This House Has Not Changed a Bit

07/04/2008

One of the characteristics of my late parents was their reluctance to accumulate material possessions. This was really strange, and upon reflection, I barely notice this characteristic in anybody else. We should all possess these characteristics.

The late martyr, Qazi Tabatabee - the Friday prayer leader of Tabriz - came to visit us in the year 1972. He told me he had traveled from Tabriz to Mashhad along with his father 40 years ago to pay a visit to my father. He said "your father was then sitting in the same place as he is now, and I am sitting in the same place as my father was 40 years ago. This room and house have not changed a bit."

A generation had passed, yet he still managed to maintain the same lifestyle. When my brother - Hassan - was about to marry, they knocked that room down and built two smaller rooms. This was because there was no other room in our house. The house had a basement. They built a bathroom in there. Before that, we did not have any bathroom in our house. Of course, by then we had already left home. This had opened up some room for our guests in the living room.

^{* Source: http://english.khamenei.ir}