I’m the youngest of three kids. George is the oldest and Mary Ann is the middle child. Here we are in the tub back in the early ’60s, when Saturday night baths were still a thing. We lived in the bottom floor of a two-family house in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Even though I was only three when we moved from this house, I can still remember snippets of conversations from those early years. Like my mom warning us that, if we didn’t quiet down, the landlord (who lived upstairs) would throw us out on the street. We Greeks are very dramatic! To add to our collective angst, the landlord’s son, Gary, told us that his family had a bomb shelter in their half of the basement. He added that they would lock us out if a nuclear bomb were ever dropped. As this was during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, we took it all very seriously. But, despite the prospect of being evicted or, worse yet, incinerated in a nuclear Armageddon, our family was happy, owing mainly to our belief that God would get us through whatever life had in store for us.

Here are two pictures from my baptism. In the first photo, George was front and center, trying to steal my thunder on my special day. But, in fairness to him, I don’t think having to share the limelight with a new baby brother was on his bucket list. In fact, in the second picture, you can see George sizing up the baptismal font, making sure it was deep enough, hoping the priest would dunk me in and forget to pull me out.

On the subject of my baptism, this is a picture of my Nouna (which is Greek for godmother). She’s the one staring at the camera looking like she’s trying to swallow a tennis ball.

Every Greek boy knows the humiliation of having to dress up, at least once in their formative years, as a Greek Evzone. That’s me on the right. Evzones were the elite soldiers in the Greek army, but their uniforms were anything but rugged or manly. The standard-issue uniform includes a skirt, genie shoes with pom-poms on the toes, a fez cap with a long tassel, and white panty hose. Having to parade around in front of the relatives in this getup is a Greek male rite of passage – one of the many “character-building” experiences of my youth.

This is me, dressed as an ancient-Greek warrior ready to go on stage for one of our Greek School pageants. I’m sure I was feeling pretty menacing holding that aluminum foil spear. But there was no getting around it: I was yet again forced to go on public display wearing a dress.

This is a photo of my Yiayia Domna. As all good grandmothers would do, she spoiled us kids rotten. Her treat of choice were tootsie rolls, telling us, Αυτά είναι καλά για τα δόντια σου. That means, “These are good for your teeth.” She had this theory that, because tootsie rolls were so sticky, they effectively pulled the food, and even plaque, off our teeth. Of course, sporting full dentures since the age of 45, she was in no position to be dispensing dental advice. In this picture, sitting next to Yiayia Domna was our much-loved childhood dog, Duke. Whenever Yiayia would get her hair permed, she and Dukey would have identical hairdos—same color and everything—which she thought was just so stylin’.

Here are George, Mary Ann, our Thea (Aunt) Mary, and Yiayia Domna in front of our house in Trumbull, Connecticut. My mother fancied herself as a skilled photographer who would orchestrate the perfect family photos. As you can see here, George would make the goofiest faces he could conjure up just when my mom was snapping the photo. In this one, Dukey joined the conspiracy by having a mini-convulsion, entirely eclipsing Thea Mary. Bear in mind, this was before the advent of digital photography, when buying and developing film was big bucks. Whenever my mom would flip through the pictures after retrieving them from the local pharmacy, her fury at my brother would unleash for ruining yet another set of photos. Of course, I thought it was hilarious.

My Godparents bought me my first camera, a Pocket Instamatic. Unfortunately, it had a design flaw: the flash bulb was set too close to the camera lens. So, in the pictures, everyone’s pupils glowed bright red, making them look like demon-possessed aliens. My mother’s remedy? A dab of black magic marker to the eyeballs. These are just a couple of examples of the many family photos that were “fixed” with my mother’s handiwork.

Yes, I was “That Kid” whose mother made him wear a suit and tie every year on school-picture day. You can see from my wet hair, this was before we knew about hair product, so I used water to tame the wonky protrusions emanating from my head. But even worse than picture day, my brother and I periodically were forced to wear Hawaiian shirts that Thea Mary and Theo Evangelo brought back from their trip to the Hawaiian Islands. The shirts were covered with tropical birds and palm trees and had large gold-colored buttons. George’s was bright aqua-blue and mine was lime-green. My mom tried to convince us that the abuse that George and I suffered on the school playground when we wore those shirts was because the other kids were jealous that they didn’t have “AUTHENTIC” Hawaiian shirts like we did. I wanted to believe her, but there was no getting around it – we looked like total dorks.

My mother, getting more daring in her photo setups, wanted an action shot of me running in my high school cross-country uniform. However, it probably was raining that day and she didn’t feel like braving the elements outdoors—there were limits to how much she would suffer for her art. So she had me simulate a cross-country run down the 15-foot hallway in our small suburban home. My cross-country career wasn’t much to brag about—I was the slowest guy on the team. But I was determined to follow in the footsteps of my big brother, George, who was one of the stars of our high school’s cross-country team. But, while George had a runner’s body, mine was more suited for something more sedentary, like bird-watching or, maybe on a good day, lawn darts.

I loved high school, mostly thanks to an AWESOME group of guys that I hung with: John, Tom, Bill, and Kenny. Every so often on Friday nights, we would get together with a bigger bunch of guys and take the train from Bridgeport to New York and wreak havoc on the Big Apple. Bill, pictured here with me during one of those trips, could make me laugh like no one could. He was the one who gave me my nickname “Phlegm” (story for another day). He also was the tough guy of our group: went on to become an MP in the marines after graduation. A few hours after this picture was snapped, Bill dragged me by the ankles on my back around the floor of Grand Central Station, just prior to our late-night trip back home. He ruined my studly white sweater but the ride was a blast . . . well worth it.

These pictures depict the normal state of my freshman dorm room at Lehigh University. I had a giant pile of dirty clothes that I would store on my bed during the day (the closet was full of even dirtier clothes). At night, when I was ready to go to sleep, I would clear the bed by plopping the pile onto the floor. In the morning, before throwing the clothes back on the bed, I would sniff them to see which items were the least objectionable to wear that day—anything to avoid having to do laundry just one more day. My poor roommates, Kevin and Jay, threatened to send these pictures home to my mother if I didn’t clean up my mess. It didn’t work.

Somehow, I managed to get myself elected president of my college sophomore class. My only initiative that year was a fundraiser which involved designing and selling hats that celebrated homecoming weekend. The highlight of the weekend was the big football game against Lehigh’s archrival, Lafayette College. The problem with our sales campaign was, we couldn’t fit the words “Lehigh-Lafayette Weekend” on the front of the hats, at least within our budget. So we settled for the abbreviated: “LEH/LAF,” which you can see peeking from the top of the hat I was wearing. As it turns out, the hats were not all-the-rage I thought they would be. In fact, they were a big flop that became a running joke on campus that haunted me for the months that followed and led to my failed presidency. Note to self: next time you embark on a sales campaign of commemorative apparel, abbreviating the main event into something as unappealing as “LEH/LAF” is a really bad idea. Later that year, the class vice president ran against me in my re-election bid and beat me by one vote. I took the close election as a sign from God that it was not part of his plan for me to serve in that office another year. As it turned out, my VP was a much better president than I was, and it freed up some much-needed time for me to get my grades out of the toilet.

Back on the home front, after my dad cut down a large tree that was getting in the way of our driveway basketball court, he insisted that I help him dig out the stump. By any rational account, we should have had the stump ground-out, or pulled from the ground with some heavy machinery that was designed for the job. But, NOOO!!! My dad and I had to spend dozens of hours digging, cutting roots, and pulling giant rocks out of the ground to get the stump out. And why? Because we are DEMETROSES, of course! And Demetroses don’t hire qualified people to perform jobs that we can otherwise do ourselves, spending countless hours of backbreaking work with hand tools, just to save a few bucks. If you look closely at this picture, you can see in my face that I was extremely annoyed with my father for causing me to waste a sizable chunk of my precious youth on this inane project. And I reserved some ire for my mother, for her apparent need to capture my torment on film for posterity. But now that Dad is gone, and I see the expression of immense pride on his face, with his pick-mattock slung over his shoulder and his loyal son at his side, I’m so glad I toughed it out with him right to the bitter end, when we dragged the mother-of-all-tree-stumps into the woods. Truth be told, I wish he were here right now, so we could dig out another stump together.

Before entering law school, I worked at the Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the Navy overhauled nuclear submarines. My job was so cool. I was responsible for inspecting the many industrial operations, both in the production shops on base and inside the naval subs. Using all kinds of fancy instruments, I measured the chemical and noise levels to which the workers were exposed and then recommended health and safety controls to mitigate the risks. The only unfortunate part of my job was the title: “Industrial Hygienist.” I thought that title was way too dainty, not reflecting either the importance of the job I was doing or the often grittiness of working around some of the most potentially hazardous industrial processes imaginable. Case in point: when I would introduce myself to the workers on site and tell them that I was an Industrial Hygienist, they inevitably would complain to me about the dirty coffee pots in the lunchroom or the inadequate supply of toilet paper in the bathroom. One guy actually started telling me about issues he was having with one of his wisdom teeth.

When I was working at the shipyard, I lived in a boarding house in Kittery, Maine. The other tenants, like me, were in their twenties and just starting out in the world. Here I am at one of our backyard barbecues, enjoying one of my true passions: stuffing my face with a good cheeseburger. You can tell I share some of the same genes with my Nouna (see previous photo of her above in similar pose).

George and his wife, Cheryl, had seven kids and Mary Ann and her husband, Peter, had four. So, when we all got together, my nieces and nephews comprised quite a large brood. But I was single for most of their childhood years, so I loved my role as the “fun uncle.” I would tease, tickle, and toss those kids around, to the point where they’d get so riled up that my siblings often wanted to put me in time-out, as opposed to the kids.

In the second picture, I don’t remember what I was saying to provoke that face on my niece, Jacolyn, but I’m sure I was deliberately annoying the heck out of her. At one point, all eleven of the little monsters ganged up on me and mounted an insurrection. So I went crying for help to George, who was the resident disciplinarian. But he didn’t seem to have much sympathy for my plight. Refusing to intervene, he quoted from Galatians 6: “Spencer, you reap what you sow.”

Mary Ann had this caricature of me made and sent it to me shortly after I landed my first job as an attorney. I worked as a litigation associate at a big Boston law firm, where I worked killer hours but learned my craft from some of the greatest legal minds and mentors anywhere. After a few years there, I was appointed General Counsel for the Massachusetts Department of Labor, and then had my own law practice for ten years. More recently, I’ve been working as a corporate in-house attorney in the technology space. Being a lawyer is one of those professions that can swallow you whole, if you let it. Thankfully, my faith in God and close relationships with my family and friends helped me to keep it in perspective, even during the most stressful periods of my work life. And there were plenty of those over the years!

This picture was taken at Mary Ann’s wedding during the throwing of the garter. That’s the wedding game in which the groom throws the garter to the pack of eligible bachelors who compete to be the one who catches it. The prize? Being the bachelor who is next in line to get married. That’s me in the black tuxedo in the front row on the far left. As you can see, I was very content with my unattached status and had no desire to change that any time soon.

As for my desire to remain a lifelong bachelor, that all changed when I met my now-wife, Catherine. We had our first date in May of 2003, got engaged in December of that year, and got married in March 2004, less than 10 months from the day we met. It was quite the whirlwind romance. I had never met anyone as beautiful as her and, on top of that, with such a joyful and loving spirit. This photo shows Catherine and me in front of our first house in Arlington, Massachusetts. I got married late in life, at the age of 41. Apparently, the Lord wanted me to wait for just the right person!

One of the perks of being a dad is you get to unleash your inner child—not that my inner child was ever all that repressed. Our twins, Coco and Christopher, were born in early 2006. One of my best memories of those early days was when I would pull into the driveway after a long day at work. Catherine and the kids would wait for me, peeking out the front window of our house. When I would step out of the car and hear the sounds of excitement bursting from that window, words simply cannot describe the feeling of total joy that I felt.

One thing they didn’t tell us about twins: while they’re most often the best of friends, they also can be fiercely competitive with one another. That was never more evident than during the annual Easter egg hunts that Catherine and I would organize for the kids. We would hide dozens of plastic eggs in the yard, some of which were filled with candy. And, of course, “to the victor goes the spoils.” But the cold hard truth was Christopher was just better at it than his twin sister. Coco’s problem was the minute we would begin the festivities by my yelling “go,” Christopher would take off like a lightning bolt, scurrying about the yard like a madman. And he was unusually adept at finding the eggs even in the most obscure hiding places. And then there was poor Coco . . . Just at the sight of her brother jumping into action would trigger a mini panic attack, instantly immobilizing her. This photo was taken at the very last Easter egg hunt that we held; we had to discontinue them because they were just too traumatic for our girl. She is shown here after seeing, what she thought, was a plastic egg at the bottom of a small cliff at the edge of our front yard. When she tried to lower herself down, she lost control of her basket and her eggs scattered all over. Christopher is shown making his getaway after mercilessly stuffing into his pockets several of the very few eggs that Coco managed to collect. I typically didn’t laugh hysterically when one of my children was suffering emotional anguish, but this was just too funny for me to control – I totally lost it.

This picture was taken around the time that I started writing my own versions of Bible stories for the kids, the precursor to The Bible: Enter Here. By this point, the kids were too old for kiddie Bibles, but didn’t respond well to our nightly readings of the actual Bible text. In short, they were bored to tears. So they decided to transform our nightly Bible study into the “Coco and Christopher Comedy Hour.” Their brand of humor was pretty lowbrow. It typically involved some bodily function or something equally objectionable – anything to torture their well-meaning and devoted father. During one of our Bible sessions, they got the idea to jump on my legs, wrap their arms around my calves and tickle my feet. As my legs lurched in every direction and I would writhe in tickle-induced agony, they would yell something like: “This isn’t my first rodeo!” or “Oh boy, we got us a feisty one!” I soon realized they were timing each other to see which one lasted the longest on the “bucking bronco,” i.e. me, before I could kick and catapult them off the bed. Their maniacal laughter only served to heighten my fury as I endeavored in vain just to get through a single Bible story. Unfortunately, the irony was not lost on them of me screaming bloody murder while, at the same time, trying to teach them the Bible’s lessons on living in peace, turning the other cheek, and forgiving our oppressors. They say: “A picture speaks a thousand words.” Definitely true with this one

This is the latest addition to the Demetros family: our Covid puppy, Teddy, who we got from our local animal rescue shelter. His first name, Theodore, comes from the Greek words Theos, which means God, and Doros, which means gift. (I know . . . I sound like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.) Teddy truly is a gift from God, like the many wonderful blessings that the Lord has bestowed upon me and my family over the years. Throughout my life, I truly have been blessed.

I’m the youngest of three kids. George is the oldest and Mary Ann is the middle child. Here we are in the tub back in the early ’60s, when Saturday night baths were still a thing. We lived in the bottom floor of a two-family house in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Even though I was only three when we moved from this house, I can still remember snippets of conversations from those early years. Like my mom warning us that, if we didn’t quiet down, the landlord (who lived upstairs) would throw us out on the street. We Greeks are very dramatic! To add to our collective angst, the landlord’s son, Gary, told us that his family had a bomb shelter in their half of the basement. He added that they would lock us out if a nuclear bomb were ever dropped. As this was during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, we took it all very seriously. But, despite the prospect of being evicted or, worse yet, incinerated in a nuclear Armageddon, our family was happy, owing mainly to our belief that God would get us through whatever life had in store for us.

Here are two pictures from my baptism. In the first photo, George was front and center, trying to steal my thunder on my special day. But, in fairness to him, I don’t think having to share the limelight with a new baby brother was on his bucket list. In fact, in the second picture, you can see George sizing up the baptismal font, making sure it was deep enough, hoping the priest would dunk me in and forget to pull me out.

On the subject of my baptism, this is a picture of my Nouna (which is Greek for godmother). She’s the one staring at the camera looking like she’s trying to swallow a tennis ball.

Every Greek boy knows the humiliation of having to dress up, at least once in their formative years, as a Greek Evzone. That’s me on the right. Evzones were the elite soldiers in the Greek army, but their uniforms were anything but rugged or manly. The standard-issue uniform includes a skirt, genie shoes with pom-poms on the toes, a fez cap with a long tassel, and white panty hose. Having to parade around in front of the relatives in this getup is a Greek male rite of passage – one of the many “character-building” experiences of my youth.

This is me, dressed as an ancient-Greek warrior ready to go on stage for one of our Greek School pageants. I’m sure I was feeling pretty menacing holding that aluminum foil spear. But there was no getting around it: I was yet again forced to go on public display wearing a dress.

This is a photo of my Yiayia Domna. As all good grandmothers would do, she spoiled us kids rotten. Her treat of choice were tootsie rolls, telling us, Αυτά είναι καλά για τα δόντια σου. That means, “These are good for your teeth.” She had this theory that, because tootsie rolls were so sticky, they effectively pulled the food, and even plaque, off our teeth. Of course, sporting full dentures since the age of 45, she was in no position to be dispensing dental advice. In this picture, sitting next to Yiayia Domna was our much-loved childhood dog, Duke. Whenever Yiayia would get her hair permed, she and Dukey would have identical hairdos—same color and everything—which she thought was just so stylin’.

Here are George, Mary Ann, our Thea (Aunt) Mary, and Yiayia Domna in front of our house in Trumbull, Connecticut. My mother fancied herself as a skilled photographer who would orchestrate the perfect family photos. As you can see here, George would make the goofiest faces he could conjure up just when my mom was snapping the photo. In this one, Dukey joined the conspiracy by having a mini-convulsion, entirely eclipsing Thea Mary. Bear in mind, this was before the advent of digital photography, when buying and developing film was big bucks. Whenever my mom would flip through the pictures after retrieving them from the local pharmacy, her fury at my brother would unleash for ruining yet another set of photos. Of course, I thought it was hilarious.

My Godparents bought me my first camera, a Pocket Instamatic. Unfortunately, it had a design flaw: the flash bulb was set too close to the camera lens. So, in the pictures, everyone’s pupils glowed bright red, making them look like demon-possessed aliens. My mother’s remedy? A dab of black magic marker to the eyeballs. These are just a couple of examples of the many family photos that were “fixed” with my mother’s handiwork.

Yes, I was “That Kid” whose mother made him wear a suit and tie every year on school-picture day. You can see from my wet hair, this was before we knew about hair product, so I used water to tame the wonky protrusions emanating from my head. But even worse than picture day, my brother and I periodically were forced to wear Hawaiian shirts that Thea Mary and Theo Evangelo brought back from their trip to the Hawaiian Islands. The shirts were covered with tropical birds and palm trees and had large gold-colored buttons. George’s was bright aqua-blue and mine was lime-green. My mom tried to convince us that the abuse that George and I suffered on the school playground when we wore those shirts was because the other kids were jealous that they didn’t have “AUTHENTIC” Hawaiian shirts like we did. I wanted to believe her, but there was no getting around it – we looked like total dorks.

My mother, getting more daring in her photo setups, wanted an action shot of me running in my high school cross-country uniform. However, it probably was raining that day and she didn’t feel like braving the elements outdoors—there were limits to how much she would suffer for her art. So she had me simulate a cross-country run down the 15-foot hallway in our small suburban home. My cross-country career wasn’t much to brag about—I was the slowest guy on the team. But I was determined to follow in the footsteps of my big brother, George, who was one of the stars of our high school’s cross-country team. But, while George had a runner’s body, mine was more suited for something more sedentary, like bird-watching or, maybe on a good day, lawn darts.

I loved high school, mostly thanks to an AWESOME group of guys that I hung with: John, Tom, Bill, and Kenny. Every so often on Friday nights, we would get together with a bigger bunch of guys and take the train from Bridgeport to New York and wreak havoc on the Big Apple. Bill, pictured here with me during one of those trips, could make me laugh like no one could. He was the one who gave me my nickname “Phlegm” (story for another day). He also was the tough guy of our group: went on to become an MP in the marines after graduation. A few hours after this picture was snapped, Bill dragged me by the ankles on my back around the floor of Grand Central Station, just prior to our late-night trip back home. He ruined my studly white sweater but the ride was a blast . . . well worth it.

These pictures depict the normal state of my freshman dorm room at Lehigh University. I had a giant pile of dirty clothes that I would store on my bed during the day (the closet was full of even dirtier clothes). At night, when I was ready to go to sleep, I would clear the bed by plopping the pile onto the floor. In the morning, before throwing the clothes back on the bed, I would sniff them to see which items were the least objectionable to wear that day—anything to avoid having to do laundry just one more day. My poor roommates, Kevin and Jay, threatened to send these pictures home to my mother if I didn’t clean up my mess. It didn’t work.

Somehow, I managed to get myself elected president of my college sophomore class. My only initiative that year was a fundraiser which involved designing and selling hats that celebrated homecoming weekend. The highlight of the weekend was the big football game against Lehigh’s archrival, Lafayette College. The problem with our sales campaign was, we couldn’t fit the words “Lehigh-Lafayette Weekend” on the front of the hats, at least within our budget. So we settled for the abbreviated: “LEH/LAF,” which you can see peeking from the top of the hat I was wearing. As it turns out, the hats were not all-the-rage I thought they would be. In fact, they were a big flop that became a running joke on campus that haunted me for the months that followed and led to my failed presidency. Note to self: next time you embark on a sales campaign of commemorative apparel, abbreviating the main event into something as unappealing as “LEH/LAF” is a really bad idea. Later that year, the class vice president ran against me in my re-election bid and beat me by one vote. I took the close election as a sign from God that it was not part of his plan for me to serve in that office another year. As it turned out, my VP was a much better president than I was, and it freed up some much-needed time for me to get my grades out of the toilet.

Back on the home front, after my dad cut down a large tree that was getting in the way of our driveway basketball court, he insisted that I help him dig out the stump. By any rational account, we should have had the stump ground-out, or pulled from the ground with some heavy machinery that was designed for the job. But, NOOO!!! My dad and I had to spend dozens of hours digging, cutting roots, and pulling giant rocks out of the ground to get the stump out. And why? Because we are DEMETROSES, of course! And Demetroses don’t hire qualified people to perform jobs that we can otherwise do ourselves, spending countless hours of backbreaking work with hand tools, just to save a few bucks. If you look closely at this picture, you can see in my face that I was extremely annoyed with my father for causing me to waste a sizable chunk of my precious youth on this inane project. And I reserved some ire for my mother, for her apparent need to capture my torment on film for posterity. But now that Dad is gone, and I see the expression of immense pride on his face, with his pick-mattock slung over his shoulder and his loyal son at his side, I’m so glad I toughed it out with him right to the bitter end, when we dragged the mother-of-all-tree-stumps into the woods. Truth be told, I wish he were here right now, so we could dig out another stump together.

Before entering law school, I worked at the Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the Navy overhauled nuclear submarines. My job was so cool. I was responsible for inspecting the many industrial operations, both in the production shops on base and inside the naval subs. Using all kinds of fancy instruments, I measured the chemical and noise levels to which the workers were exposed and then recommended health and safety controls to mitigate the risks. The only unfortunate part of my job was the title: “Industrial Hygienist.” I thought that title was way too dainty, not reflecting either the importance of the job I was doing or the often grittiness of working around some of the most potentially hazardous industrial processes imaginable. Case in point: when I would introduce myself to the workers on site and tell them that I was an Industrial Hygienist, they inevitably would complain to me about the dirty coffee pots in the lunchroom or the inadequate supply of toilet paper in the bathroom. One guy actually started telling me about issues he was having with one of his wisdom teeth.

When I was working at the shipyard, I lived in a boarding house in Kittery, Maine. The other tenants, like me, were in their twenties and just starting out in the world. Here I am at one of our backyard barbecues, enjoying one of my true passions: stuffing my face with a good cheeseburger. You can tell I share some of the same genes with my Nouna (see previous photo of her above in similar pose).

George and his wife, Cheryl, had seven kids and Mary Ann and her husband, Peter, had four. So, when we all got together, my nieces and nephews comprised quite a large brood. But I was single for most of their childhood years, so I loved my role as the “fun uncle.” I would tease, tickle, and toss those kids around, to the point where they’d get so riled up that my siblings often wanted to put me in time-out, as opposed to the kids.

In the second picture, I don’t remember what I was saying to provoke that face on my niece, Jacolyn, but I’m sure I was deliberately annoying the heck out of her. At one point, all eleven of the little monsters ganged up on me and mounted an insurrection. So I went crying for help to George, who was the resident disciplinarian. But he didn’t seem to have much sympathy for my plight. Refusing to intervene, he quoted from Galatians 6: “Spencer, you reap what you sow.”

Mary Ann had this caricature of me made and sent it to me shortly after I landed my first job as an attorney. I worked as a litigation associate at a big Boston law firm, where I worked killer hours but learned my craft from some of the greatest legal minds and mentors anywhere. After a few years there, I was appointed General Counsel for the Massachusetts Department of Labor, and then had my own law practice for ten years. More recently, I’ve been working as a corporate in-house attorney in the technology space. Being a lawyer is one of those professions that can swallow you whole, if you let it. Thankfully, my faith in God and close relationships with my family and friends helped me to keep it in perspective, even during the most stressful periods of my work life. And there were plenty of those over the years!

This picture was taken at Mary Ann’s wedding during the throwing of the garter. That’s the wedding game in which the groom throws the garter to the pack of eligible bachelors who compete to be the one who catches it. The prize? Being the bachelor who is next in line to get married. That’s me in the black tuxedo in the front row on the far left. As you can see, I was very content with my unattached status and had no desire to change that any time soon.

As for my desire to remain a lifelong bachelor, that all changed when I met my now-wife, Catherine. We had our first date in May of 2003, got engaged in December of that year, and got married in March 2004, less than 10 months from the day we met. It was quite the whirlwind romance. I had never met anyone as beautiful as her and, on top of that, with such a joyful and loving spirit. This photo shows Catherine and me in front of our first house in Arlington, Massachusetts. I got married late in life, at the age of 41. Apparently, the Lord wanted me to wait for just the right person!

One of the perks of being a dad is you get to unleash your inner child—not that my inner child was ever all that repressed. Our twins, Coco and Christopher, were born in early 2006. One of my best memories of those early days was when I would pull into the driveway after a long day at work. Catherine and the kids would wait for me, peeking out the front window of our house. When I would step out of the car and hear the sounds of excitement bursting from that window, words simply cannot describe the feeling of total joy that I felt.

One thing they didn’t tell us about twins: while they’re most often the best of friends, they also can be fiercely competitive with one another. That was never more evident than during the annual Easter egg hunts that Catherine and I would organize for the kids. We would hide dozens of plastic eggs in the yard, some of which were filled with candy. And, of course, “to the victor goes the spoils.” But the cold hard truth was Christopher was just better at it than his twin sister. Coco’s problem was the minute we would begin the festivities by my yelling “go,” Christopher would take off like a lightning bolt, scurrying about the yard like a madman. And he was unusually adept at finding the eggs even in the most obscure hiding places. And then there was poor Coco . . . Just at the sight of her brother jumping into action would trigger a mini panic attack, instantly immobilizing her. This photo was taken at the very last Easter egg hunt that we held; we had to discontinue them because they were just too traumatic for our girl. She is shown here after seeing, what she thought, was a plastic egg at the bottom of a small cliff at the edge of our front yard. When she tried to lower herself down, she lost control of her basket and her eggs scattered all over. Christopher is shown making his getaway after mercilessly stuffing into his pockets several of the very few eggs that Coco managed to collect. I typically didn’t laugh hysterically when one of my children was suffering emotional anguish, but this was just too funny for me to control – I totally lost it.

This picture was taken around the time that I started writing my own versions of Bible stories for the kids, the precursor to The Bible: Enter Here. By this point, the kids were too old for kiddie Bibles, but didn’t respond well to our nightly readings of the actual Bible text. In short, they were bored to tears. So they decided to transform our nightly Bible study into the “Coco and Christopher Comedy Hour.” Their brand of humor was pretty lowbrow. It typically involved some bodily function or something equally objectionable – anything to torture their well-meaning and devoted father. During one of our Bible sessions, they got the idea to jump on my legs, wrap their arms around my calves and tickle my feet. As my legs lurched in every direction and I would writhe in tickle-induced agony, they would yell something like: “This isn’t my first rodeo!” or “Oh boy, we got us a feisty one!” I soon realized they were timing each other to see which one lasted the longest on the “bucking bronco,” i.e. me, before I could kick and catapult them off the bed. Their maniacal laughter only served to heighten my fury as I endeavored in vain just to get through a single Bible story. Unfortunately, the irony was not lost on them of me screaming bloody murder while, at the same time, trying to teach them the Bible’s lessons on living in peace, turning the other cheek, and forgiving our oppressors. They say: “A picture speaks a thousand words.” Definitely true with this one

This is the latest addition to the Demetros family: our Covid puppy, Teddy, who we got from our local animal rescue shelter. His first name, Theodore, comes from the Greek words Theos, which means God, and Doros, which means gift. (I know . . . I sound like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.) Teddy truly is a gift from God, like the many wonderful blessings that the Lord has bestowed upon me and my family over the years. Throughout my life, I truly have been blessed.