His grandparents

An old lady his grandmother, respectable in proud livingrooms, and grandfather too when he was alive, the kin of happy old couple you'd find anywhere, frosted whitehair, glasses perhaps, content and weary with muddled livingroom shrewdness and TV, dressing sadly in grey dreary sweaters and maybe respectable slacks, old gran, with furry cat reclining drowsily on sofa cushions, and she herself, travailing pickily from putting kettle on in kitchen to livingroom again, has occasion to laugh sometimes at the memory of the fact that she's lived so long and can see the folly of life for what it is, can see the wheel of life and death in a wistful, almost despairing, yet comfortable way. Folding hands on lap as she peers at TV to tut at news with grave undertones of tradition.
And she in her dun sepulchral hall with its flowery, respectable ornamentations or faded workingclass wallpapers, has a dim plastic telephone sitting on a little utility table.
Crude and muttering she may use it sometimes to chat, all in grim-mouthed straightness, on the horrors of the modern world or perhaps joys of it, standing folding arms and musing, the phone maybe is an off-white old lady kind with a dial still and not even buttons, and with an old crackened number implanted safely in it since some forgotten night in the 70s. It's the channel through which flows all the trivialities of eternity and family and gossip and where the heart of soft remembrance remains. A token of modernity in respectable scented homes.