ArcaMax

It's not that I don't remember my father complaining.

Because, oh, he did plenty of that. He complained about how there were too many lights on in the house, how we hadn't eaten all our food, how the door was still open or how we'd turned the heat up too high. He complained that our grades weren't good enough, that we fought with each other too much, that our rooms were messy or that we hadn't put our dishes into the sink yet.

He complained, heartily and frequently, about lots of other things, too.

But he never complained about hard work.

My father's first job, he says, was at the grain mill in the center of town in his village. The farmers would bring their wheat to have it ground into flour, paying with a percentage of their crop. When the mill's donkey, which with its pacing turned the mill's wheel, stopped walking, my dad would poke or tap the animal with a stick to get it going again. He was 3 years old.

When my father was 12, his parents moved to a different village a couple of hours away. My dad said he asked them to stay behind in the house so he could quit school and work. My grandparents, who still had some family in the village, agreed. That was the end of my father's formal education.

In the decades after that, he worked on ships as a merchant marine, served in the Greek Navy, taught himself English by watching "Sesame Street" in Philadelphia, opened a drive-through restaurant catering to working-class folks in North Carolina, apprenticed in electrical work and eventually built a formidable business as a self-employed electrician on offshore oil rigs and giant shipping vessels in the Gulf of Mexico.

When someone failed after trying to cheap out with a lower-priced electrician, they would usually call my father.

"I'm the best, and that's why I'm the most expensive," he would tell us, proudly but not vainly.

In the early days, he never said no to a job, no matter what he would miss while he was away.

When he got a job, he would rise early, usually while my brothers and I were still sleeping, and drive for hours to places like Galveston and Port Fourchon, Houma and Corpus Christi. Often, he'd take a helicopter to the rigs and ships, then work straight through, for as long as it took, repairing the gigantic generators that powered the machines. He would eat, sometimes, on the job, whatever was handy, then take a helicopter back to his truck, load up his tools and drive home.

He would work for days, sometimes, without sleep, and I remember him coming home and scrubbing his hands for what seemed like forever with heavy-duty Lava soap to remove the tarry black oil stuck to them. He'd throw his work coveralls into the washing machine and fall into a deep slumber that could last for 12 hours or more.

Accustomed to small electric charges, he had gotten into the habit of using his fingers to test whether a small-voltage connection was live or not. A few times, he came home with blackened fingers from unexpected shocks. At least twice, he narrowly escaped electrocution.

Sometimes he brought home strange payment from the ships, tins of Russian caviar or parrots caught by Portuguese sailors. Once, he arrived with filets cut from a hammerhead shark he'd accidentally caught by hanging a side of lamb from a giant crane as a joke. He saved the jawbone, and we ate its meat at dinner, marveling at the mild taste.

My dad drove a big truck, an F1-50, which he needed because it could withstand driving through the muddy fields near a dock, could carry heavy equipment and the sturdy toolbox he needed to do his work. He worried about someone stealing the tools, which had happened before. They were expensive and tough to replace.

He talked about all of this and more, but not once do I remember him complaining about any of it.

I suppose that it never occurred to him to do so. He had no education to aid him or a well-off family to help if trouble arose. My mother was often ill, sometimes hospitalized for stress and hard-to-pinpoint diseases. We lived close to his work but far from any family.

My father knew he was the moat around our castle, the final barrier between his children and poverty, and he dedicated himself to the task of shielding us from want. We were never hungry. We always had clean clothes, a warm bed and a place to live.

Today, on Father's Day, I hope my dad's proud of that. I know I am, but I hope he is also proud of the way he protected his children, with his unstinting devotion to the role he played and still, to this day, continues to play: the role of father.

It's a title, not given by biology, but earned through sacrifice and hard work. And if you've earned the title of father, in whatever way you have done so, happy Father's Day to you, too.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

----

Copyright 2025 Creators Syndicate Inc.