Hospitals. Public schools. Transit. An airport.
I have spent my life on the bones of a city. The buildings that cannot stop, not for a day, not for a storm. These places must work on their worst day. Most people pass through and never look back. No one asks what is behind the wall. They are not meant to. That is the job.
I started with my hands. Now I read contracts. It is a strange place to end up, for someone who began by pulling wire. I got here one job at a time. I did not plan any of it.
None of that qualifies a man to write about evolution.
What it gave me instead was a habit, and the habit turned out to be the qualification.
The line about God is in the details did not start in a church. It started on a job site. It means one thing. The whole depends on the parts no one sees.
This is not just a saying. What fails is almost never the thing everyone watched. It is the joint no one checked. If you want to get it right, you look as close as you can, and then you look closer. That is where accuracy lives.
Do this every day for thirty years and it stops being a process. It becomes the way you see. You notice one thing, then another, then a third. Things you would have missed a year before. This habit does not stay at work. It follows you home. Before long, you find yourself doing it with a leaf.
I am not a scientist. But there is science behind every page.
I spent decades reading. I learned from people who gave their lives to finding out what is true. They earned every sentence I am borrowing. Almost nothing in these pages is something I found myself. I have tried to name everyone who truly deserves the credit.
The only thing here that is genuinely mine is the noticing.
Do not take my word for any of this. You are not meant to. Every claim is sourced. Every number has been checked. Some were checked again because they were wrong the first time. When the honest answer was we do not know, the page says that. It stays that way.
I was born in Piraeus and brought to New York before I was old enough to remember the trip. New York raised me. From fifteen to twenty-five, I was back in Greece; I went in as a kid, and I came out an adult. I have two homes, and I have never found that a difficult thing to hold.
I started working at seventeen. On the job in the morning, school at night, one year of that decade given to the army, and some version of that arrangement ever since, on both sides of the Atlantic. For nine years I also helped run a small scholarship fund, for kids whose families earned slightly too much to qualify for help and nowhere near enough to pay for college.
And it was on the Greek side of it, at seventeen, that a stray cat decided to include me. He is the reason for all of this, and the story belongs to him, so I have given Bezouli his own page.
I write at a desk that once belonged to another cat. Her name was Booboo. She arrived as a foster who was supposed to stay a few weeks, and she stayed more than twenty years, and she had a habit of getting up onto the desk while I was trying to work.
Méli, Felix, and Milo have the run of the place now. One of them is usually on the desk. It is the same desk.
Not a laboratory and not a library. A desk, early, before the day starts, with the light changing on the leaves outside the window and a cat directly in the way of the work.