Hello. My name is Andrew Quinn. This is the first post of People You Should Be More Like.
Under normal circumstances, I would extend to the person I'm writing about the chance to review, critique, and block publication of this open letter. Unfortunately, I am no longer in contact with today's subject. So I must rely on my own steadily fading memory, and trust in the purity of my aim to carry the day. Forgive me for any mistakes I make: The details are less important than the vibe.
“I'm cap'n here by 'lection. I'm cap'n here because I'm the best man by a long sea-mile. You won't fight, as gentlemen o' fortune should; then, by thunder, you'll obey, and you may lay to it! I like that boy, now; I never seen a better boy than that. He's more a man than any pair of rats of you in this here house, and what I say is this: let me see him that'll lay a hand on him--that's what I say, and you may lay to it.”
--Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
My father Tony is one of the most remarkable men I have ever known. Born in 1959, on a now-unmarked plot of land in County Sligo I can now only find by following the little river to its fork on Google Maps, he is a time traveler, going from a childhood without running water and electricity to one of the most highly-sought after residential electricians of the city of Boston. All without me ever seeing him spend a cent on advertising. (There are some advantages to keeping the same work number for 20+ years, it makes repeat business easy.)
As the youngest of several boys, Tony was expected from an early age to eventually inherit that besotted plot and continue his own father's family farm. Over time, his older siblings fled, piling more and more farm work on his shoulders. The flight began with his oldest brother winning a university spot, which later paved the way for him to move to America and start a chemical engineering plant. Hence we reach the first of his remarkable traits: His relentless work ethic. To balance the exacting Irish schooling system, his increasingly heavy farm work, and the many sports he played, I doubt he must have had even an hour to himself most weeks as a teenager. A few times, he told me he thought he could have gotten top marks if he didn't have the farm on his shoulders too - he could only manage second best. I think this was a serious understatement.
Fate eventually lightened the load for him. Tony's father became increasingly desperate for more help on the farm. It was likely just him and Tony at this point. So, with the fury of all desperate men backed into a corner, he stormed into Tony's room, and splintered his draftsman's board into pieces, dooming his future studies.
I don't know exactly what Tony did between 17 and 20, when he boarded a plane to the United States and hence we arrive at his second remarkable trait, bravery. Presumably he worked full time on the farm, and watched his more competent hurling buddies fly the coop. How did he cope with the anger? With the seething fury he must have felt every time he saw that aged face? I don't know. Maybe - probably - he drank, a little, or a lot. Maybe they fought. That's what I did, when Tony put me myself through a similar situation. But that's not a story for this letter.
Three people boarded that plane in 1979 to attend Tony's oldest brother's wedding. Two people were on the return flight. Tony arrived at Logan International Airport with his parents and his luggage, stepped outside, ate a hot dog for the first time, and decided he wasn't going back. This man is more American than any American I have ever met. If you ever cross him on the street, ignore everything he says about politics. Corner him and ask him what the greatest country on Earth is. He will point to the ground at your feet.
You do not know true fear until you have tried emigrating like this. I underwent a pale imitation of it when I stepped off my flight from the US to Finland in 2021, shortly after the COVID-19 borders reopened. Where I had a fresh degree in engineering, a fiancee, in-laws eager to help, and the eventual expectation of a valid EU passport, my father had one and only one thing going for him: His siblings, who had by and large settled down in Boston. Some of them had green cards. Most did not. I know the process for getting a green card was nowhere close to the bureaucratic hell it is today, but I still have no idea how he ended up getting his own.
What I do know is this single act of courage, this decision to null-and-void the ancient contract between father and son and strike out on his own, knowing full well the abandonment may well destroy any relationship he had to his own parents, set me and my siblings up for options and abundance unparalleled in the modern world. A Promethean defiance. May we all have such cojones.
Bravery and work ethic served this man in his twenties much more directly than they did his teens. He took odd jobs, whatever he could. He saved money. He stayed with brothers and sisters. At one point he took out a $1000 loan, about $3800 in today's money, just to prove to the banks he could pay it off. This set him up for his first mortgage much later in the future. The first mortgage set him up for the second, the second, the third.
He took night classes. He piled his entire Gaelic football team into an electrical van and drunk-drove 4 hours from Boston down to New York City for a game with his best friends. (N.B., this Substack is not titled "People You Should Be Exactly Like.") He became an electrician. It turns out you can do a lot in your twenties when you're used to 80 hour work weeks. His twenties became his thirties.
He tried dating an American girl. She broke up with him after their third date to the same bar where he and all his construction buddies hung out because he never had time for her. He swore off American girls and dated an Irish girl. Later that girl became my mother. He married her, age 35.
He hurt his back.
It is 1999. I am five years old. It is the third night in a row I have been kept up by bleeding, eczematic skin. I am listening to mom and dad shouting at each other over their mortgage and construction bills at the kitchen table. He hasn't been able to work for a while.
I think about mom telling me if I don't apply the Vaseline, which only makes my skin itchier, I will keep bleeding and get infected and die. I think that doesn't sound so bad.
There is only so much a man can take, both physically and mentally, before he starts to falter. That's true of my father, and that's true of me. Something approximating a herniated spinal disc flattened him, and for the rest of my life I would see him spend at least an hour every evening lying flat on his back using a special device that progressively stretched his back out at the knees to fix himself up good enough to get to sleep. The sports stopped. The work stopped. And patient as he tried to be with me, a difficult child in the best of times, it was obvious the pressure was getting to him.
Hence we arrive at Tony's third remarkable trait: Self moderation. It turns out an occasional booze cruise after a football match in your twenties doesn't mean you'll turn into an alcoholic. Despite everything he was going through, I never once saw my father drunk in our own house, to say nothing of the other painkillers he could have found on the streets of Boston.
Perhaps I should underline this point further. Our lives are in some sense defined much more by what we choose not to do, rather than what we do. I chose not to apply for Y Combinator this weekend, because I have a language to learn in my spare time, darn it. I don't even want a 1% chance of being thrown off that course before I reach a level of fluency I'm happy with. It would be cheating my future self, who thought we had a good thing going with this whole Finland thing.
Now we can imagine what kinds of alcoholic tendencies quasilegal Irish construction workers in the 1980s had (third date to the same bar, man, really?). So there must have came a time where he chose between cheating his future self and lightening up on the sauce. Maybe it was gradual, maybe it was all at once. Maybe it wasn't even conscious. But the fact remains that this man knew the rest of the bottle. And even in his hours of greatest weakness, he kept saying No. No, no, no, no, no.
Even when he was out of work, Tony still had some rays of hope to reach for, dim and refracted though they may be. I started elementary school - and I turned good at it! No matter which country you hail from, an immigrant parent's greatest dream is to have a kid who takes what the new country offers for all it's worth, especially one whose own education was splintered before his eyes. I first dreamed of being a scientist, and quickly switched to just knowing I would be some flavor of engineer as soon as I learned what they actually did. I had more than my fair share of problems, but at least he could tell himself "This one will be fine once he leaves the coop, I just have to make it there."
With consistent treatment, many meetings with specialists, and aggressive self moderation, the disc turned from impossibly painful to very painful to only moderately painful to stand up with. Our old sportsman ere long quickly picked up golf as a hobby, finding its long walks and controlled swings to be a much better compliment now - I'm told the golf course helped him meet a few of his wealthier clients as well. The old houses I got dragged to on Saturdays to watch him rip copper wiring out of became newer, and larger, and further out, to areas like Canton and Weston. Even I started to get interested in what he was up to, although I pretended to deny it every time.
Tony returned to work probably in the early 2000s. Whereas before he disbanded a burgeoning construction crew of his own because he couldn't stand the paperwork taking him out of the field, now he started to take on apprentices more frequently, sharing his decades of knob-and-tube wiring knowledge with them. I like to imagine that the people who worked with and under my father all found the experience valuable, including, much later, my own younger brother, when he was getting his own electrician's license.
Something unexpected happened after the turn of the century: The Boston housing market revved into overdrive, and those three houses Tony bought in the bad part of town filled with the Greeks and the homosexuals ended up turning him into a rather wealthy man. You wouldn't guess this by looking at him, of course. He doesn't wear expensive clothes, and he has the opposite of expensive tastes in anything except maybe golf clubs and his wife's car.
Hence we arrive to Tony's fourth remarkable trait, and the one I wish to close on: His steadfast devotion to my mother. (Disclaimer: It is possible, though IMO unlikely, that they have since separated since last I saw them. If so, I am speaking purely of the time I knew them.)
I saw a few divorces around me growing up, one of them acrimonious. I heard the vitriol of those early frantic conversations about money, and was convinced for a long time growing up that my parents were two steps away from getting a divorce themselves, and that it would be ugly. I was happily and utterly mistaken to think this. All it took was quasi-illegally emigrating to marry the woman of my dreams myself to get to the point where that looks obviously foolish.
I can't recall once hearing my father even jokingly insult my mother, or take her name in vain, or call her any kind of slur. When as a teenager I would harp on about what I perceived to be her worst faults, he patiently backed me up and reminded me of her good sides. To my jumbled-up mind, I thought this had to be a joke. How can this man not see these things? Why didn't he choose someone less like this, at least!?
Many years later, when their and our relationship hit twin rock bottoms, she took off her ring and handed it to him. (They worked it out later.) He asked me, being the only person around at the time, to join him at a bar, where he drunk two shots and talked about it. I had a beer. Then a third. I listened to him whimper. My chest felt resident to an icy, pitiless fog. I kept mum, let him talk, exercised remarkable trait #3 as best I could. All the while, little cunt I was, I kept thinking "You deserve this."
No, he didn't. And I may never get the chance to apologize now, for that night. I get it now.