was still a kid, almost ten or eleven so it isn’t his fault anyways…. The night passed by and the wedding was over and everyone slept for the night and things seemed fine and dandy… The next morning my dad left for school and had a normal day until he came back home… While going up the stairs to their flat, my grandpa was walking down the stairs carrying the dead body of a one and a fraction years old girl… My aunt…

My dad always thought if she lived she would have been the sweetest and most tender of all his sisters and he talks of her in a way that makes me tell he loved her more than any other sibling he had….

I was able to see another tear in his eyes…. My dad is the best family man ever… He was eleven when he wanted to take care of a younger sister, he was a kid and he had it in him… I wish I could be like him and I wish I would make him real proud….

That was the day when I knew that nothing was ever wrong with my dad’s eye… That was the day I knew that my dad was just stronger than the rest of the herd, strong enough to have lots of feelings and yet be able to keep the pain to himself when he has to because he has to lead whether as an eldest brother or as a loving father…. He always has the lead….

A few days ago before my dad left to Cairo on his vacation he told me that when people grow older they get softer in the heart, things that never used to show can be seen and feelings that never used to be there are discovered… He told me that as we grow older in age our tears tend to flow with more ease and that we get to unbear less hurt than we used to bear…. He told me that if anything ever harmed or hurt one of us, be it me, my bro, my two sisters or my mom he would not bear to live a single day and I believed him….

I miss you Dad….
And I guess here comes my tears….

To Possibilities…..

Two memories…..

Before I start, I would like to mention that the idea of first times is not mine, it has been stolen from Miss Cerise… I hope it is fine with you… Yet I am not gonna go and list many of my first times… And if I plan to I would like to detail the story for each first time, I would dedicate an entire blog to it… But well this first time is a memory I always have, maybe it is one of the memories that have stuck to my head and since I am all depressed with my dad being in Cairo I would like to have a small talk about him….

So I am a kid, I get hurt I cry, I fall I cry, I get yelled at I cry, this is what I do and well my mother usually cried being the sensitive person she is… I remember that I was told that once when I was around the age of ten I walked up to my dad and asked him if something was wrong with his eyes. Well he had to ask me for a reason for my question and to his surprise my answer was, “Cause I never see you cry.”

What kind of kid is so sadistic to the extent that he wanna see his dad cry. I mean come on that is a weird need of mine that was really hard to be satisfied by my dad. Until one time when I was in highschool, I sat along with my dad and my sister while my mother was in the hospital for a couple of weeks and he started telling us about some stories from the past and then I asked him about the hardest moments in his life, the most moving ones, until then I never saw my dad shed a tear…

My dad told me how he was here in UAE when my grandpa and grandma got into a car accident on the Cairo-Ismaeliya highway (Egypt) and how he didn’t know about it when he got a telegram from my aunt’s husband who went like ‘Please come to Egypt soon, there’s some problem with your parents.”

I know that kind of message was kinda caring but comeon coming to think of it he scared the crap out of my dad anyways and left him to face the shock when he got to Cairo…. When my dad arrived at Cairo my uncle was waiting for him and he drove him to Suez and as he arrived there my eldest aunt told him the bad news… My grandpa was dead… He died before they could even move him from the car. My second to the eldest aunt (They are the only two older than my dad) also died in the accident and she was pregnant with her third baby…

So basically two girls are motherless and my dad has lost the person he loves most in the world, his father. He then had to ask about my grandma and my aunt told him she is hanging there but her health is deteriorating… My father took the news and asked for the reason why they didn’t drive him to the hospital and my aunt replied saying that she didn’t want him to see my grandma kind of deformed because of the accident because he wouldn’t bear seeing her that way. My dad then asked to go to wherever she was to see her but then they told him that she was in a hospital in Ismaeliya (Totally different city)… Why the fuck would they drive him to the family house in Suez if my grandma was lying in a hospital in a totally different city?

Anyways after a lot of convincing my aunt and uncle did my dad agreed to stay for the night and then visit her and hit the road the next morning to see her… By the time he arrived there she was dead and it was time to go for a burial… My dad told us the story and he had a tear in his eye, it was the first time ever.. I mean come on he must have cried sometime in the past but this time is the first I have ever heard of or saw with my naked eye… It wasn’t even crying anyways they were just a couple of tears but with a deep breath and very hard feelings that could be seen in the pale smile on his face as he said, “While they were crashing I was playing cards with my friends over here.”

Well my grandpa is missed, I was below the age of two when he died but I have been told not only by my dad but by my aunts and uncles too that I was his favorite grandson, I was the first in the blood line to carry on with the name of the family and over that i was the first born of his favorite and most obedient of all his children and my grandpa had nine of those… I was the son of the the son who made my grandpa proud more than anyone else did or could’ve and I am proud to be this man’s grandson and that man’s son…

And by the way the car my grandpa was driving when he died was my dad’s car and my dad never wanted the car back and left it out on the highway until it was stolen piece by piece…..

May my grandpa’s grave be like paradise to him….
اللهم اجعل قبور المؤمنين روضة من رياض الجنة

To be continued….

Here’s to possibilities…..