I have, though, been carrying on his habit of daily mountain tea drinking, his legacy of community service and the life lessons he taught the summers of my childhood spent in the village. I haven’t been holding my breath in the interim of the growth spurt that would prove my grandfather’s prediction as truth.

Papou was smart – right about everything, exception being his prediction I’d be the tallest person in the family I’m 5’3” – my teen towers over me, as do my siblings. With his walking stick in hand, my grandfather dressed to the nines, always in a suit and scally cap. Perhaps, he was a cat whisperer, though hunting dogs whimpered like puppies in the presence of the elderly man whose facial features gently resembled Popeye. Papou loved the near-dozen cats that found a safe haven in the yard of his home. Papou was a well-known pharmacist and he and my grandmother, a nurse whom I never had the chance to meet, instilled a love for the medical profession and an unwavering commitment to community service, which was passed on to my mother, and then to me and my siblings. More: Meet Hershey, a 'gentle soul' looking for a quiet home More: Worcesteria: Library talks TikTok, mystery in stone, and a concert by vets, for vets

More: Woofing it up: Worcester goes barking mad for National Puppy Day He valued education he encouraged his grandchildren’s summer reading and would sit with me and my siblings to listen to us read books in Greek to him. My grandfather (papou) lived for more than a century on the daily, he drank mountain tea and ate sugar by the spoonful. My son never met his great-grandfather, but that summer I traveled with him to Greece, my 7-year-old lived the grace of our roots as we walked, with my grandfather’s hand-carved wooden walking stick, the livestock-populated, cobblestone streets in our Zagori village.

Nestled in the Pindus Mountain range in northwestern Greece, my grandfather’s village picturesquely sits adjacent to the world’s second deepest gorge.

My telegram